Home Circuits: queer temporalities and Welsh landscapes

Event details

16 November 1785: ‘after breakfast Went the Home Circuit. My Beloved return’d to the Library to draw her Map. I remained in the Shrubbery – Transplanting’ 

23 October 1788: ‘My Beloved and I went the Home Circuit – very dark – inclined to mizzle. Carpenter at work – Mountain Peach nailed … The fig tree nailed’ 

13 June 1789: ‘We went the Home Circuit … We were delighted at having an opportunity of Consulting the first Botanist in England about our Trees and plants’ 

When Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby landed in Milford Haven from Waterford in 1778 they were in search of a new life together. After travelling up through Wales, they settled on Pen-y-Maes cottage, which they later renamed Plas Newydd, in Llangollen – never to return to Ireland. Over the following five decades, reading, walking, writing and not least gardening shaped their time and located them in north-east Wales. Year after year, Butler and Ponsonby cultivated their garden (trees, flowers, kitchen produce), recording its progress in almost daily detail as they walked the perimeter of their land, or made their ‘Home Circuit’. 

The contemporary travel writer Mike Parker has recently noted how the never-forgotten lives and story of Butler and Ponsonby – better known as the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’ – appears to acquire greater visibility at times of national crisis. In 2019, Parker’s own On the Red Hill gave a compelling account of four men’s lives at Rhiw Goch, a cottage in mid-Wales, through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book is unusually (for auto/biography) modelled on the seasons – one for each of the four characters in it – in a structure that replaces linearity with a more experimental and experiential sense of narrative time. Working between Butler, Ponsonby and Parker, this paper uses life writing to explore the theme of queer temporalities in nature and place writing.