A Ram in the Well: A Welsh Homecoming. - Review - book review

Contemporary Review, June, 2001

A Ram in the Well: A Welsh Homecoming. June Knox-Mawer. John Murray. [pound]16.99. 223 pages. ISBN 0-7195-5587-6. The author is well known as a novelist, a writer of travel books, and a presenter of programmes on BBC Radio Four. The author grew up in Denbighshire as part of what she calls an 'Anglo-Welsh' family and then left Wales to make her way in the great world of London.

In this charming book she describes, after a brief autobiographical introduction, how she returned to her native Wales. The text describes how she bought, furnished and came to love her cottage in North Wales. There is humour, pathos and affection throughout the text and a fascination with the Welsh people she met and who came to make up her new world. She is especially good at small word-pictures of events and scenes. There is also something of an elegiac tone to the book, as if she were describing a world that was doomed to disappear under concrete and tarmac. It is, as we say nowadays, a thoroughly good 'read' whether the reader has any Welsh blood or not. (J.M.)