Hay-on-Wye

The Town That Became a Library

Hay-on-Wye has about two thousand residents and, depending on how you count, somewhere between twenty and thirty secondhand bookshops. The ratio is absurd. The town is essentially a library that got out of hand, starting with Richard Booth, who opened the first shop in 1961 and spent the following decades buying entire libraries — country houses being cleared, universities downsizing, the stock of dead booksellers — and reselling them at prices designed to be irresistible.

The result is a town where you can spend a morning moving from shop to shop and find a first edition of something you’ve wanted for a decade, or a complete set of the Oxford English Dictionary for thirty pounds, or an inexplicable shelf of Hungarian poetry in translation that nobody has touched since 1987. The organisation varies by shop from rigorous to approximate to possibly nonexistent. The prices are generally low enough that browsing feels like archaeology rather than shopping.

Booth’s Books — the castle shop, run from a crumbling medieval castle Booth actually owned — is still the largest. You enter through a gatehouse and the books are stacked in rooms and passageways, and the castle is sufficiently ruinous that the distinction between indoors and outdoors becomes philosophical. I found a signed copy of a Patrick Leigh Fermor travel book in a box on the floor, priced at four pounds. I’m not sure it was intentional.

The Hay Festival

Every May, the town hosts the Hay Festival, ten days of talks and readings and debates that has been described as the Woodstock of the mind, which is either accurate or embarrassing depending on your relationship to both events. Bill Clinton said it, so the description is firmly embedded. The lineup typically includes novelists, scientists, politicians, philosophers, and whatever category Bill Bryson falls into.

I haven’t been during the festival itself — the town’s capacity to absorb that many people seems genuinely doubtful, and the accommodation prices reflect the doubt — but I’ve arrived the week after and found the energy of it still in the air. The bookshops lay in extra stock. The cafés have added chairs that haven’t gone away yet. The people working in the shops have the slightly dazed look of a service industry that has just survived something.

Walking Out

Hay sits at the northern edge of the Black Mountains, with the Brecon Beacons a few miles south and the Wye Valley immediately to the east. The Offa’s Dyke Path passes through town — the 177-mile national trail that follows the approximate line of the eighth-century earthwork that King Offa of Mercia built to mark the Welsh-English border. You can walk it north or south from Hay for hours with nothing but ridge and valley and the occasional farm.

The Wye itself is worth the afternoon. The river runs clear and fast here, and in early summer the banks are full of wildflowers — meadowsweet, ragged robin, purple loosestrife — in a way that feels genuinely unmanaged. The paddling trips downstream to Hereford take about three days and involve camping on river islands and ignoring the outside world entirely.

Eating and Staying

The town’s food has caught up with its literary reputation. The Blue Boar does proper pub food — local beef, Welsh lamb — in a room that smells pleasantly of wood smoke and old upholstery. Shepherd’s, a café on a side street, makes coffee seriously and the lunch menu changes with the season.

Lia found a recipe for laverbread in a secondhand cookery book from 1962 and spent the rest of the trip trying to find somewhere that served it. Hay is not the place for laverbread. It is the place for other things.

When to go: May for the Hay Festival if you book early and don’t mind crowds. September through November for quieter browsing, the Black Mountains in autumn colour, and the Wye running high and fast after summer. Avoid the town entirely on Bank Holiday weekends in August when it gets genuinely gridlocked.