The reclusive Welsh poet R.S. Thomas, who was second only to J.D. Salinger in jealously guarding his privacy, died in September. Tom Davies, then a journalist for the Western Mail, recalls an unexpected encounter with the man who is widely regarded as the most significant religious poet of the 20th century, and who was also a fierce Welsh patriot.

IT WAS EARLY AFTERNOON and a tractor was rumbling throatily in a nearby field. A huge crow was sitting on a telephone wire pecking at the insides of a crab apple and, a few yards further down, a rabbit had been pancaked flat on the road. Just above the luckless rabbit there was a metal road sign with a hole blasted through it by a shotgun.

I had come to Llyn, a thick fist of land which pokes out of the north-west corner of Wales. The Land's End of Wales they call it, a peninsula just 16 miles long and up to 10 miles wide, which, by reason of its isolation, may be one of the last bastions of Welshness.

A sprinkling of Welsh monoglots still lived in Llyn and that most musical of languages is still used in every day life. All the villages also have their own chapels with the elders walking around there on Sundays with fat Bibles under their arms. Here also be dragons.

ALMOST EVERYWHERE YOU TURN the land is dotted with ancient burial grounds, holy stones in the marshland and old stone axe factories. There are high mountains and deep valleys and forgotten villages. The timeless roar of the waves never seems to be far away and this is an old pilgrimage route to Bardsey Island or Ynys Enlli, the sacred island of the saints which lies amidst treacherous currents just off the peninsular tip.

Just being there, walking along the sandy shoreline, with swarms of shrieking herring gulls chasing the shoals, is to be in the very heart of the Land of Our Fathers. This is Wales as she has always been – where decent honest people conduct decent honest lives, working the land and living in the fear and shadow of the Lord.

The quintessential Welshness of the place has always attracted artists who have then gone charmingly around the bend under the weight of all this strange, ruined beauty. The writer Jan Morris lives in the nearby village of Llanystumdwy immersing herself and her work in all things Welsh. There is also a writers' centre in Ty Newydd, Lloyd George's old home in Llanystumdy where students endeavour to unravel the literary dark arts.

Criccieth itself has a wonderful old castle where you can sit and think about long last battles and few walks are more lovely and lonely than ambling along the coast watching the procession of breakers coming in, high and proud, before bashing their brains out on the rocks.

But, at the time I was there, there were growing and serious tensions beneath these artistic idylls and that shotgun blast in that road sign gave us a clue to their nature.

THE ONE MAN WHO had put himself and his work at the centre of these tensions was the poet priest R.S. Thomas. Adjudged our finest Welsh poet in English and one of the three leading religious poets of the century, he was then living on his own in a small cottage overlooking the sea at Hell's Mouth in Llyn where he pondered on the awesome and unequal clash between Cynddylan on his tractor and our Bert in his caravan.

In his intense and powerful poems, driven by a pitiless intelligence, he laid bare the inner workings of rural societies like Llyn where the peasant "leans to gob into the fire," the hill farmer "pens a few sheep in a gap in the clouds" or stoops to pull "the reluctant swedes."

He also spoke trenchantly of "an impotent people, sick with inbreeding, worrying the carcass of an old song." His faith was hardly one of optimism either and we often find, in his work, the picture of a lonely old man, kneeling in a stone chapel, crying in anguish in front of the "untenanted cross," waiting for God to tell him something. This waiting for the deus absconditus was a recurring theme to his work. There was much to challenge in his highly-praised God-haunted work but very little to console. The real wonder was that he hadn't been kicked out of the Church years ago.

But, at the time of my visit, he had been speaking out against what he saw as the growing phantasmagoria of Welsh life; the baubles, the commercialism, the second homes, the decay of the language. It's all over, he kept saying, wringing his hands in despair. It's all far too late.

As far as he was concerned the rival language, English, was excrement and all this, mind you, from a man who wrote his poetry in English, had an English wife and whose children could not speak Welsh. He was even born in Cardiff, of all places, and studied for the ministry there.

Perhaps significantly the sign I had spotted, with the shotgun hole in it, pointed to his home in Rhiw.

I HAD LONG WANTED to talk to old R.S. – as he was known to all – but old R.S. had never shown any sign of wanting to talk to old T.D.

A year earlier The Times had asked me to write a profile of him so I duly wrote him an obsequious letter asking to see him, also enclosing one of my books on pilgrimage which had actually won a national award. He replied, thanking me for the book but added that he had no wish to be profiled by The Times and would be very grateful if I told the editor so.

But his anti-social rudeness had long been legendary. Meic Stephens who was then the literary editor of the Welsh Arts Council drove all the way up there with a fat cheque for him once, thinking that he would surely get through the door then. In fact old R.S. snatched the cheque off him and slammed the door in his face. When I was up there I was hoping to profile him for The Western Mail so I decided to knock on his door and see what happened. (Had he slammed the door in my face Plan B was to fall on the floor and feign illness to see where that got me.)

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