Welsh Journals

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However, despite this (and other minor blemishes such as the absence of a detailed diocesan map showing parish boundaries, a rather cursory index, and no bibliography of either primary archive material consulted and secondary works something those who brought the work through the press could easily have prepared from Murphy's notes) the book is most welcome. It stands as a piece of intermediate research: it can be distilled for smaller parochial histories, or taken up by historians of larger questions (be that a history of the church in or a history looking at the impact of religion in Ireland in the period), all will find it well written, carefully researched, and a mine of information. Thomas O'Loughlin Department of Theology University of Wales, Lampeter Nigel Jenkins, Gwalia in Khasia: a visit to the site, in India, of the biggest overseas venture ever sustained by the Welsh. Photographs by Martin Roberts [Gomer, Llandysul, 1995]. 342 pp. ISBN: 1 85902 184 0. Price £ 17.50. This is ecclesiastical history as patchwork quilt, and all the more enjoyable for that. The author's standpoint is that of "an agnosticism tinged with a kind of zen pantheist hankering", and the result is a not unsympathetic view of Presbyterian missionary activity but one decidedly from outside, uncorrupted by piety. Any Welsh-speaking Nonconformist over sixty will have heard of 'bryniau Khasia' in Sunday school, but the blurb on the present book's dust-jacket is no doubt right in describing the story as now "largely forgotten". Nigel Jenkins has turned his personal goal of finding out about the venture into a rich informative and splendidly readable amalgam of travel narrative, historical account, and sociological analysis. When Thomas Jones of Berriew, Montgomeryshire, was sent by the Calvinistic Methodists to India in 1840 it was the occasion of their breaking away from the London Missionary Society and eventually founding their own mission field. The general Welsh background and that of Jones himself are interwoven with the frustrations the author experienced in setting up a visit to the Khasi Hills and then in getting there. We move in parallel between the long haul of the 1840s, descriptions of that journey in Merfyn Jones's novel Ar Fryniau'r Glaw [On the Rain's Hills], and a leisurely narrative of the author's own observations and encounters en route. There seems always time for some agreeable meanderings in byways: the present occupiers of Thomas Jones's home at Berriew; William Carey's mission base at Serampore; South Park Cemetery, Calcutta, with the graves of Sir William ('Oriental') Jones, Rose Aylmer and Thomas Jones the latter the only one that people, chiefly Khasis, still come to see. Chronology is