Cambria Spring 2009 by Chris Jones

WALES’S MAGAZINE

cambria The National Magazine of Wales MARCH/APRIL 2009 MAWRTH/EBRILL

Cylchgrawn Cenedlaethol Cymru £3.50 €3.50

CAMBRIA MEETS

Cerys Matthews Travels of the Red Book of Hergest Sadwrn Barlys Filming Owain Glyndw ˆr The true Welsh Daffodil

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THE INDEPENDENT

Summer 2009

La bohème P u c c i n i

Supported by the Beatrice A V Cadman Charitable Trust

One of the greatest love stories ever sung

The Queen of Spades Mitridate, rè di Ponto (in concert)

M o z a r t

T c h a i k o v s k y

Supported by a generous donation from The Kobler Trust

“Worth bartering the family silver to see” THE INDEPENDENT

Conductor – Sir Charles Mackerras

BOOK NOW 13 - 20 May, 2 - 6 June Wales Millennium Centre | 08700 40 2000 | wmc.org.uk | Tickets £5 to £37.50 Visit WNO’s new website wno.org.uk for details of casting, to listen to audio clips and for full booking information.

New to opera? visit fresh2opera.co.uk

wno.org.uk

WNO’s The Queen of Spades photo by Clive Barda Registered Charity No 221538

“A world-class company”

CONTENTS VOLUME 10 NUMBER 6

8 8 8

EDITOR’S LETTER

LETTERS

POLITICS& OPINION

SIÔN JOBBINS, ROYSTON JONES, NIGEL JARRETT

CERYS MATTHEWS talks to the iconic Welsh superstar about her homeland, her family and her future. cambria

THE TRAVELS OF THE LLYFR GOCH HERGEST D P DAVIES follows the trail of one of the few remaining Welsh manuscripts from the middle ages, a work which has exerted a powerful influence on our understanding of the Wales of the remote past.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF EDWINSFORD

Of all historic Welsh houses at risk, Edwinsford is one of the loveliest, and perhaps the saddest and most romantic of them all says JOHN VAUGHAN

ˆR FILMING OWAIN GLYNDW A powerful film about our greatest national hero is needed now as never before. DAVID BARRY tells the story of his involvement with an early attempt which singularly failed to make the grade.

28 8 8 8 8

“DY’ SADWRN BARLYSH”: ABERTEIFI’S SPRING FESTIVAL remembers times from his idyllic childhood on an upland farm in west Wales when crowds gathered at the end of each April in Aberteifi in a celebration of rural life and lore. Though times and practices may have changed, they still do. GWYN GRIFFITHS

PATRICK THOMAS

The Celtic cross and the Khatchkar

GUTO OWEN

A Welsh future for Biomass

DAVID JONES

The true Welsh Daffodil

CULTURE

MOTORING

40 49 50 51 52 56 60 62

DIRECTORY

The best places to eat in Wales

FOOD

DOROTHY DAVIES

ONLOOKER

The Sixth National St David’s Day Parade

WEB DIRECTORY

cambria’s Welsh website guide

WHAT’S HOT

Events and happenings around the country

LITERATURE BOOKS POETRY MUSIC NATURE ART

8 8 8 8 8 8 8

GARDENS

CATRIN ROGERS

on Llanfyllin; MEIC STEPHENS on T. Llew Jones

MEIC STEPHENS

on the publishing scene in Wales

PAUL GROVES:

Myllin at Llanfyllin

NORMA LORD:

Bryn Terfel’s First Love

CHRIS KINSEY

Nature Diary - The not so humble Bumble Bee

Sculptor JOHN MEIRION MORRIS; artist IAN JACOB CAROLINE PALMER:

Welsh garden coffee-table books

JOHN E. EDWARDS:

A Duke rides to the rescue

on Laverbread

Y CLAWR / THE COVER: CERYS MATTHEWS AT THE NATIONAL EISTEDDFOD IN CARDIFF 2008

68 The greatest National St David’s Day Parade ever!

CONTRIBUTORS MEIC STEPHENS, is a journalist and poet and has written, edited and translated some 150 books about our country’s culture.

10 NUMBER 6 2009 MAWRTH-EBRILL

VOLUME MARCH-APRIL

CLIVE BETTS is one of Wales’s leading political commentators and represents cambria in the press section of the National Assembly.

FOUNDER & PUBLISHER

Henry Jones-Davies has worked for the BBC, HTV and independent television companies, and is a regular contributor to Welsh periodicals.

EDITOR

Frances Jones-Davies

SIÔN JOBBINS

PATRONS

Jan Morris D. Huw John Siân Phillips Dr R. Brinley Jones Professor Hywel Teifi Edwards John Elfed Jones John Hefin Dr Arturo L Roberts Mary Lloyd Jones

is a motoring journalist of many years experience and writes for a number of prestigious publications.

JOHN EDWARDS

DR CAROLINE PALMER is a biologist, anthropologist and garden historian who has written extensively on Welsh garden matters. CARL RYAN is a professional photographer specialising in extreme sports photography and fashion.

POLITICAL EDITOR

Clive Betts FEATURES EDITOR

Frances Davies LITERARY EDITOR

Meic Stephens EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Siôn T. Jobbins

NORMA LORD is a lifelong opera lover and music journalist and has been a regular contributor to Classical Music magazine.

ADVISORY BOARD

Professor Meic Stephens Aneurin Jones Jonathan Adams Myrddin ap Dafydd Wil Aaron Menna Elfyn Elisabeth Luard David Gravell

won the 2008 BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year Competition. Her poems are widely published in magazines and anthologies.

CHRIS KINSEY

is Research Associate in English Communications and Philosophy at Cardiff University. MALCOLM BALLIN

RESEARCH EDITOR

Rhobert ap Steffan MOTORING

John A Edwards ART DIRECTION

Simon Wigley PHOTOGRAPHY

David Williams, Carl Ryan, Mari Sterling, John Keates, Gareth ap Siôn

is a veteran political activist and commentator on Welsh life and politics. ROYSTON JONES

is a professional photographer whose work has appeared in a number of books about Wales.

MARI STERLING

GARETH AP SIÔN is a patriotic historian and photographer. He lives in Cardiff

- THE NATIONAL MAGAZINE OF WALES © 2009. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced by any means without the prior permission of the publisher in writing. cambria is published bimonthly by Cyhoeddwyr Cymrica Cyfyngedig, PO BOX 22, CAERFYRDDIN/CARMARTHEN, SA32 7YH, Cymru/Wales. ISSN: 1366-0675. All material submitted must be accompanied by a stamped, selfaddressed envelope. The publisher will not be held responsible for loss, damage or any other injury to unsolicited manuscripts or artwork (including drawings, photographs, and transparencies). We cannot guarantee a response to unsolicited matter. cambria magazine has made every effort to ensure that proper permission has been obtained for the reproduction of all illustrations in this issue, and we apologise unreservedly for any errors or oversights. Views and opinions expressed by individual writers in this magazine do not necessarily reflect those of the editor or the publisher. All information in this publication has been verified to the best of the authors’ and publishers’ ability; however Cyhoeddwyr Cymrica Cyfyngedig does not accept responsibility for any loss arising from reliance on it. Subscriptions for 6 issues: British Isles £18 - All other countries £28. Single copies: £3.50 plus 70p postage. The first copy of a new subscription application will be mailed by second class post for addresses in the British Isles, and by surface mail for the rest of the world. Please allow 6 weeks for overseas delivery. Argraffwyd gan: Harcourt Litho, Fforestfach, Abertawe. cambria

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- PROUDLY PRODUCED AND PUBLISHED BY THE WELSH IN WALES

FROM THE EDITOR

2003, this will be the first issue since then not to be graced with his pen. He has given up his office at the Assembly but will continue as a contributor. In future his writing will emphasise individual stories focussed around interviews with key characters, concentrating more on policies which affect the people of Wales and why they have been adopted, rather than on the nitty-gritty of party-politics. For the next issue he is interviewing Alun Ffred Jones on what is happening within his heritage portfolio. You will see a letter from Terry Breverton on windfarms - it has never been our policy to stop printing letters on this subject, although it is true that we have cut back on them. We received so many on the subject but we also had complaints that we were in danger of becoming a ‘one issue’ magazine. The vast majority of these letters were anti-wind energy, many of them emotional, some scientific. I can assure you that we are not going to stop publishing them altogether, but there are so many other issues of importance which face us in Wales today and we feel it our duty to maintain a balance. The editorial policy of this magazine was established a long time ago and should be quite clear to all our readers. cambria opposes windfarms in Wales for three reasons. First, if tourism is to remain a key industry, and one on which we will rely heavily in the coming years, windfarms on a Welsh horizon, however remote the location, cannot but have a negative effect on encouraging visitors coming to Wales to enjoy the pleasures of unspoilt countryside. Second, the alliance between the wind energy industry and central government with the system of sweeteners and grants that go with it appears to operate more in the interests of multi-national conglomerates and their profits than making scientific sense. This leads on to the third point, as to whether covering the entire country with wind turbines of massive size, with all the associated ancillary construction and infrastructure would ever provide more than 10 percent of our energy needs. The other 90 percent has to come from othe resources. The equation involving the correlation between energy production, carbon footprint and environmental impact does not have a positive outcome. That said, hoorah for his last paragraph. Reading through the proofs I am delighted by the quality of the articles and their subjects. Siôn Jobbins article, as always, provides interesting food for thought: an assessment of the relationship between Wales and Ireland becomes a rumination on the responsibilities of nationhood. The pictures of the St. David’s Day Parade provide a happy reminder of a beautiful day, not only sunny but actually warm, and the atmosphere was a perfect reflection of the weather. It was the biggest Parade to date, and yet was marginalised and largely ignored by a declining Welsh press. A big thank you to all who came and supported it, to the partners: The National Assembly and Cardiff City Council, to all the sponsors, and to those who year-in year-out give freely of their time to make it possible. Lastly, owing to our patrons’ advisers’ and readers’ suggestions, The Friends of Cambria will be launched officially at a reception this summer. Details will be published in our next issue.

