WRITERS’ lives are studded with literature festivals, great and small. It is then that they go off to gossip and maybe see each other once a year.

Last weekend, it was to Discoed, that Powys, née Radnorshire, hamlet on the cusp of Offa’s Dyke, where the poet Edward Storey has created something perfect — and en passant succeeded, with other dear friends, in putting right its old shepherds’ church. Like Cascob Church, two or three miles up the lane, it is set with a kind of clumsy loveliness in a Celtic circular graveyard with a yew that has weathered every religion. Farmer Dilwyn has been its lifetime pro­tector.

Powys is hot and dove-grey by turns. From my bed, I can watch the sheep waking up on the hillside, first motionless humps like woolly pearls, then like travelling breakfasters, munching away in all directions. A good bit later a young man tacks huge straw-rolls on to a trailer, clearing the harvest away.

Edward and I then go shopping in Presteigne, which is like a little Suffolk town in 1935, where passers-by say “Good morning,” and where there is an old quiet. Left on my own for a few minutes, I take my usual walk to the bridge that links Wales with England. Over the River Lugge (Light). The water is musical and shallow, and plantations of Hima­layan Balsam have their feet in it.

On Sunday morning, Edward and I go to the handsome parish church, where the tall priest in his green and gold vestments glitters in the sunshine, and where a sumptuous Tudor tapestry of the Entry into Jeru­salem, faded yet spiritually glowing, holds some of my attention.

Presteigne is full of old books. I buy, for almost nothing at all, four battered Agatha Christie paperbacks for Ian, who is addicted. I give a lec­ture on John Masefield, preach at Discoed’s Harvest Festival, where delicious soup-smells invade the last hymn; then, but this is the day before (Discoed tends to be so intensively wonderful that time ties itself up in tangles), I meet the friends at an ancient sheep-farm dug into the hills, and catch up with what has been happening this side of the Welsh Border these past 12 months. The Welsh, and those who have gone to live among them, since it is so catch­ing, are eloquent. Not for them East Anglia’s sparse words.

Stephen the Rector has been made a Prebendary, which I look up. Before the Reformation, the cathedral canons were furnished (praebere) with a living; so they came to be called “prebendaries”.

George Herbert was made a Prebendary of Leighton Bromswold, which he most probably never visited, but which, on his instruc­tions, the Ferrars brothers turned into a stone and wood version of his faith — and poetry.

Prebendary Stephen was in full rehearsal of Patience when he welcomed me to Discoed. Now there’s saintliness for you. Today’s harvest festivals are all askew; for no one in the church is likely to have done a stroke in the fields. But we sing plaintively, and try to think of East Africa.

I think of the Discoed shepherds, the Cascob shepherds, the rumpled ground in the Celtic circles where they sleep, and the flocks palely gleaming on Offa’s Dyke. For the moon is wandering over Wales.

A sixth volume in the Wormingford series, The Bookman’s Tale, is now available (Canterbury Press, £12.99 (£11.70); 978-185311-980-4).