Welsh Romance

Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, described north Wales as “full of horror”.

The region was remote; the landscape wild and rugged. Yet within decades, artists and writers thronged to get there. The painter JMW Turner went five times at the end of the 18th century; the poet William Wordsworth slogged up Snowdon one summer. North Wales was the ideal setting for the Romantic movement: the trend of the day.

The Romantics glorified nature and the past. They sought to experience the “sublime” (a sense of fear and awe) and depict the “picturesque” (composed scenes with unruly elements). Wordsworth argued that poetry should begin as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. Emotion was vital. With its grandeur and mystery, north Wales encapsulated