Not your local library    Britain’s only residential library is the place to lose yourself in a tome or two...

"Nor do I do much library research these days, though once I haunted the stacks. Libraries have changed. They are no longer quiet... I mourn the loss of the old card catalogues... because the oaken trays of yesteryear offered... an element of random utility and felicitous surprise..."

Literary lion Annie Proulx (as quoted in the Australian media) might be heartened to discover St Deiniol's, Britain’s only residential library, a bookworm’s oasis tucked away in the obscure Welsh village of Hawarden.

Within commuting distance of the walled city of Chester, St Deiniol's imposing red brick Gothic edifice houses a scholarly retreat whose customary guests spend their days immersed in the collection founded last century by William Gladstone, four times prime minister, 63 years an MP and polymath par excellence. Far from the madding crowd, St Deiniol's offers its cosy rooms and hearty English catering to all comers, at modest rates. Not your average holiday hideaway, but there's a wonderfully bookish air about the place which attracts discerning travellers (last year's first visitor signed in as 'Elizabeth R').

Anyone with more than a passing interest in books should enjoy the ambience of these beatifically peaceful halls. As Reverend Peter Francis, the affable Warden, points out,
“the great beauty of St Deiniol's is the openness of the collection, its ‘browsability’ through which one can be agreeably distracted from one's own pursuits by other tomes.

Gregory, the library's administrator, is documenting the life of Henry Ainsworth, a sixteenth-century translator of the works of the great Jewish scholar Maimonides; and a particularly business-like woman, accompanied by her young daughter, has come to research the education of girls afflicted by a rare genetic disorder.

William Ewart Gladstone was a pragmatic political leader with an intense interest in abstruse issues. Disestablishment, the severing of the ties between Church and State, was then a burning issue and one which absorbed much of Gladstone's prodigious intellectual energies. Even so, he found time to reach a book a day, on average.

Annie Proulx may well have admired Gladstone's towering intellect, but I doubt she would share his passions. Her preference for the nitty-gritty, for sharing the lives of battlers, poor immigrants and rural folk has little in common with Gladstone's lofty, abstruse ideals.

Gladstone believed in the universality of the search for enlightenment and in the need (as he saw it) to preserve Anglican scholarship against the day when disestablishment - a development for which he campaigned - might leave the church cruelly exposed without the State’s support.

During his lifetime Gladstone devoured eighteen thousand books. He designed his own library shelves as well as the sliding press still used by librarians today. As well as theology he read an immense amount of contemporary nineteenth century history and literature and the collection, now 250,000-strong, maintains this thrust, as well as holding most of Gladstone's own correspondence and speeches.

What did Sir Willliam do for light relief? He alternated between rescuing fallen women (we don't know quite how) and chopping down trees, watched by sightseers who arrived by the train-load to take in the spectacle. Rather than simply bequeath it to Oxford, Gladstone wanted his collection housed at Hawarden where it would remain accessible to ordinary men and women, a rarified version of the mechanics' institutes and free libraries whose imposing facades grace so many Antipodean towns from that era.

During his lifetime Gladstone built a corrugated iron cottage behind the family estate, and laboriously moved his collection into it by wheelbarrow. After Gladstone’s death the ‘tin tabernacle’, by now housing thirty thousand books, was supplanted by the imposing Gothic brick buildings which remains as the nation’s memorial to him. Only such treasures as a venerable hand-illuminated Armenian gospel, secure in its embossed metal case, are locked away. Another bequest has endowed St Deiniol’s with the largest collection of Franciscan material existing outside the Vatican.

Another of Gladstone’s engaging oddities was his Bulgarian connection. Like other British politicians, then and now, he delved into the tortured politics of the Balkans and supported Bulgarian partisans in their fight for independence from the Ottoman Turkish Empire. His support is still remembered fondly in Bulgaria, whose authorities presented plaque on display in the Library.

St Deiniol's is both a convivial place to study and a fine base from which to explore the Welsh countryside or the medieval streetscape of Chester. And on a raw, squally night we found more robust hospitality down in the local, where some of the Welsh choristers needed very little prompting to raise their voices in song.