CLIVE BETTS WROTE HIS FIRST COLUMN FOR US IN AUTUMN

MARI STERLING

frances jones-davies

MYFYRDOD

A people with out a collective memory of itself, a pantheon of heroes, and the “lieux de mémoire” of a national mythology gradually but inexorably forfeits its identity as a people. PROFESSOR REES DAVIES

(1938-2005) Chichele Professor of Medieval History and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

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letters windfarm disgraces memory of greatest welshman of all time EDITOR

One man more than any other, Owain Glyndwˆr, has given us the sense of Wales as a nation, and made us what we are today. The defining moment in his 15-yearwar for independence was the Battle of Hyddgen, in the foothills of Pumlumon in the wonderful Cambrian Mountains. Without that success at Hyddgen in 1401, the war would have ended in its first year. It is a place that defines Wales as a nation - a land of bogs and buzzards, rocks and streams, untouched for centuries. This is one of the very, very few unspoilt areas left in Wales, almost a sacred landscape. From Pumlumon, one can see 250 wind turbines and hundreds more are planned. The Welsh Assembly Government has given permission to tender for many more wind turbines and their pylons and substations and roads around Nant-yMoch and Hyddgen. Almost half of Britain’s wind turbines have already been thrown across Wales by foreign corporations. Much of our land is already covered by the scars of urbanisation, and politicians seem bent on killing our only remaining industry, tourism. I have driven around the Cotswolds and the Lake District recently - where are their windfarms? I drive all over our tiny country researching for writing, and the great, noisy, ugly things are everywhere. Cambria stopped printing letters on windfarms as seems that around 99% of Welsh people did not want them. However, it seems that 99% of our elected politicians do. Do they think that they know more than

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the people who elect them? My taxes (disguised as levies) are used to subsidise these monsters, built overseas and usually run by foreign corporations. They do not generate free power - they will eventually add £400 to our fuel bills, according to the Chairman of E.O.N and independent scientists. There is no cost-effective case for them whatsoever (speaking as an economist) and they are despoiling our remaining landscapes (speaking as a Welshman). They are not ‘hidden’ but in prominent places to catch the wind, visible from 25 miles away. (Wales is only about 170 miles by 60 miles in area). And don’t forget the new pylons trailing all across the remaining Welsh landscape connecting them to the National Grid. For Heaven’s sake call a halt to this ‘progress’ immediately. What other nation would despoil the battlefield of the victory, that more than any other, defined its sense of nationhood? Without Hyddgen, our greatest national hero who led our last War of Independence from invaders, would be forgotten as ‘just another rebel’. I have been involved in the 600th year celebrations for Glyndwˆr’s War of Independence, celebrated at Caer Drewyn in 2000, and since at Corwen, Machynlleth, Cefn Caer (Pennal) and elsewhere to recognise seminal events in his 15-year war against six royal expeditions into Wales. Private subscription has allowed replicas of Glyndwˆr’s sword, dagger and crown to be presented to Machynlleth, Cefn Caer and Corwen. No leading politician has bothered with the festivities and church services, and there has been minimal media coverage of these events. Does Glyndwˆr still ‘scare’ every political party and the gov-

ernment media? Are they still confused about the nature of cultural nationalism? Do they finally want to erase Glyndwˆr’s memory by concreting over his legacy, just as Edward I built Conwy Castle over the grave of Llywelyn the Great at Aberconwy Abbey? The people responsible for what is happening to Wales, and what has happened, have little regard or feeling for our country, or its heritage and culture. The power of London, let alone Brussels, is tighter and stronger, with little evidence of any politician with the heart and common sense to stop ‘progress’. When, if ever, has their version of ‘progress’ helped Wales the country is dying - we are the poorest part of Britain, itself the sick man of Europe - there are no jobs for our children, and the answer is to concrete over what little pride we have left. The time has surely come for a Welsh Reform or Welsh Democratic Party - one with its members elected on the basis that they will put Wales first, before anything - before pensions, honours, perks, fiddles and the like. Terry Breverton Pontfaen/Cowbridge

harri webb and mac? EDITOR

In his article ‘The Drumbeat of Revolution’ (cambria JanuaryFebruary) John Humphries states that Harri Webb was involved in the ‘insurrection’ led by Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (MAC) but that his links to it ‘were not known until now’. The author makes a similar claim in his book Freedom Fighters: Wales’s Forgotten War 1963-1993. I

beg leave to doubt this claim. I lived in the same house as my friend Harri for four years and was in close touch with him for many years thereafter right up to his death in 1994. I have also read his voluminous correspondence and journal. There is nothing to suggest that he was involved in any way. If John Humphries has any evidence to the contrary, perhaps he will let us know what it is. Meic Stephens Cardiff

welsh language services mean more welsh jobs EDITOR

CBI Cymru director David Rosser is on record as claiming that there is little or no demand for Welsh in business, adding “we desperately need to get people who can speak Welsh to use it” Well, Mr Rosser, consider this. I called at my local post office for DVLA form D1 to replace my tattered old paper driving licence with a smart, shiny new plastic one. Although they had loads of these forms in stock not one was in Welsh. I must point out that this was not their fault; that’s what the DVLA delivered to them. But this is not anglicised Monmouthshire or Radnorshire, this is Sir Gaerfyrddin where most people speak and use Welsh in their daily lives. I applied for a Welsh version on the DVLA website over a week ago and it still hasn’t arrived. Perhaps it never will. It took me over six months to get bills in Welsh from my telephone company and almost every time I call a government or council

department I get, after the obligatory ‘bore da/prynhawn da’ ..... sorry, you’ll have to speak English or could you phone back later? It’s not much better on the dedicated Welsh language lines which are not always staffed. And this is just the public sector. When it comes to the private sector forget it! With all the delays, obstacles and inconveniences encountered by those trying to utilise their language, is it little wonder that so many Welsh-speakers don’t bother? Furthermore, people become too embarrassed and frustrated to ask for Welsh-language services because they are unjustly left feeling that it is they who are being awkward and uncooperative, not the people behind the counter or at the other end of the phone. Oh, and by the way, creating and preserving more Welsh language services in Wales means securing more Welsh jobs, and also means giving more Welsh-speakers the opportunity of staying and working in their own country instead of having to seek employment elsewhere. Consider that Mr.Rosser. Rhobert ap Steffan Llangadog

another land of great railways EDITOR

May I add one small correction to Phil Carradice’s otherwise excellent article about this wonderful old Hill Station of the Raj (Cambria January-February 2009). The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (DHR) is still very much alive and well with daily trains along its full 55 miles. Some servic-

es use British built steam locomotives now well over 100 years old.The DHR is truly one of the world’s great railway journeys and is one of only a handful to have UNESCO World Heritage status. There is lots more about the DHR on our web site www.dhrs.org and if any of your readers has memories of Darjeeling I’d be delighted to hear from them. Paul Whittle Vice Chairman Darjeeling Himalayan Railway Society pro@dhrs.org

ignorance of our history EDITOR

I was so delighted to read the letter from Denver Thomas about the Roman invasion. It has always amazed me how little is known about the true history of the island now occupied by Great Britain. There is an excuse for those of the Welsh who are much younger than I am because they are mostly unaware that the teaching of our history prior to 1850 was banned by the English, as was the use of our Welsh language. But some Grammar schools such as the one I attended - Llwyn y Bryn in Swansea - ignored that law; sadly it seems that even nowadays many schools stick to it. Phyl Newall Gwˆ yr

We are always delighted to receive letters of every opinion. It may prove necessary to edit letters for space and clarity. Letters should be exclusive to cambria magazine.

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OPINION

Siôn Jobbins

First Cousins: Ireland and Wales

n the various drunken celebrations of Celtic brotherhood ‘yr hen Wyddeles’ is one Welsh idiom you’re unlikely to come across. Literally translated it’s ‘the old Irishwoman’. However, its meaning and connotations are not that of a homely old Irish grandmother but rather a coarse and scheming woman. I last heard it used by two young men at the gents in a pub in Caernarfon a few years ago discussing a Welsh woman they knew and before that in reference, ironically, to Margaret Thatcher. So, the relationship between the Welsh and Irish has not always been amicable, as some in the mists of Celticism would like us to believe. Suspicion between the two nations stretches back at least as far as Gerald of Wales’s writings in the twelfth century. Gerald, part Norman part Welsh, travelled with the conquering Prince John of England and described the Irish as ‘Dedicated only to leisure and laziness, this is a truly barbarous people. They depend on their livelihood for animals and they live like animals.’ - and that prejudice pretty sums up the next 800 for you! The dogged Catholicism of the Irish for centuries was one central reason for continued suspicion by the Welsh. As the Welsh historian of Irish decent, Paul O’Leary, writes it came under extra strain when Welsh workers felt that the immigrant Irish were undermining their pay. O’Leary notes that between 1825 and 1882 there were no fewer than 20 anti-Irish riots in Wales, starting with the one in the Rhymni Valley. The anti-Irish sentiment was given a more cultural context following the publication of the ‘Blue Books’ in 1847. As O’Leary notes the effect of the ‘treachery’ of the Blue Books (the Government’s report into education in Wales) was to portray the Welsh as a scheming and immoral nation with the Welsh language as a medium for that immorality. One Welsh reaction, and the most powerful for generations, was to internalise the colonialism of the Report and also to claim that it wasn’t the true Welsh who were to blame. The blame was on those, mostly of the rough industrial regions and non-Chapel goers (read Irish and the anglicised) who were besmirching Wales’s good name. It was ‘it isn’t us guv-ism’ on a national scale. However in his excellent article in the Welsh historical journal, Cof Cenedl XXI of 2006, O’Leary notes a subtle change in the attitudes of some Welsh people from the

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The great Liberal MP for Meirionnydd, Tom Ellis, supported Irish Home Rule in 1886 and Cymru Fydd (Young Wales) was inspired by the Irish model. Patrick Pearse himself, one of the leaders of the 1916 Rebellion, was accepted to the Gorsedd of the Bards at the National Eisteddfod at Cardiff in 1899 1860s. The Monmouthshire columnist ‘Gwentwyson’ in Y Cronicl newspaper of 1863 makes the startling comparison that ‘negroaid cathwasiol Lloegr ydy’r Gwyddelod’ (the Irish are the negro slaves of England) and that the Welsh should desist from mocking the Irish as they were the victims of the oppressive policies of Britain in Ireland. Changes in attitude towards the Irish were given a further boost by the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Ireland in 1869. This decision raised the possibility that the same could be done in Wales. Despite continued anti-Irish sentiment based on antiCatholicism and labour issues, parts of the Welsh elite, at least, began to adopt a more appreciative attitude towards the Irish. The great Liberal MP for Meirionnydd, Tom Ellis, supported Irish Home Rule in 1886 and Cymru Fydd (Young Wales) was inspired by the Irish model. Patrick Pearse himself, one of the leaders of the 1916 Rebellion, was accepted to the Gorsedd of the Bards at the National Eisteddfod at Cardiff in 1899, and the success of Sinn Fein’s rebellion was a direct influence on the founders of Plaid Cymru who are now a party of government. But however little is understood of the Irish in Wales and the attitude of the Welsh to the Irish, even less is written on the attitudes of the Irish to the Welsh - in Wales or Ireland. For the history of the Irish in Wales is a complex one. The added twist being, that however lowly the Irish were perceived, unlike the native Welsh,

