Claire Connolly: 'The Worst Spot in Wales' (2020)

Description

Lede
Remembered by many as a brilliant writer and satirist, Jonathan Swift spent a lot of time on the Irish Sea, travelling between London and his Dublin home. In the autumn of 1727, he spent a memorable few days in Holyhead when, travelling back to Ireland following the success of Gulliver’s Travels, he found himself at the mercy of the weather.

Story
Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Swift was riding high on the success of his recently published Gulliver’s Travels. He was also though anxious for news of his friend and lover Esther Johnson (known as ‘Stella’ in his poems) who lay dangerously ill in Dublin. So keen was Swift to get home to Dublin that, on encountering delays at Chester, he turned northwards and pursued a risky mountainous overland route to Holyhead, hoping to boarding a packet there. In Holyhead, though, there were more delays and Swift did not get to Dublin in early October: Stella died four months later.

The two poems that Swift wrote in Holyhead, along with the journal he composed there over his seven day stay, express memorable and eloquent rage at being trapped ‘in the worst spot in Wales under the very worst circumstances’, as he put it in the ‘Holyhead Journal’. A frustrated Swift tried to write his way out of his circumstances and his poem ‘Holyhead. Sept. 25. 1727’ gives free rein to his rage:

Lo here I sit at Holy Head
With muddy ale and mouldy bread
All Christian vittals stink of fish,
I’m where my enemies would wish.
Convict of lies is every Sign,
The inn has not a drop of wine
I’m fastened both by wind and tide,
I see the ship at anchor ride.
The Captain swears the sea’s too rough,
He has not passengers enough.
And thus the Dean is forc’d to stay
Till others come to help the pay.

Famously cantankerous, Swift railed only at his own predicament but also at the wider predicament of Anglo-Irish elites, at once reliant upon the Irish sea for communication with Britain and victims to its changing conditions. Prevailing south-westerly winds mean that ships are to this day more commonly stuck in Welsh rather than Irish ports and readers may well have composed their own Holyhead social media posts, text messages or tweets.

Holyhead was linked to London via a network of road and rail with a layered history: the Holyhead road, now the A5, follows an old Roman Road that runs from North Wales through Shrewsbury and the marches, right into Marble Arch via Cricklewood and Kilburn. That route was modernised from the early 1800s when Thomas Telford built his suspension bridge over the Menai Straits and improved the road.

In Swift’s day, though, the journey was a treacherous one. He left Chester at 11am on Friday the 22nd September. From there he travelled seven miles further and stopped at an ale-house, before going a further fifteen miles to Rhuddlan, where he spent the night, dining on ‘bad meat, and tolerable wine’. He left ‘a quarter after 4 morn. on Saturday’ and overnighted again at Conway, before travelling on to Bangor. Swift and his servant then crossed the Menai Straits a few miles from Bangor and stayed at an inn 22 miles from Holyhead, ‘which if it be well kept, will break Bangor’.

Departing for Holyhead at 4 in the morning, Swift hoped to be in Holyhead in time for church on Sunday morning. Progress was slow, though, and with only 7 miles still to go, they had to stop at Llangefni for a 2 hour rest. Both Swift and his servant had problems with their horses and they walked the remaining few miles ‘on the rocky ways’ before finally meeting a blacksmith. With three miles to go to Holyhead, they left their horses to be shoed ‘and walked to a hedge Inn 3 miles from Holyhead; There I stayd an hour, with no ale to be drunk. a Boat offered, and I went by Sea and Sayl in it to Holyhead.’ That Sunday evening, he slept in Holyhead.

Swift remained in Holyhead for four days, all the while anxious for letters and news from Dublin. ‘I confine my self to my narrow chambr in all the unwalkable hours.’, he wrote, complaining that ‘The Master of the pacquet boat, one Jones, hath not treated me with the least civility, altho Watt gave him my name. In short: I come from being used like an Emperor to be used worse than a Dog on Holyhead.’ Still, he walked on Caer Gybi and sought in vain for a glimpse of the Irish coast or a shift in the weather. Despite (or maybe because of) his unhappiness, Swift’s Holyhead Journal remains one of the great pieces of occasional port literature.

Factoid
Despite Swift’s many complaints, Holyhead became a kind of last recourse in his imagination: on the 21st of October, 1735, he wrote to Alexander Pope ‘as one going very fast out of the world’, saying that ‘my flesh and bones are to be carried to Holy-head, for I will not lie in a country of slaves’.

• https://perma.cc/3UGM-9LHB (link opens in new window)