From
George Borrow's Wales
by John Davies, in Planet 134:

George Borrow ventured to Wales for the first time in July 1854 when, at the age of fifty-one, he began the walk which was to be the subject of Wild Wales . Writing of his journey, his wife noted: "He keeps a daily journal of all that goes on, so that he can make a most amusing book in a month whenever he wishes to do so". He began organising his material immediately on returning home but the first draft was not completed until 1857, the year of the publication of his Romany Rye. A further five years passed before the publication of Wild Wales, the delay occasioned perhaps by the chilly reception given to Romany Rye. The 1854 visit, beginning at Llangollen on 27 July, included fairly intensive travels in parts of the north and was then followed by a sweep down through Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire to Swansea, Merthyr, Newport and Chepstow where on 16 November he took the train to London.

...Wild Wales itself offers evidence of the gaps in Borrow's reading. A volume of the poems of Lewys Glyn Cothi, a particular favourite of Borrow, was published in 1837, but as he denied any knowledge of Gwallter Mechain, the editor of the volume, it is unlikely that he had read it. Although there is a passing reference to the fair and talented Lady Charlotte in an article Borrow inspired in the Quarterly Review in 1861, there is no evidence in Wild Wales that he had read her translation of Y Mabinogi. Neither does the book contain any suggestion that its author knew of the work of another Merthyr resident, Thomas Stephens's The Literature of the Kymry (1849). The most detailed history of Wales published in the first half of the nineteenth century was Thomas Prices's (Carnhuanawc) Hanes Cymru which appeared in parts between 1836 and 1842, but Borrow has no reference to that work either. Carnhuanawc would have been a person after Borrow's own heart. He was a man of great strength and beauty, a loyal Anglican who hated all pretension and who could turn his hand to anything from woodcarving to watercolours, an accomplished linguist and close associate of the Bible Society; he died in 1848. One would give much to have an account of a conversation between Borrow and Carnhuanawc.

...From the 1870s onwards there were continuing and increasingly structured efforts to address the lacunae in Welsh linguistic, literary and historical scholarship. Those efforts would undoubtedly have received the blessing of Borrow, despite the fact that they would have resulted in the sweeping away of many of his more curious ideas, especially in the field of Welsh and Celtic philology. It is doubtful, for example, whether anyone would now maintain, as Borrow did in the first paragraph of his introduction to Wild Wales, that the words Wales and Vulcan were cognate - although, if that were true, it would create a link of sorts between John Redwood and the country for whose administration he was once responsible.

Yet, although Borrow's knowledge of Wales was inadequate and although Wales as a whole did not engage his attention, his account of his visit captured some of the essence of the country at the exact time when it was on the verge of massive changes. The origins of these changes were discernible when Borrow undertook his tour. He did not discern them, but in a sense he did something more important. He portrayed the mood of the Welsh people at the very moment when they were poised on the brink of transformation. And he did so with such panache that surely generations as yet unborn will read him with profit and delight.