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they still possessed and spoke the imperial language, hands of the Irish. Many Irish still habitually refer to English. This created a paradoxical situation of a weak landing in Holyhead or Fishguard as landing in England. social community speaking the prestigious powerful state Speaking Welsh can be mocked and insulted as much by language, English, as opposed to a relatively stronger Irish people as by our other neighbours. Irish knowledge social community speaking a weaker, less prestigious lanof Wales, from my experience, rarely reaches the dizzy guage, Welsh. These situations led to instances of prejuheights of the common clichés. Numerous visits to dice against Welsh, which is rarely mentioned in polite Ireland have lead me to expect a blank look as I explain political circles and never discussed in academic articles. I’m from Wales and they desperately search for a polite I would contend that there’s an untold story of Irish answer or cultural reference. Conversations, which do prejudice towards the Welsh and especially the Welsh commence on the theme, seem pre-programmed by language. On Bord Fàilte purely anecday courses in dotal evihospitality dence it one sided seems to me conversations that the Irish where I yearn as a commufor the honnity have esty of adopted in silence. the past, Whilst the rather paraIrish think of doxically, an Wales (if they Ulster unionthink of ist attitude Wales at all) A source of inspiration to generations of Welsh nationalists since the towards the as an extendays of Emrys ap Iwan in the late nineteenth century native Welsh sion of language. England, Until the last few generation or so, efforts which we most Welsh, even today after the Troubles and 80 years would today call ‘integration’ of the Irish community by of independence, think of Ireland as being just a slightly the Welsh were rarely successful. The Irish were separaterrant part of the UK. Independent yes, but really, you ed from the Welsh working class by their lack of knowlknow, they’re part of Britain. Maybe they’re both right. edge of Welsh and their Catholicism. Preachers like The more politically minded Irish are possibly baffled Ieuan Gwynedd who succeeded in attracting Irish chilby Welsh subservience, whilst the Irish attitude towards dren from the streets of Tredegar in the 1840s to attend the Irish language is a source of amazement to the Welsh Sunday Schools, were few in number. The Irish nationalist Welsh. How is it, the Welsh think, that a became, ironically, a force for the Anglicisation of Welsh nation separated by a sea, which has seen no immigrasociety. The Irish as a community, only started to tion for 400 years can lose their language so completely? become integrated when the native Welsh became How is it that I can be served nonchalantly in Welsh in Anglicised. Although data is not available, my hunch is a garage 100 miles from the metropolis of Liverpool or that despite support for Mother Ireland and Irish emanManchester, but not 300 miles further west? cipation among the Irish communities of Wales, it is So, Ireland, as well as a source of inspiration to generprobably true that, as a community, that support did not ations of Welsh nationalists since the days of Emrys ap extend to supporting Welsh home rule until very recentIwan in the late nineteenth century also serves as a warnly, and maybe not even during the 1997 referendum. ing. Saunders Lewis, a big Hibernophile warned, with a Politically, linguistically and culturally, the working class knowing look towards Ireland, that winning independIrish communities in Wales have been bastions of ence before winning the fight for the language would be English language culture and upholders of the structures fatal to Welsh. With the exception of the brave first live of the British state. The biggest cultural affect of the broadcasts in Welsh coming from Dublin - rather than Irish as a community in Wales has been to make Wales Wales - in the 1920s, Irish moral support for Wales or an English-speaking country. the Welsh language has been notable in its absence. The If Irish have suffered prejudice at the hands of the introduction of the Gaeltacht in the 1950 had some Welsh, the Welsh have suffered from ignorance at the bearing on the Adfer movement and the concept of the

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Fro Gymraeg but that’s about it. But then maybe Ireland’s biggest gift to Wales has been to be there - and to be independent. For, despite this history, there is so much to celebrate and inspire in Wales’s relationship with Ireland. Of the half a dozen Irish people I know well, all are Welshspeaking and my life is richer for knowing them. Although the present day politics of the Republic seem at times to be a rainier and bigger version of Ceredigion, the Irish Risorgimento of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still inspires thousands of Welsh people including myself. Ireland offers an alternative. And that is of a state whose own self-worth isn’t that of a desperate mutton-dressed-as-lamb ex-super power trying to strut her tawdry stuff on the world stage. Ireland’s army truly ‘serves neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland.’ But Ireland’s strength is the elixir it refuses to drink. A leader of smaller nations, a battler for the underdog? No, it timidly skulks away from that role. It could so easily have spoken up in Europe during the negotiations on the Nice Treaty for the right of nations like the Catalans and Basques to choose their constitutional future, as outlined in the Good Friday Agreement for the Irish. A right that remains illegal under the Spanish constitution. But it didn’t. It could have used its veto to demand that France sign the Charter on Minority Languages and so

recognise the right of their sister Celtic language, Breton, to live. But it won’t. Which begs the question, what’s the point of Ireland? Why, in a post-Catholic, post-Republican and possible post-Irish language state, have an Irish state? Is, ‘because we feel Irish’ or ‘don’t want change’ enough? Certainly peace for over 80 years in the Republic is a good answer. But, should there be more than that? It’s not that I believe that Ireland should rejoin the UK very far from it. But, I know the moral reason for a Welsh state - to defend and promote the Welsh language - but I’m not so sure today of the moral reason for an Irish one? Or am I guilty of defining Irish nationality by Welsh standards... and of ignorance? Maybe, the journey to independence, or the cultural movement that goes with it, is the exciting part. Maybe, the journey is more important than the destination. If so, is Wales not the new Ireland? Are we in Wales, all of us, not now where the Irish were in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? And if we are, can we not have an honest appraisal of the relationship between our two nations as we too become a nation-state? If we’re ready to leave the ‘hen Wyddeles’ and the old prejudices on both sides then the one road to statehood for Wales, like Ireland before her, is the right one.

OPINION

Royston Jones

Going backwards fast

or some fifty years we Welsh have argued, campaigned, protested and, on many occasions, resorted to direct action for constitutional change, language rights, or against the exploitation of our resources and the changing demographic profile that erodes our national identity. Have we achieved anything? Let’s take stock. On the constitutional front, yes, OK, we have an Assembly. But the paradox is that power now seems to

reside with a group of MPs, most of whom share distinctly anti-Welsh sentiments. They propound absurd arguments against giving us more power: “Walk before you can run” they say or, even more insultingly, they use the current economic climate to argue that this is “no time” to discuss further devolution. (Of course, when the economy improves, then we won’t ‘need’ more devolution.) Their minds are firmly closed to the idea that an equitably funded Assembly with real powers would be far more effective in dealing with the problems confronting us than a bunch of part-timers in Westminster for whom Welsh concerns are a bit of a distraction from the ‘real’ business. In the Assembly itself we see a rather sad bunch of losers, intellectual lightweights and time-servers who either kow-tow to their masters in London or else are so chuffed to be in power that they can think of noth-

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ing more beneficial for the nation than covering Wales in wind turbines and fighting like ferrets in a sack to become Lords. As for the other parties, for their relevance or influence they might as well not be there. If we are to believe some pundits, this situation of stasis is almost inevitable with a Labour-led coalition in Cardiff and a Labour government in London. But will it change if the Conservatives win the next UK election and Labour is still in power down Cardiff docks? Here’s Old Jones’s prediction. In the scenario just outlined we’ll see ‘Welsh’ Labour, prompted and guided by its bosses in London, seeking to confront and embarrass the London government. But it won’t be done to serve us; it will be done to serve the interests of the Labour Party. While those same Labour politicos now arguing against greater powers for the Assembly will suddenly become great supporters of devolution and defenders of what they will chose to present as ‘Welsh interests’! Cynicism and hypocrisy shall reign o’er the land - stock up now on the sick bags! Are things any more encouraging when considering yr hen iaith? The language is now said to be ‘healthy’ because more people claim to be able to speak Welsh, and because of its higher public profile. The truth is encapsulated in the village where I live. When I first knew this village thirty-five years ago the vast majority of its population spoke Welsh; many spoke little English. Now one hears Welsh only from the older indigenes, who are rapidly becoming a minority as tourism and its inevitable corollary immigration take their toll. But, of course, we have bilingual signs everywhere, so we are expected to believe that the language is, to use the favoured term, ‘secure’. It puts me in mind of the analogy used by Tom Paine in his Rights of Man to attack conservative opponents of the French Revolution. He condemned them for being obsessed with the fading ‘plumage’ (i.e. the French monarchy and aristocracy) while being prepared to ignore the ‘dying bird’ (the mass of the French people). Our language campaigners are a bit like that: obsessively concerned with the ‘plumage’ of visibility, legislation and official recognition, while prepared to ignore the ‘dying bird’ that is the Fro Gymraeg (Welshspeaking areas) and the plight of most speakers of the language. What then of our resources, and here I lack the space to discuss any other than water? We Welsh have, for over a century, been largely helpless as our valleys were flooded and our communities uprooted to provide water supplies for England, yet we still pay more for our water than English consumers of our water. We are not allowed by English law to charge a reasonable price

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We are rebuked with the reminder that water is a “natural resource”, for which it would be positively immoral to demand a profit. Quite so; a natural resource like oil, or gold. We are treated as cowed and stupid colonials to be exploited, accused of racism or greed if we ask for fair play.

for that water. It must flow across the border on a ‘no profit, no loss’ basis. This is partly, and unconvincingly, justified by reminding us of the money spent by English cities in erecting the dams, some over a century ago. When that fails we are rebuked with the reminder that water is a “natural resource”, for which it would be positively immoral to demand a profit. Quite so; a natural resource like oil, or gold. We are still treated as cowed and stupid colonials to be exploited, and accused of racism or greed if we ask for fair play. Which brings us to the subject of rural housing and demographic change. Holiday homes and the immigration of wealthier English people inflating property prices to beyond the reach of most locals has been a thorny issue for decades. It prompted the arson campaign of Meibion Glyndwˆr from 1979 to the early 1990s. When the MG campaign was in full swing politicians grandiloquently announced to the Welsh public (largely sympathetic to MG’s aims) that they would never treat with, much less surrender to, “terrorists”. Well, the “terrorism” has been over for nigh on twenty years have those noble and upstanding politicians tackled the problem? No; not beyond half-heartedly providing a few ‘affordable’ homes for the natives, or using an unworkable ‘local occupancy’ clause that has been overturned in court, or else is simply ignored. The brutal truth is that in the past half century we have achieved nothing beyond the purely cosmetic on

