Once or twice I thought the whole mass of men must have been down together with the coffin atop of them and some one killed or maimed at least. Kilvert has touched and delighted (and mildly shocked) readers of his diaries ever since they were first published. Some of his actions and thoughts seemed a little suspicious and if he had been around now the guy would be locked up.

However, poet John Betjeman was among those who have since defended Kilvert, saying, "If there had been anything sinister in his attentions to them, he would hardly have written so candidly in his diary about his feelings". He was rather shy and constrained and sat for a long time still with the tumbler of beer in his hand and looking at nothing. After receiving this rejection Kilvert wrote in his diary that "The sun seemed to have gone out of the sky". This had occurred during a clear out of various personal papers, prior to moving into a residential care home.Kilvert is a keen observer of place (in this case, mostly the Hay valley area of Wales) and a great describer, and often quite amusing. The coffin went out immediately and the pall bearers filed out in pairs after it, taking their places and holding each his pall tassel on either side. The diaries of Robert Francis Kilvert (1840–1879), kept from 1870 to 1879, are a unique treasury celebrating the Welsh and English countryside and the variety of characters inhabiting it, seen through the perspective of a sensitive, lyrical and witty young clergyman. It came silently, suddenly, and it went as it came, but it left a long lingering glow and glory behind as it faded slowly like a gorgeous sunset, and I shall ever remember the place and the time in which such great happiness fell upon me. That is the inescapable fact that comes to mind as you read the diaries of a man who died over a 130 years ago.

train but while Henry Dew and I were running along the line to the station we heard the train coming behind us and it glided past close blazing with lamps into the station where it stopped half a minute and was off again to Hay in spite of Henry Dew’s running and hooting. It came unsought, unbidden, at the meadow stile, it was one of the flowers of happiness scattered for us and found unexpectedly by the wayside of life. It’s tragic that so many of the diaries were destroyed - so many stories are left unfinished and that is frustrating. Given that the book is only fragments of the original diary ( to an extent positively reduced to a manageable size) there is a great deal in here about rural life, Victorian mindsets, and the landscape, and incidentally the class system, to maintain interest.It took either Kilvert or me a little while to get into it -- diaries can sound so self-conscious, and be rendered so much less interesting because of it.