The eponymous dance in Margiad Evans's terse and unsettling novella is expectedly a pretty joyless affair, for the world she depicts is one of ultra hard work and precious little enjoyment.  In fact oodles of suffering are seemingly good for the souls of those who attend both chapel and church, the Welsh and the English in this border-straddling book.  

 

It's the story of one life, Ann Goodman's, and it's told in diary form, telling how she comes down from the mountains, and her cousin's farm at Twelve Poplars to the fertile red loam soils around the Wye.