any front. And just as a raddled old floozy uses cosmetics to hide the ravages of time and a dissolute life, so the English State has used insincere and ineffectual legislation and other window dressing to betray its contempt for us. Exposing, in the process, the stupidity or venality of too many Welsh who choose to argue that we’ve made progress! Yet there was always a better option; a path that, if we had taken it, would have proved far more beneficial to Welsh people. For if you think about it, there is a howling absurdity at the heart of modern Wales. Legislators and academics can discuss the Welsh language - but who speaks Welsh? Politicians and media debate devolution for Wales - but would devolution ever have become an issue without the existence of a distinct nation? At bottom, there can be no talk of ‘Wales’ without an acceptance of Welsh nationhood. In many other multinational states, and countries with indigenous populations, legislation is enacted to recognise specific national groups and accord certain rights to all members of that group. This is what we should have argued for: recognition as a distinct group with priority given to members of the group in housing, employment, education, the right to use either of the national languages in all situations, and many other fields. In other words, a comprehensive national policy for a nation and all those who belong to it. Of course, to argue for this will - yet again - be called ‘racist’ and ‘exclusive’. If so, then British or any other citizenship is racist and exclusive. Recognition by the US federal government of Native American rights is unquestionably exclusive. Inevitably, any argument for recognition of Welsh nationality will be countered with, ‘But how will you decide who is Welsh?’ as if this would be an insurmountable stumbling block. I can see the Wasting Mule publishing a letter from someone asking if he qualifies because his father was the sole survivor of a UFO that landed in Cwmscwt one snowy night, his mother was the last of the Romanoffs, and he was born on a paddle steamer half way between Ilfracombe and Mumbles. Tricky one, that. Fortunately, in the real world it would be far simpler. Anyone born in Wales would obviously qualify. Those born outside Wales to a Welsh parent should qualify. Anyone marrying a Welsh person would be welcomed. After that ‘citizenship’ - or whatever we chose to call it - could be conferred on anyone who has lived here for a qualification period and shown commitment to Wales. Every state on earth makes decisions on citizenship. You simply set up a court or department to evaluate the applications and let that body get on

with it without interference. Of course, what I’m suggesting is unlikely to come to pass under the existing constitutional arrangement. But I am convinced of this: if we had recognition as a nation then we Welsh would - both collectively and individually - be in far better shape than we are today. A campaign for national rights would be less divisive, or more inclusive, than the campaign for devolution or language rights ever was, for it would offer benefits and opportunities to all our people irrespective of political persuasion, language, location or anything else. After half a century of struggle we who took part in that struggle desperately try to persuade ourselves (and each other) that things have improved . . . really? Maybe we’re afraid of the truth; but I’m going to lay out some truths for you anyway, and I don’t care if I repeat myself. Political power is more firmly centred in London than it was before ‘devolution’. If Wales win at rugby or Dai Gob wins the Best Corpse award at the Tomsk Film Festival, politicos go into raptures and the Mule gives it front page coverage - because we live in a land of bread and circuses that a classical Roman would recognise; we see the Valleys, possibly the whole country, being sacrificed on the altar of Greater Cardiff; we have water in abundance yet pay through the nose for it - a bit like a motorist in Dubai paying £10 a gallon for petrol; in our rural areas Welsh people find themselves becoming strangers in their own country; year on year our wage levels fall further and further behind England’s; the ‘industry of the future’ is basic-wage tourism; in the real world the Welsh language is dying fast; having an accident or being taken ill could prove fatal because the ambulance will take three days to reach you; we have no national media worth speaking of; travelling any distance within Wales without a car is virtually impossible unless you really, really enjoy walking; forget all the nonsense spouted about preference being given in employment to Welsh speakers, because if you want a job in contemporary Wales fluency in Estuary English is what counts.... and this is an improvement on the situation that prevailed 50 years ago? Face up to the truth - we’ve gone backwards! Because instead of following a broad, national highway, we were led astray by romantics riding hobby-horses and those pursuing all too narrow objectives. These people took us down dead-ends, where we were, effectively, mugged by the English State. We lost sight of the bigger picture and the greater good. It needn’t have been like this. It shouldn’t have been like this. Is it too late for a Campaign for Welsh National Rights?

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OPINION

Nigel Jarrett

The myth of a national identity in print

hen I began working as a newspaper reporter in the late 1960s, there was a joke told about the Western Mail - how copies of its North Wales edition were transported from the capital at night in the boot of a Ford Zephyr. As my father-in-law owned such a vehicle, it was easy for me to assess the WM’s readership outside its South and West Wales heartland. Unimpressive, apocryphal tale or not. The later and successful incursion of the Liverpool Post and Echo into the north and north-west of the country, effectively embarrassing if not actually seeing off the Cardiffbased and soi-disant ‘national newspaper of Wales’ in those areas, said a lot about the pretensions and commercial capabilities of newspaper companies. Many newspapers have a habit of exceeding the remits enshrined at the top of their front pages - or ‘mastheads’, as their masonic nomenclature has it. I started my career on the so-called Free Press of Monmouthshire. At the time it was privately-owned and circulated in the Eastern Valley of Gwent, serving the towns and precincts of Blaenavon in the north, equatorial Pontypool and Cwmbran in the south, the last half-heartedly, as though the huge increase in population there as a result of the New Towns Act did not present any kind of challenge. It was often thought by outsiders that Cwmbran, many of its institutions purpose-built, could have supported a newspaper on its own, but the only efforts were pathetic advertising or free sheets, with no interest in the area beyond making money out of it. Anyway, the Free Press didn’t serve Monmouthshire - which is what the SE corner of Wales was called at the time - only a small part of it. National advertisers probably weren’t aware of that any more than the Fleet Street papers were who used to phone me in Pontypool to ask if I could cover something for them in Blackwood, where the Free Press was known, if at all, only by reputation. Much could have been made of the fact that, even for a ten-second tip-off to a disembodied Cockney voice on some newsdesk at the end of the line, I would receive by return of post in 1969 a cheque for £25, for a filed story of 150 words

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Even at the end of my career in 2002 as a salaried journalist, recent school-leavers moving pallets on the night shift at a local warehouse were earning almost as much as I. That’s not meant to be disparaging, just fodder for thought about why so many provincial newspaper journalists are unhappy. substantially more sometimes in excess, of my weekly wage. Because I was relatively late in beginning a newspaper career, my employer didn’t think I needed any training and would have jeopardised my future prospects if I had not insisted, with the support of the National Union of Journalists, on being properly prepared. The union’s training officer was George Viner, who reminded me of someone permanently engaged in combating forces of the most immovable reaction, i.e. newspaper employers. Even at the end of my career in 2002 as a salaried journalist, recent school-leavers moving pallets on the night shift at a local warehouse were earning almost as much as I. That’s not meant to be disparaging, just fodder for thought about why so many provincial newspaper journalists are unhappy. The South Wales Echo, the South Wales Evening Post (readers have long cottoned on to its particularity and call it the ‘Swansea Post’) and the South Wales Argus, my old paper, circulate only in a small geographical part of the south. At the Argus in the early days we were amused to watch repeated attempts by Thomson House in Cardiff to set up an office for the Mail and Echo in Newport, where the Argus is based and its circulation still concentrated (though it is now printed overnight in Worcester). Amusing because it was fun to compete and we knew the exercise would fail. Competition, of course, served the area by default: it was more satisfying to know you’d outflanked the opposition than to realise that the story you’d done it with told readers something about their area they might not have known had you not been on your mettle. What both papers have always lacked

along with the Western Mail, and for prevailingly sound commercial reasons, is a sense of Welshness, of being of interest to everybody in Wales every day and on every page. The Mail has always had a Welsh affairs correspondent but in most papers coverage of the Welsh Assembly and other national platforms was early predicated on the interest their deliberations would have for the reader in a particular place, upheavals in agriculture and free swimming for the over-60s notwithstanding. Readers in Cardiff and Newport are not interested in what happens in Rhyl or Aberaeron. Perhaps they can be if the stories from there are salacious or sensational, which explains the marginally greater inroads on broad-based circulation of Wales on Sunday, cleverly exploiting the fact that the Sun and other tabloids, which it apes, sell reasonably well in Denbighshire and Cardiganshire. The Liverpool Post effect was repeated, but less profitably, in the Chepstow corner of Argus territory by the Bristol-based Western Daily Press after it recognised the demographic region it called Severnside, which came into fanciful being with the building of the (first) Severn Bridge. The concept was simple: Chepstovians could now travel to work in Bristol and district while people in top jobs in Bristol - note the emphasis on class and status, always uppermost in the mind of a newspaper manager - could live more cheaply in SE Gwent. Quam tempus fugit. You can still get the WDP in Chepstow and the Caldicot Levels but it must cost more to get it across the estuary and distribute than it makes in advertising and sales, an example of what industry commentators call ‘buying circulation’. To what end, one never can tell. Newspapers work in mysterious ways and reflect few standard business models. The Liverpool assault on North Wales, far from assuming a partisan Welshness forced on it by the area it was encroaching, was a trawl for more readers. Where these are served all over Wales by weeklies, the effectiveness of the coverage is equally difficult to essay. Content is dictated by sales and advertising, not long-

term cultural investment, and the bigger the proprietorial company (the US giant Gannet in the case of the Argus and its weekly Free Press satellites) the less open to arguments of non-profitable survival is its far-flung interests. In November, the closure of the ‘no longer viable’ Free Press in Monmouth and Abergavenny was announced. Existing Welsh newspapers have rarely missed the stories that matter even if their ‘independence’ has created a supra-political naivety about how society works and who is suffering at the hands of whom. However, establishing a truly all-embracing Welsh newspaper in English, something different from what exists at present - the Western Mail being an unsettling hybrid of serious and popular is problematic. Molten habits could prove to be hastening of the industry’s disappearance and the internet might mean that newspapers will abandon their print versions for ever-more-comprehensive websites. It’s already happening at a newsroom near you. Last year’s job losses among big newspaper groups, the restructuring of the news-gathering operation, the redefining of the journalist’s role and very title - all point to an industry in turmoil. It’s one that has always been behind the times, almost masonic in its operational secrecy but invariably profitable. In Britain, the amount of printed matter on the newsagent’s shelf is actually increasing. Perhaps in Wales the solution is something small but provocative and, given time, influential, so long as its contributors are knowledgeable, authoritative and can spell. Or it may be better to wait for the internet to become other than a subterranean form of secret communion, often illiterate, and to set up a web newspaper with a talented and committed staff. Then again, one could accept the status quo, with all its flaws. But can national identity be reflected in a newspaper, anyway? What it is to be a Welsh newspaper (other than a newspaper published in Wales) is almost as imponderable as what it is to be Welsh.

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Cerys Close up cambria

meets CERYS MATTHEWS

Her father’s family was Welsh-speaking from Pembrokeshire. Her mother came from Neath.

