Chapter 5: Monmouth to Hay-on-Wye

The Skirrid Inn at Pandy

Pandy is a tiny settlement on the road between Abergavenny and Hereford, where the influential radical thinker and writer Raymond Williams was born and brought up. Williams has given us a beautiful picture of the idyllic solidarity of a rural Welsh village in the 1930s in his partly autobiographical novel Border Country. Here's his description of the fictional Glynmawr, based on the real Pandy:

"To the east stood the Holy Mountain, the blue peak with the sudden rockfall on its western scarp. From the mountain to the north ran a ridge of high ground, and along it the grey Marcher castles. To the west, enclosing the valley, ran the Black Mountains: mile after mile of bracken and whin and heather, of black marsh and green springy turf, of rowan and stunted thorn and myrtle and bog-cotton, roamed by the mountain sheep and the wild ponies."

The Holy Mountain referred to is The Skirrid, which looks exactly as Williams described it and the rest of the scene I could see as Martin and I came downhill into Pandy itself. The village is situated on the main road from Abergavenny to Hereford at the base of the Black Mountains and within a one-mile stretch of that road there are four pubs, two of which I visited for my research.

The first of these was the Skirrid Inn, which claims to be the oldest pub in Wales and one of the oldest in Britain. There is a record of a court being held here in 1110 when one of the unfortunates in that trial was hanged from the inn beam for sheep stealing, setting something of a morbid precedent. Courts were held within its walls between the 12th and 17th centuries and legend has it that over 180 people were hanged in the Inn from a beam where rope scorch marks can still be seen. It is believed that many of these were sentenced by the notorious "Hanging" Judge Jeffreys who was sent to Wales by the king to brutalise the local population for supporting the Duke of Monmouth in his failed rebellion.

"Hanging" Judge Jeffreys, having had a successful (i.e. brutal) career as Recorder of London under the wonderfully-named Chief Justice Scrogs, became Charles II's Chief Justice, loathed and reviled throughout the land but nowhere more than in Wales. The historian Macaulay described him thus:

"(He was) the most consummate bully ever known in his profession...The profession of maledictions and vituperative epithets which composed his vocabulary could hardly have been rivalled in the fishmarket or the beargarden. His yell of fury...sounded like the thunder of judgement day. Even when he was sober, his violence was sufficiently frightful. But in general his reason was overclouded and his evil passions stimulated by the fumes of his intoxication."

The Skirrid Inn is an atmospheric place still with its heavy flagstone floors, ancient stone walls, old wood panelling and its old ship's bell for calling last orders. Above the ancient fireplace the landlord used to leave a pot of Devil's Brew - the last of his ale for the Devil. On the front step he would have left a jug of Pwcca after his last customer had gone as another appeasement to the spirits of darkness. Next to one of the bars is the step on which those about to be hanged were stood and above it is the beam from which a noose hangs to this day, presumably no longer in use, even on stag nights. A slate at the bar offers Hangman's Lunch on its menu.

I would have stayed overnight there but the current owners have gone for the higher end of the market with their four-poster beds and I couldn't justify the expense. I merely had a pint of Usher's Best Bitter and gazed my fill before catching a bus to rejoin Martin at the Lancaster Arms further down the road.

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