Hay on Wye
An intriguing and quaint little market town in the borderlands with England, Hay-on-Wye is famed for its abundance of eccentric bookshops and antique shops, which attract bibliophiles and indeed eccentrics from far and wide.
Historically, Hay has always had something of a spilt personality. At the time of the Norman conquest, Hay was administered separately as the township of English Hay and the surrounding countryside as Welsh Hay. Throughout the Middle Ages Hay changed hands again and again before becoming a bustling market town in the 18th Century. The town fell into a long slumber until April 1st 1977 when Hay-on-Wye declared independence from both England and Wales in a bloodless coup led by bookseller Richard Booth.
A publicity coup that is, for Booth the enigmatic entrepreneur who established Hay as the second hand book capital of the world. After buying up the town’s empty shops, fire station, cinema and the 17th Century Jacobean mansion and filling them with books, Booth declared himself King of Hay. In a tongue in cheek ceremony, he was crowned in the grounds of Hay’s 12th Century ruined castle celebrated with a gunboat salute from the Hay Navy – a rowing boat on the Wye firing blanks from a drainpipe!
Almost every other building lining Hay’s labyrinth of medieval narrow streets is a bookshop. There are now 45 bookshops covering some 2000 different genres, indeed Hay proves that people will write a book on absolutely anything!
A day ambling around the towns plethora of bookshops and antique stalls comes highly recommended, with collections of books, old pictures, old maps and antiquities you won’t leave empty handed. In fact at Booth’s bookshop at Hay Castle, you could even purchase a title, enter the town a commoner and leave it a Duke or Duchess of Hay.