FRANCES JONES-DAVIES

“When people ask me

where I am from I always

ast year, hopeful of an interview, I burst unannounced into Cerys Matthews’s dressing room at the Eisteddfod an hour or two before her concert. We were both rather startled. I, because facing me was a slight, defensive, rather vulnerable looking young woman, more the girl you might imagine listening to her haunting and ethereal renditions of Calon Lân and Gwahoddiad, than the strong-jawed, feisty woman I had been expecting. Apart from appearing in the concert she was also there to pick up the Cardiff National Eisteddfod Prize for musical composition for her minialbum Awyren. It is in an unusual format, having only five songs on it, and it has been said for this reason and because it is in Welsh, that it couldn’t work commercially. But reviews on Amazon contradict this, the general view being that her voice and the music are such a pleasure to listen to that it doesn’t matter if one can’t understand the words. She also plays a wide variety of instruments and often produces the music too, ‘I find the music easier to write than the lyrics’, she tells me. In her teens she trained her voice with cigarettes and whisky to make it husky. ‘I was a huge fan of Bob Dylan, still am, but my voice is as different from his as you can get. I don’t smoke any more though.’ But she has been known to light up purely because she can’t stand being told not to! Of late, her voice has been less redolent of these influences, its range is amazing from raw through to pure, sweet and almost fragile. In Nashville she introduced her musician friends to ‘one of the most popular songs of Wales’, Gwahoddiad (‘Arglwydd dyma fi’) only to find that it is actually an American song (written in 1872 and translated into Welsh in 1876). This appealed to her and epitomised the reasons she went to Nashville in the first place: ‘I love the stories of songs, how they travel, which countries pick up on them and why they affect people, especially the Irish ones. There are lots of people of Irish descent in the Appalachians and Tennessee. The history behind songs is fascinating.’ ‘I have been collecting songs since I was nine. I didn’t

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say I’m a mongrel - from all over south Wales.” come from a particularly musical household, but my grandmother has a lovely voice, she could have been a singer really but she got married very young and it wasn’t an option then. My parents have great musical taste though.’ Her father’s family was Welsh speaking from Pembrokeshire, but they made the conscious decision not only to bring him up speaking English but thought he would have a better chance if he wasn’t a Welsh speaker. Her mother came from Neath and was not a Welsh speaker originally but when Cerys was one she started to learn, ‘for political reasons’, and the children were sent to Meithrin in Cardiff where their father was a doctor. ‘When people ask me where I am from I always say I’m a mongrel from all over south Wales!’ After her iconic and hugely successful group Catatonia split, she moved out to America, married a fellow musician in Nashville, had a son, and five years later moved back. She suffered from terrible hiraeth and ‘really missed the sea, the eccentricity of people back home and the BBC.

On the flip-side there are things she misses about America - NPR radio for one. She intended to live in Pembrokeshire but her work means she spends a lot of time in London. The children are in the Welsh School, growing up Welsh speaking. ‘It’s a great little school, very simple. I don’t want the children to become too sophisticated too young. Here, I can be home with them for breakfast and tea, pick them up from school, it’s good for us. I’m really focusing on setting up a family home for my kids, I don’t want to move again, not soon anyway.’ But touring gets into the blood. Cerys has been on the

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF RHOSYGILWEN

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DAVID WILLIAMS

ABOVE: Cerys Matthews performing at the 2008 Eisteddfod in the capital.

LEFT:

Cerys Matthews receiving the 2008 Cardiff National Eisteddfod Prize for musical composition from D. Hugh Thomas, President of the Eisteddfod Court

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road ‘pretty well’ all her adult life, since she was nineteen. ‘It is hard to settle when you are used to this life.’ Now, touring will be worked around the children’s schooling. She has two albums coming out shortly and later in the summer will go touring again. When the children are older she will take them with her; which she has done in the past but it was hard work and ‘back stage is not particularly glamorous or safe, with all the wires and equipment. It was fun, the best bit was on the bus making up songs and playing games. The children had to fit in with our schedule of very late nights, so they wouldn’t wake the crew too early. It was a great adventure for them but eventually it became a bit of a bore. I’m glad I tried. You have to make mistakes and I hate being told I can’t do something!’ The children, Glenys Pearl y Felin and Johnny Tupelo Jones, are now five and three respectively. The names have a pleasing rhythm. ‘I wanted the children to have names that grounded them geographically. My parents live next to a woollen mill and Glenys was born at Withybush Hospital. Johnny should perhaps be

The programmes will concentrate on Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney, Robert Burns, William Yeats, Ted Hughes and Dafydd ap Gwilym

Tennessee but I preferred Tupelo, and we were on our way there when the contractions started. I love names, especially ones with stories behind them.’ Life is very busy now. She is undertaking a lot of work for the BBC, quite a bit of DJ’ing, and she is to be the presenter of a poetry season, travelling all over the UK. She is thrilled to bits doing this. The programmes will concentrate on Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney, Robert Burns, William Yeats, Ted Hughes and Dafydd ap Gwilym, looking at their similarities, and whether or not there is a particularly Celtic underlying their work. She has always been ambitious and driven, but now she wants to concentrate on doing the work she has in hand as well as she can, her family and ‘maybe buy some more furniture’! Cerys’s new album The Not so Torrid Affairs of a Reluctant Housekeeper which she describes as ‘John Barryesque and cinematic’, depicts the unglamorous life of a mother with young children, juggling nappies and all the quandaries life has to throw at her. Quirky humorous, yet optimistic, each song tells a familiar story.

The Cambria

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Cerys Matthews is appearing at CeltFest on March 21st at Cardiff’s CIA in the company of Bryn Terfel, Rhys Meirion, Dafydd Iwan and The Wolfe Tones.

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H E R I TA G E / T R E F TA D A E T H

The Travels of Llyfr Coch Hergest - THE RED BOOK OF HERGEST D.P. DAVIES

he Bodleian library at Oxford University possesses a book of manuscripts written in vellum and bound in red Moroccan leather entitled Llyfr Coch Hergest (Red Book of Hergest). The work is an unique golden treasury of medieval Welsh poems and prose which appears to have been copied between 1375 and 1425. Llyfr Coch is one of the four ancient medieval books of Wales and includes examples of nearly every type of Welsh language literature from the period before the year 1400. It is probably best known as a major source of the Mabinogi and it also includes the herbal remedies associated with the thirteenth century Dyfed family dynasty of doctors, Meddygon Myddfai (The Physicians of Myddfai). The story of Llyfr Coch from its inception in the thirteenth /fourteenth centuries to its final placement on the shelves of the Bodleian Library is an intriguing travelogue, a silent witness to many epic events of Welsh, and British, history. This journey begins in fourteenth century Swansea in the small village of Ynysforgan, the home of Hopcyn ap Thomas fab Einon (1330-1408). Hopcyn, was both a learned and wealthy man, heavily committed to Welsh bardic traditions who began amassing a collection of manuscripts. As part of this process he invited Hywel fab Hywel Coch of Buallt (Builth), a member of the Hopcyn household, and two other professional scribes to copy between them as much as possible of available Welsh medieval literature into a literary anthology. This they did during the period 1375 to 1425. As was the custom of the day, manuscripts were mostly written and copied in monasteries - especially those associated with the Cistercian order. The Abbeys of HendyË&#x2020; Gwyn ar DĂ˘f (Whitland) and Ystrad Fflur (Strata Florida) were especially prominent in the writing, copying and translation of religious literature and texts of law

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PAGE FROM LLYFR COCH HERGEST

both in Latin and the vernacular Welsh language of the time. These important centres of native scholarship may well have been the home of the scribes of Llyfr Coch. When Hopcyn died in 1408, his son Tomos and later his grandson Hopcyn inherited his estate. This was during the time of the Wars of the Roses and Hopcyn was a THE CISTERCIAN ABBEY OF YSTRAD FFLUR

HERGEST COURT

supporter of the Lancastrian cause under the leadership of Henry VI. When in 1461 at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross in Herefordshire the Lancastrians were defeated, all land and possessions of the Hopcyn family, including the library with its many manuscripts, were confiscated and in 1464 given over to Sir Roger Vaughan of Tretwˆr (Tretower), the Vaughan family being one of the great landowners of the border counties of Radnor and Hereford. With the collection came Llyfr Coch which found its way onto the library shelves of Tretwˆr. Its time there was brief. In 1465 the manuscript found its way into the library of a house near Kington, the market town on the border between Hereford and Radnorshire, which belonged to another branch of the Vaughan family. Plas Hergest (Hergest Court), in the shadows of high Hergest Ridge, was to become a great centre for Welsh culture and bardic poetry, and Llyfr Coch was to stay in its library for more than two hundred years. In 1571 a wealthy churchman, Dr Huw Price of Brecon, together with several colleagues, founded a new college in Oxford University, Jesus College. Its first principal was Dr David Lewis (1520-1584) from nearby Abergavenny. Sir Leoline Jenkins (born Llewellyn ap Jenkins in Llantrisant ), son of Jenkin ap Llewellyn of the Parish of Llanblethian near Cowbridge in the Vale of Glamorgan, was educated at Jesus College in the 1640’s and went on to become a lawyer and diplomat. For his services to the Royal cause in the English civil war, Charles II rewarded Jenkins by appointing him Principal of Jesus College - a post he held from 1661-73. One of Jenkins’s most significant contributions was to develop the buildings of the college, and especially the library to which he bequeathed an invaluable collection of books and manuscripts.

Sir Lewis Mansell (d.1636) scion of the Mansell family of Penrice, Oxwich and Margam Abbey, which had first settled in Gower during the reign of Edward I, matriculated from Jesus College in 1601 and for many years made an annual bequest of fifty pounds a year towards its library. The Mansells took a great interest in the history and literature of their counties and country, and as a result acquired a number of important manuscripts which later became known as the Margam Collection. At some point Llyfr Coch became part of this compilation. In 1634 Lewis Mansell loaned Llyfr Coch to Dr John Davies of Mallwyd (1567-1644) in North Wales. Davies was a very distinguished early student of Jesus College, graduating in 1594, and an enthusiastic antiquarian with a passion for collecting and revising manuscripts. What John Davies, then rector in the Parish of Mallwyd, actually did with the book is not known but we know he returned it to Margam shortly after. The book, however, did not remain in the Margam collection for very much longer. Llyfr Coch eventually passed into the hands of Thomas Wilkins (1625-1699) of Llanblethian. The Wilkins family, of Norman origin, had settled in the Llandow area near Cowbridge in the thirteenth century, and had, from the early 1600s developed a strong clerical tradition, with three generations being rectors of Llanfair (Church of St Mary) in the Vale of Glamorgan. It is likely that Thomas Wilkins knew the Mansells of nearby Margam, and that at some stage he either borrowed the manuscript, or had received it in the form of a gift. A former undergraduate of Jesus College, Wilkins became a famous antiquarian with strong connections to the landed gentry of South Wales, and of the many manuscripts in his possession Llyfr Coch was undoubtedly the most important. When Thomas Wilkins died in 1699, his manuscripts passed to his eldest son, also Thomas (1677-1736), who presented severMARGAM ABBEY

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al manuscripts, including Llyfr Coch, to Jesus College in 1701. Edward Lhuyd was born in 1660 in Llanforda near Oswestry in the Welsh part of Shropshire. In 1672 he won a place at Jesus College to study law, and soon after became under-keeper at the recently opened Ashmolean museum, becoming its first keeper in 1691. In the early 1690s he set out to write the Archaeologia Britannica, a study of the natural history, antiquities, history and language of Wales. The first volume of this hugely important work appeared in 1707, and is regarded as the first significant study of the affinities and relationships between the Celtic languages. To prepare for the creation of this magnum opus, Lhuyd, a Fellow of the Royal Society, embarked on a grand tour of all the Celtic countries between 16971701 in the course of which he visited Cowbridge where he came to copy over a period of two months, amongst other works, a manuscript of singular importance. He was to explain the circumstances in a letter dated 22nd September 1697 to William Williams of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford “…..I intended to have been in Carmarthenshire about a month since; but have been detained by Mr Wilkins of Llanvair in this neighbourhood these 2 months; for so long a time the copying of an old Welsh manuscript took up: which had he been willing to restore to ye owner we might have bought for twenty shillings!”

