‘O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee!’
Wordsworth, from ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, July 13, 1798’
THE River Wye runs 136 miles from its source in the Cambrian Mountains of Wales until its drowning in the Severn Estuary and for 30 accumulated years has flowed alongside my life. I cannot quite say I grew up on the Wye’s banks, but from the gates of my childhood home I could throw a stone, across a road and a sheep paddock, into its waters. This was just south of the city of Hereford, where the Wye grows plump and silk and slow; or, put another way,
