Hafod - one of the sites in The Three Landscapes Project

Notes on the Picturesque - Seven - The Pioneer

In reading of Thomas Johnes' project at Hafod I kept being reminded of another 'projector’ of the previous century - Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe – who, on his virgin and unpopulated island, created a perfect and working model of 17th century England. In addition, working from zero (almost dead and almost naked lying on a beach), he single-handedly invents and develops the fields of carpentry, cooking, agriculture, animal husbandry, economics and so on until, by the end of his account, he is ‘king of his land' (an interesting coincidence is the closeness of the correlation between Crusoe's length of time on his island and Mariamne’s life span - some 27 years).

One is also reminded of the resonances that Johnes' project must have for many who have settled in .'lIest Wales in search of 'the good lite' where, in miniature, they continue Johnes' project - by single-hantJed~ farming a small holding, milking the cow, making butter and cheese; like Mariamne, engaging in artistic activities such as painting and music; and of course by gardening.

Are we still working to an ideal created in the 18th century - an ideal that is set out in Horaces Second Epode? Is the 'walk' in the 'countryside' still resonating with us in the same way? Does 'the picturesque' and 'nature' still inform our notions of our place on the land and our place on the planet? What, at its most extreme, is the relationship between Friends of the Earth and Thomas Johnes - discuss!

The real juice at the centre of Johnes' role as a pioneer is the creation of an enclosed and a perfect world within a context that is radically different to it - and from which it is literally and ideologically fenced off. There is no doubt to me that Johnes' project was not being sustained - either financially or conceptually from the locale of west Wales, and for many weeks I couldn't grasp what it was that was holding him in place ideologically. Where were his models? What templates was he working from?

Well, Horace, the Picturesque and so on go some way towards explaining it but surely he needed more?

I think that the single supporting idea of Johnes’ project was the distance that it was from everything (by which I mean the centre of his shared discourse with his kind). People of importance visited Hafod - and it was the distance, the trip, the adventure that caused such interest, and defined Hafod's significance - how could such a thing exist in such a remote location? Indeed, later in his life when the people who mattered to him stopped paying him visits, in his letters his project's identity appears to flounder.

Had Hafod been in Buckinghamshire, perhaps nobody would have paid it much attention.

Distance defined Hafod, and its conceptual correlation with the outpost, or the colony would be an interesting one to try to work up - the relationship with an indigenous population; the relationship between imported goods (from 'home') and the local produce; the 'expatriate' and his identity (Johnes never, for instance, learned to speak the native language); the key strategies of education, training and 'animation' in a project to persuade the locals to adopt and indeed to service these 'improvements' - which are, of course, 'common sense’.

And even the relationship between Hafod and other 'temporary' or 'seasonal' homes - the tent, the log cabin - becomes intriguing.

Cliff McLucas