This was the Thomas Wilkins of Llanblethian to whom Edmund Gamage, Rector of Coychurch, referred in one of his replies to Lluyd’s queries, “We have not many skilled in ye Welsh. I suppose ye best is

The Travels of a Treasure c1300 -1714 Hergest

Ystrad Fflur?

Oxford

ye Rd. Thomas Wilkins rector of St.Mary Church and Llanmaes.” The manuscript to which Lhuyd refers is the famous Llyfr Coch, and he states “it was writ on vellom about 300 years BODLEIAN LIBRARY, OXFORD since and contained a collection of most of the oldest writings mentioned by Dr.Davies (Maenllwyd) at the end of his Welsh dictionary”. After making his copy of Llyfr Coch Lhuyd presumably returned the ancient manuscript to the Reverend Wilkins from whence it passed to the library at Jesus. Somehow the manuscript appears to have returned once again to Edward Lhuyd, and Llyfr Coch was in his possession at the time of his death in 1709 at the age of forty nine. Although it would have been quite logical for Jesus College to have purchased Lhuyd’s papers, they were immediately seized by the University of Oxford, for envy and greed had crept into the argument, and these had prejudiced the smooth transfer of the collection. For one of the fellows of Jesus College, William Wynn, had apparently quarrelled with Lhuyd, just before the latter’s death, and it was Wynn who dissuaded the College from procuring them, and encouraged the University’s Bodleian Library to acquire them instead. It seems however, that the Bodleian librarian was not at all interested in the transaction, and after much wrangling yet another Jesus fellow, Sir Thomas Sebright, bought the collection, and with it Llyfr Coch. It is not known for how long Sebright kept hold of Lhuyd’s collection but Thomas Wilkins once again acquired Llyfr Coch and in 1714 he promptly returned it to the safe keeping of Jesus College, where it was to remain for the next century and a half. In 1851 the priceless manuscript was rebound in Moroccan leather and it was in this form it found its way this time - the shortest possible distance - to the Bodleian Library, where it has remained to this day.

Tretw ˆr

Ynysforgan Margam Llanblethian

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The author D P Davies is a retired paediatrician and Emeritus Professor of Paediatrics of the University of Wales. He became interested in LLYFR COCH whilst researching the origins of the healing remedies of Meddygon Myddfai written down in the manuscript. This article is based on a lecture given to the Cowbridge and District Local History Society in April 2008.

H E R I TA G E / T R E F TA D A E T H

Edwinsford - a sad decay JOHN VAUGHAN

ome six miles north of Llandeilo, the ruinous remains of Edwinsford, or Rhydodin, are just visible from the road to Llansawel that leads off the B4302 from Talley to Crugybar. There are many Welsh houses at risk, but Edwinsford is one of loveliest; and perhaps the saddest and most romantic of them all. Beautifully situated on the banks of the River Cothi, the Edwinsford Estate was founded by the Williams family who, in common with other early Welsh gentry families, claimed descent from eminences such as Hywel Dda and Rhodri Mawr. The estate passed through successive generations of the Williams family, later HamlynWilliams, and then by marriage to the Drummond family who styled themselves Williams-Drummond. Sir James (Jimmy) Hamlyn Williams-Drummond, grandson of Sir James Drummond of Hawthornden, was born in 1891 and in 1913 he inherited Edwinsford on the death of his father. In 1918, Jimmy Drummond

There are many Welsh houses at risk, but Edwinsford is one of loveliest; and perhaps the saddest and most romantic of them all. married my great-aunt, Lady Enid Vaughan, and my great-grandmother, Evelyn Countess of Lisburne, moved from Trawsgoed to live with them at Edwinsford during the 1920s. The demise of the house and estate from the 1930s onwards is not untypical of so many of the great houses of Wales. Declining agricultural incomes in the form of rents, combined with higher taxation, increasing costs of maintenance and upkeep, all played their part; so too did family problems and differences. Most of all, there was a lack of will by owners to continue, faced with the realisation that their political influence had ended and that their incomes were insufficient to maintain their properties. By 1936 the mansion house at Edwinsford had been ‘mothballed’ on grounds of cost, and Jimmy Drummond and my aunt, who were sadly childless, began to spend more time at Hawthornden. When at Edwinsford they stayed in the Steward’s House within the lovely courtyard demesne,

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which was separated from the house by the River Cothi and linked by a beautiful single arch bridge. This courtyard had superb early eighteenth century lead statuary set on the matching stone pillars that formed the entrance gateway. On one of these was the painted figure of a gamekeeper shooting at a charging wild boar which faced him from the other side of the gate. During World War II the house was requisitioned and used for various purposes, including housing refugees from London and elsewhere. Much of the furniture was removed into storage at that time, later to reappear at auction. Certainly it was never a family house again and, after the war, the WilliamsDrummonds lived almost entirely at Hawthornden. My great aunt Enid died in 1958 and Jimmy Williams-Drummond in 1970. Edwinsford was left by Jimmy WilliamsDrummond to Frank Coombes, his valet and companion at Hawthornden during his final years there. When Frank Coombes died his executors put the estate up for sale. This included a remarkable collection of needlework furniture; some now housed at the National Museum of Wales at St. Fagan’s. A particular loss was the early lead statutory, sold to various London dealers. The cottages, some farms and the abandoned mansion were sold, mostly to a Mr. Len Moult, and subsequently to a Mr. Kettle. Over this period (mid 1970s-1990s) the house was stripped bare and the roof slates and various architectural features were removed. The current state of the Grade II* house, or what is left of it, is a heritage disaster because the current planning legislation has clearly been inadequate to protect the building. The oldest part of the house, the four-square Jacobean wing, still has some of its roof remaining and the walls seem sound enough. The problem is not insuperable, but time is running out. For years those concerned about Welsh heritage properties have asked, ‘what is to be done about it’? The present owner who, I am told, lives and works in England, no doubt has plans and aspirations as so many owners of buildings at risk do. If so, has CADW been consulted for advice or a restoration grant? And what of the Local Authority, in this case Carmarthenshire County Council? Powers do exist to serve a repairs notice, but of course the Council will be aware that this could be ignored and that this might lead to legal costs and to what all local authorities usually dread, a compulsory purchase

order placing the liability and burden of repair on the community. The dereliction of Edwinsford and the plight faced by many other houses was recently catalogued by Michael Tree and Mark Baker in Forgotten Welsh Houses. Surely now is the time for those in authority in Wales to take stock of what can and should be done about the stewardship of these properties. To date the onus seems to be very much on private individuals and heritage organisations to come forward and acquire them, if they can. Indeed, there are a number of outstanding success stories such as Penhow Castle and Bodysgallen, where private funding has rescued houses and given them life and economic purpose again. But the public sector does need to look at what are the tangential and underlying heritage issues. Many Welsh heritage properties, such as Edwinsford, are too important to be left to the vagaries of market forces and the limitations of private individuals. At the same time the planning system is overstretched and often incapable of implementing solutions. CADW, though excellent in terms of advice and support, is underfunded and its grants are becoming harder to obtain. Its repair and restoration grants in 2006-2007 amounted

to only £1.8 million. Fortunately, there does now seem to be an honest realisation, thanks to the work of Welsh heritage trusts and examples such as Aberglasney and, more recently, Llanelli House, of the significant economic, cultural and community benefits that heritage properties can bring. But such projects are far too reliant on hit-and-miss fundraising efforts and the goodwill and time put in by heritage organisations that are often run on shoestring budgets. It is time for the Assembly Government to take the lead and to implement a more pro-active heritage strategy through a national Wales heritage organisation that has not only adequate powers but also one that can source the funding necessary to enable acquisitions and the maintenance of heritage properties at risk. It may be too late for properties like Edwinsford, but if action is taken now, something there could still be saved, as could other houses at risk, for the benefit of Wales as a whole. John Vaughan is an independent property consultant and a trustee of the Trawsgoed Estate. The National Museum of Wales: www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/stfagans/ FORGOTTEN HOUSES OF WALES is published by The Georgian Group and SAVE

BODYSGA ALLEN HALL & SPA STAY IN A NAT T HOUSE! TIONAL TRUST Standing in over 200 acres of its own parkland to thee south of Llandudno with sppectacular views of Snowdonia and Conwy Castle, believed to have 13th century origins, Bodysga allen Hall provides all that iss best in country house hospitality. In September 2008 BODYSGALLEN HALL and thhe other two HISTORIC HOUSE H HOTELS became the property of THE NATIONAL TRUST, by donation, with all profits benefitting the houses annd the charity. Beautiful gardens include a rare 17th century parterree of box hedges, a rockery with a cascade, a walled rose garden, and several follies. There are 15 extremely comfortable rooms r in the Hall including four ‘Principal Suites’. Sixteen cottages, with picturesque names like Pineapple Lodge, Castlee View and Gingerbread Hoouse are situated in the grounds. The Spa at Bodysgallen Hall contains a magnificeent 20 metre pool, fully equuipped gymnasium, 5 luxurious treatment rooms, whirlpool bath, steam room, sauna, and a sunn terrace with stunning viewss of North Wales. It offers a wide range of treatments and products from ANNE SEMONIN (eexclusive to North Wales), DECLEOR, ESPA, St Tropez, together with the highly acclaimed CACI face and body treatm ments. BODYSGALLEN HALL & SPA LLANDUDNO O N.WALES LL30 1RS T(01492) T 584466 www.bodysgallen.com

