In this novel, published in 1982 and written in the tradition of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence, Bruce Chatwin revives the almost forgotten genre of the pastoral, introduces readers to the Welsh-English border country, and follows the lives of identical twins, Benjamin and Lewis Jones, who have been born in 1900 and have been sleeping in their parents' bed for 42 years. On the Black Hill is a chronicle of the Jones twins' lives, beginning with the courtship and marriage of their parents to the death, at the age of 80, of Lewis. Influenced by the tensions between their parents — a literate, imaginative, and well-traveled mother (Mary), a missionary's daughter, and a sedentary, bad-tempered, and rather inarticulate father (Amos) — Lewis and Benjamin are literate and passionate, but also innocent and chaste, drawn to experience the world outside their regional isolation but also comfortably locked into place at their farm, “The Vision”. They are psychically interdependent, feel each other's joy and pain and will be separated by neither love nor war. Benjamin, generally the more contemplative brother, cooks and sews, tends to the birthing of lambs, and manages the farm business. Lewis, who seems bolder and more decisive, tills the soil but is at the same time fascinated by tractors, aeroplanes, and certain women.