Filming Owain Glyndwˆr DAVID BARRY

ade for television back in the 1980s, Owain, Prince of Wales, was shot backto-back, a Welsh language version for showing on S4C, and an English version for Channel 4. The production company was English, as was the director, James Hill, and the brief they had been given by S4C was that they wanted bilingual actors who had never appeared in Pobl y Cwm. I had never appeared in the programme, and I speak a little bit of Welsh, having been brought up by fluent Welsh-speaking parents in North Wales, so my agent suggested me to the casting director who was based in London. Normally, if an actor is not known to a particular director or producer, the actor is required to interview or audition for the part. But they were finding it difficult to cast some of the smaller roles in this costume drama, because most Welsh speaking actors had presumably appeared in the Welsh soap opera at some stage. So I was accepted for the role of Second Soldier merely on the recommendation of my agent. When the two bulky scripts dropped onto my doormat a few days later, I immediately read the English version with interest. There was no point in trying to read the Welsh version, as I had lived in England since my early teens and my Welsh was now very basic. But I knew I could cope with learning six

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lines, which was all my part amounted to. I had often thought this great Welsh hero was a good subject for an exciting historical drama. But as I slowly turned the pages, mouth agape, I became more and more disappointed. Whoever had written this, or conceived of the idea, seemed to be trying to create a family adventure along the lines of the old ’50s and ’60s series Ivanhoe, William Tell and Robin Hood. There was even a corny scene in the script, straight out of a John Ford western, where the hero exits a castle on horseback, along with his sidekick Rhodri, who spots one of Henry IV’s snipers up a tree, about to kill Owain with an arrow. Rhodri fires one from the hip and fells the sniping archer, whereupon our hero salutes his friend and thanks him. “Diolch, Rhodri.” And how do you do a John Wayne drawl in Welsh? Halfway through the script, desperately disappointed, I gave up reading it, and only bothered reading my own character’s lines. I knew this particular film was going to be a sad, bad experience, but little did I know of the farcical events that lay in store for me. A week later I caught the Holyhead train from Euston Station, having been instructed to get off at Llandudno Junction, where a film unit car would meet me to transport me to my hotel ready for filming on the following day. It was there I met Martin Gower, the actor who would be playing First Soldier. Our characters seemed to be the comedy relief, a sort of double-act of two inept soldiers who end up being pushed into the river by Owain and his merry men in this travesty of a historical epic. During the drive along the beautiful Conwy Valley we got to know each other, and I discovered that

I knew this particular film was going to be a sad, bad experience, but little did I know of the farcical events that lay in store for me. Martin’s upbringing was similar to my own, having moved to England when he was quite young, with a Welsh tongue that was terribly rusty. But we thought we could cope with our six lines each, especially if we helped each other out in the hotel that evening. Most of the cast and crew stayed in hotels in Betws-y-Coed, but Martin and I were quartered in a beautiful country manor hotel at Dolwyddelan, about four miles from Betws. As it was unusually perfect weather, we became rain cover. Most of our scenes were interiors, so we were kept on stand-by in case it should rain. It meant that in those pre mobile phone days we couldn’t leave the hotel and had to hang around all day, eating and drinking. It was such a hardship, tucking into a salmon freshly caught in the nearby salmon leap by one of the waiters. When they eventually decided to use us in a scene, we were picked up by “Mr Jones the Taxi” who was ferrying many of the cast here and there. As we headed for the production office at Llanrwst, where the make-up department and wardrobe were based, Mr Jones told us that he had been involved in many films, most notably The Inn of the Sixth

Happiness which had been shot in the Snowdonia region, where they built an entire Chinese village on the hillside near Beddgelert. Mr Jones reminisced about the halcyon days of chauffeuring Ingrid Bergman around the Welsh mountains, when films were films and they were well organised. “Not like this lot,” he opined. “This lot don’t seem to know what they are doing.” And to prove him right, when we got to the Llanrwst production office, one of the runners was gabbling into his walkie-talkie about some lost portable toilets, which should have gone to the current location, but which had gone in the opposite direction, and loads of actors and crew were now clutching the cheeks of their backsides tightly. When I was kitted out in my chain-mail, I went to make-up, and was reminded that perhaps I had only been cast because I fitted the brief - no Pobl y Cwm appearances and a smattering of Welsh - but was actually miscast. I was supposed to be a tough soldier, one of Henry IV’s mercenaries, about to rape a fair, local maiden until rescued by Owain. The make-up girl stared with concentration at my face and declared, “You look like Noddy. You look so cute. How am I going to make you look tough?” I suggested a scar, but in my balaclava-like helmet there wasn’t really much room left on my face. I continued to look cute. As soon as we were ready, one of the unit cars drove us to one of the locations, the impressive Gwydir Castle, a fifteenth century fortified manor house less than two miles from Llanrwst. As the film had at least been blessed by sunny weather, exteriors were being filmed in the courtyard of the castle. At first glance, a film set can be misleadingly impressive in a costume drama, and you almost believe for a moment

that you are stepping back in time. Until you notice all the technical paraphernalia, or an actor in doublet and hose smoking a cigarette or tucking in to a bacon butty. As soon as we arrived on the set, we became acquainted with some of the other actors, and noticed a strange atmosphere, almost as if the cast were method actors and resented the English production company and crew. We soon discovered the reason for this when we were told by one of the actors that he had approached the director just before they were due to shoot the Welsh version of a scene, and asked if he could change a couple of lines, as they were tongue twisters. But the director, apparently pushed for time, had said dismissively that he wasn’t too bothered about the Welsh version and could they just get on with it. Of course, word of this spread like wildfire throughout the cast, creating a lot of resentment. Some of the actors had re-christened the production company “Mickey Llygoden Films.” When the director heard this, and asked what it meant, he wasn’t pleased when he discovered Llygoden meant “mouse”. Also staying at our hotel up in the hills was Dafydd, the location caterer, with whom we drank in the evenings; which probably explains our preferential treatment on the set at lunchtimes, when we were offered a surreptitious “livener” in our orange juice. Dafydd, had an assistant, Tom, who helped with the cooking in the chuck wagon. One morning I noticed Dafydd was struggling on his own. I asked him what had happened to Tom. Looking over his shoulder and lowering his voice, Dafydd replied, “Tom had to go back to Caernarfon to sign on.” Outside our hotel was a small station. The railway ran from Blaenau

Ffestiniog via Betws-y-Coed to Llandudno Junction, and one night the three of us decided to go to Betws-y-Coed by train, and drink with some of the other actors and crew at their hotel. We would have to share a taxi back, and I had Mr Jones’s number on a scrap of paper. Just before midnight it looked as if the bar was shutting, so I went and telephoned Mr Jones to order our taxi. His number rang and rang and rang. I thought he must have been busy working, as it was now pub turning-out time. But when I returned to the bar, and told the barman that there was no reply from “Mr Jones the Taxi”, he looked at his watch and said, “Oh, you won’t get Mr Jones now. He takes tablets.” So we walked. The following day, feeling a bit jaded, as soon as lunchtime came around, Dafydd stuck another “livener” in our orange juice. I never did see the end result of our film, and my tough soldier performance. But a friend saw it, and I was told I looked rather sweet. Usually, when actors work in a large-budget made-for-television film, over the years they receive small cheques for repeats or sales abroad. I don’t think I ever received a residual cheque for Owain, Prince of Wales, so presumably, and deservedly, it sank without trace. Perhaps one day some screenwriter and film company will do justice to the Owain Glyndwˆr story, a great tale of intrigue, politics, double-dealing, love and war. Of course, as almost everyone knows, Glyndwˆr vanished, and nobody knows what became of the man. It was almost as if he deliberately created his own legend status. And there is no evidence that he was betrayed or assassinated, so a film ending remains open to interpretation. Now there’s an intriguing thought, and it’s just given me an idea!

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H E R I TA G E / T R E F TA D A E T H

In anticipation of Dy’ Sadwrn Barlysh GWYN GRIFFITHS

y’ Sadwrn Barlysh - I shall attempt to convey the local Welsh pronunciation for Barley Saturday, for me a day of pleasure and many, many memories. Traditionally it is held on the last Saturday of April although it has, rarely, been allowed to drift into the first Saturday in May. This year it will be on the 25th of April. It is the day when the crowds from my favourite corner of Wales, South Ceredigion and North Pembrokeshire, flock into the town of Cardigan.

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A farmer up in the Preseli hills once told me that anything on four legs made money while anything on four wheels took it away. As I watch this year’s parade I shall ponder on his words.

There I shall listen out for the Demetian dialect - the delicious Dyfedeg - that links together the people of these two counties, where the Welsh “o” turns into “w” and coed becomes cwêd and doe becomes dwê and oer becomes wˆer etc. Officially, it is the day to mark the end of the ploughing, the sowing and harrowing - although it was not always so. In the old days you did not sow your barley, the hardy “Cymro Bach” variety, before Dy’ Sadwrn Barlysh and the thorn was in flower in case you had a cold snap and the frost caused havoc with your crop. Now even sturdier crops have evolved, or maybe it’s just global warming, and anyone still growing barley in these parts will have done so before the day of celebrations.

This is the day when the farmers and breeders come to Cardigan to show the Cobs, the ponies, Shetlands even, and above all the magnificent shires - y ceffylau gwedd the big ploughing horses. Although these fine animals will not show many signs of having ever pulled a plough, these big docile animals are proud to step out decked in their ribbons. Nostalgia is as good as it ever was. My father ploughed with a pair of horses up to 1960. But that was further up in Cardiganshire and my old

school friend Raymond Osborne Jones tells me that the cut-off point for farming with horses in the Tregaron area was 1955, but down in Pembrokeshire I remember a farm between St Dogmael’s and Moylegrove using horses much later than that. I can never claim to have ploughed with a pair of horses, but I was allowed to use the harrow behind a pair of horses after my father had sown - by hand - the wheat, oats and … barley. Handling a plough and reins was a man’s work, with the harrow you had just the reins which a teenage schoolboy could just about manage. Dy’ Sadwrn Barlysh is a glorious homage to that era, when horses gave way to the Fordsons and Fergusons. The day the town of Cardigan stands still to recall a piece of passing history as the machines and animals come together for a parade epitomising more than any decade, the 1950s. A farmer up in the Preseli hills once told me that anything on four legs made money while anything on four wheels took it away. As I watch this year’s parade I shall ponder on his words. It is a sight to bring memories of the sounds and smells and tastes of those days flooding back. The sound of someone grinding the gearbox of a pre-synchromesh Fordson - y Fforden Fach - on a distant hillside. But we were still using horses and my mother would take tea or lunch out to my father in the field. The horses were left harnessed to the plough fidgeting as they tried to graze the hedge. Tea and bread and butter never tasted as good as when you sat there under the hedge on y dalar. There is no English word for talar - my dictionaries translate it as “headland in a field” some adding helpfully “in ploughing”. And the smell of the freshly ploughed earth in the warm clear sunshine. We had proper weather those days - so my memory tells me. My childhood was one when communities mucked in together. Every farm took its turn at potato planting, and we all went from one to the next. Shearing, peat

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cutting - I don’t suppose anyone does that anymore - the corn harvest, potato picking and threshing; half the fun was in the socialising. Technology has now taken over. The combine harvester at a stroke put an end to the corn harvest and the threshing. I wonder whether Don Morris, Cardigan Borough Surveyor, considered the social implications of Dy’ Sadwrn Barlysh when he and others got together to re-start this day of festivities in the 1950s after the war. As communal cooperation decreased days like Dy’ Sadwrn Barlysh became more important, farmers getting together in a way they do less of in these days. Perhaps it has become even more important in these days of tourism and the need for townspeople and incomers to see and experience some of the colour of rural life and catch a glimpse of traditions and a slice of recent social history recreated before their eyes. Dy’ Sadwrn Barlysh has had a new lease of life in recent years and I look forward especially to the parade starting at two o’clock on the afternoon, the shire horses and the cobs stepping out in style, the ponies and traps, the vintage cars and the old tractors. How I admired, stuck as I was with a pair of horses, the little Fordson, the Fordson Major, John Deere, Massey Harris. Then came the little grey Ferguson - y Ffergi Bach - with its hydraulic attachments, the hay mower and the little trailer for taking the churns out to the main road and milk lorry. The fitting of these attachments always meant much cursing and argument. I shall look forward to seeing them all and I wonder whether Geler Jones’s steam engine will still be there - a sight I remember from a long time ago. Whatever, I shall look in at Oriel Awen Teifi. The proprietor, Geraint James, promises a new exhibition by local artist Aneurin Jones and his son Meirion. Aneurin has drawn much inspiration from watching the farmers of Crymych and Cardigan. I am proud that one of his drawings adorns the cover of the fourth in my series of little anthologies of writings in the Demetian dialect. It’s Y Ddau Werinwr. Like talar, there is no English equivalent for gwerinwr. Peasant is the nearest word but that does no justice to these people. But peasant is a corruption of the French word paysan, a man of the land, a word conveying some of the cultural nobility and dignity of gwerinwr. I look forward to meet up again with some of Aneurin’s gwerinwyr and, as D. J. Williams once put it, to shake hands with old faces.

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Coleg

... Because the journey matters

Llanymddyfri

Llandovery

... Gan fod y siwrne’n bwysig

College

Come & Meet Us April 17th – April 18th – April 25th – May 8th – May 23rd –

Open Evening at the East India Club, London Entrance & Scholarship Examinations Open Morning from 10.00am Charity Golf Tournament & Open Evening at Machynys Peninsula Llandovery College Grand Charity Ball

Llandovery College offers An affordable, first class education with small class sizes and high pass rates. Superb facilities set in over 45 acres of beautiful grounds. Scholarships and bursaries at 11, 13 and Sixth Form. Daily school bus service bringing children from all over Wales. Packed weekend and extra-curricular programme with DofE, CCF and so much more. A strong musical and performing arts culture. International sporting honours for 24 pupils in 17 sports this year alone.

To visit us, for more information or to register for the events above, please contact Mrs. Bethan Charles-Davies, Registrar, Llandovery College, Carmarthenshire SA20 0EE 01550 723000 mail@llandoverycollege.com www.llandoverycollege.com

Patrick Thomas

The Celtic Cross and the Khatchkar

n the seventh century a Breton monk composed a life of St Samson, whose missionary journeys a couple of generations before had taken him from his native West Wales to Cornwall and ultimately Brittany. The author visited places connected with his subject’s life, even locating an old man who was Samson’s cousin’s nephew, from whom he gleaned both written and oral information. At one point the monk visited Trigg in Cornwall, where Samson had had one of his most spectacular successes, baptising a tribe of pagan idol-worshippers. The biographer found a standing stone on which the saint himself had carved the sign of the cross. Reverently the visitor traced with his own hand the marks made by the holy man. The conversion of pre-Christian sacred stones into crudely carved cross stones, and then more elaborately decorated high crosses and cross slabs was a highly significant development in the Celtic lands. Even now the characteristic Celtic cross which evolved from this process remains the central symbol of Christianity in the Celtic-speaking countries. The Church in Wales now has a simple, attractively drawn Celtic cross as its logo. Less happily, the Diocese of St Davids uses a rather peculiar ‘dancing’ Celtic cross, which is apparently supposed to convey a combination of dynamism and tradition. It is often pointed out that the characteristic shape of the Celtic cross has its origins in a decorative wreath of victory used by sculptors to strengthen the arms of a stone cross, helping to prevent them from being easily broken off. However the combination of cross and circle inevitably developed its own symbolic significance. The circle could be seen as the risen sun - and thus the risen Son of God on Easter morning - emphasising the idea of salvation and resurrection won through the cross. When Dominic Carmichael, our Lay Eucharistic Assistant, carved us a processional ‘Cross of Saint Teilo’ for Brechfa Church in the 1990s this was the symbolism that he used: behind the cross he set a circular disc on which the rays of the sun shone forth as a sign of new life and hope

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The Celtic cross became inextricably linked with the spirituality, art and selfexpression of our western fringe of Christendom.

beyond suffering and death. Other interpretations have also arisen. Some people have seen the circle as representing the world or creation, being healed and made whole through the power of the cross. However, the central purpose of the Celtic cross is that which Samson, the sixth century Welsh missionary, had in mind when he carved the sign of the cross on the standing stone in Cornwall: a recognition of God’s love expressed through the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ as a sign of hope for all humanity. The Celtic cross became inextricably linked with the spirituality, art and self-expression of our western fringe of Christendom. Meanwhile a fascinating parallel process took place between the Black Sea and the Caspian in Armenia, which, at the beginning of the fourth century, became the first country to recognise Christianity as its official religion. There the khatchkar (‘cross-stone’) has assumed an equally powerful significance in national religion and culture. Although the Armenians call their country Hayastan, an old proverb describes the country as Karastan (‘Land of Stones’). It is therefore hardly surprising that in Armenia, as in Britain, sacred stones played a significant part in pre-Christian culture. If we have our Côr y Cewri (Stonehenge), with its mysterious bluestones brought from the Preseli hills, the Armenians have Karahunj near Sisian in the mountainous region of Syunik. This extraordinary arrangement of stones, many of them with holes specially made through them, dates back to before 2000BC, and is generally thought to have been some sort of astronomical observatory. Even more evocative, however, are the ancient carved stones associated with springs and water sources high in the hills. These sacred objects are probably almost as old as Karahunj itself. Two Armenian scholars say that they go back to 2000BC, while a third dates them between 1500BC and 900BC. The fish-shaped standing stones are known as vishaps – vishap being the Armenian word for a dragon (dragons play as significant a part in

CELTIC CROSS

Armenian mythology as they do in that of our own country). The carvings on them vary, sometimes showing an ox or a bird or even occasionally a human figure. Often they have curved lines on them, which would seem to represent water. Ffynhonnau (springs) were of central importance in pre-Christian Welsh religion. Running water was a sign and a source of life itself. The same was true in Armenia. In both countries sacred springs were later absorbed into the Christian tradition and often linked to the legends of saints. Armenian vishap stones seem to have represented the spirit or divinity of a particular spring, if not the water goddess herself. Their purpose was presumably protective, ensuring that the spring would not dry up. Anyone who has quenched their thirst from an Armenian mountain spring during the scorching heat of the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s arid summer will realise how important it is that the ice-cold water continues to flow. Although there is no direct link between vishaps and khatchkars, the ancient dragon-stones established the concept of a sacred stone in the Armenian mind. More obvious ancestors of the khatchkars were the stelae or obelisks which were erected from the period of the Kingdom of Urartu (8th â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 7th centuries BC) onwards. These influenced the pattern of some of the earliest Armenian Christian monuments. High on a plateau amidst the mountains of northern Armenia is the beautiful church of Odzun. Armenian Christian tradition (which at times is as imaginative as our own) claims that St Thomas the Apostle visited the spot on his way to India, and that the church itself was

constructed at the beginning of the fourth century by King Trdat III, the first Christian king of Armenia, and dedicated by St Grigor Lusavorich (Gregory the Enlightener), the father figure of Armenian Christianity. More sober scholarship dates the original building to the sixth century. It was reconstructed in the eighth century using material from the earlier church. The simple sculpted crosses, surrounded by circles, set into the walls of the church at Odzun, are reminiscent of the designs of some of their early Welsh counterparts. I suspect, however, that they were almost certainly carved to commemorate the recovery of the True Cross from the Persians by the Emperor Heraclius and its return to Jerusalem in March 630. This was an event which caused enormous excitement in Armenia. The most spectacular monument at Odzun, however, is outside the church. Two pillars stand on a stepped plinth, framed by arches which support a protective roof. On them are carved a combination of Biblical scenes and figures linked to the conversion of Armenia. They include a depiction of King Trdat with the head of a wild boar. This was a God-sent affliction as punishment for his murder of the beautiful nun Hripsime and her companions. St Grigor Lusavorich later restored the suitably penitent monarch to his proper form. The Odzun pillars are not unique. Sirarpie Der Nersessian, the greatest authority on Armenian art, referred to at least seventy similar stones. Many of them have been reduced to fragments by the impact of earthquakes or the iconoclasm of invaders. Der Nersessian noted a curious similarity between the general design of these pillar monuments and those of Northumbrian panelled crosses. She recognised that there was no direct connection between the two, though other Armenian ARMENIAN KATCHKAR

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THE PILLARS OF ODZUN

scholars have sometimes been tempted to suggest a direct Armenian influence on some of the Irish high crosses. The pillars at Odzun date from the sixth or early seventh century: the period before the Arab invasions totally transformed the life of Armenia. The apparent triumph of the Cross with Heraclius’ defeat of the Zoroastrian Persians was overshadowed and obliterated by the explosion of the hosts of Islam from their heartland. In 640 an Arab army sacked the Armenian capital of Dvin. The Arab conquest had a direct impact on Armenian religious art. The sculpted pillars disappeared and when Christian monumental art reappeared towards the end of the ninth century it was in the form that quickly developed into characteristic Armenian khatchkars or cross-slabs. The earliest dated khatchkar comes from Garni, one of the most ancient royal sites in Armenia. It is an extremely simple cross carved on a stone slab and was erected by Queen Katranide in 879. Two years later a khatchkar from Vardenis already shows the details that would develop dramatically over ensuing centuries. Two fruits hang from stalks sprouting out of the top of the cross, while curved leaves curl up from a thicker stem that comes from its foot. The cross thus becomes the Tree of Life: the instrument of crucifixion and death is converted into a symbol of resurrection and regeneration. Over the centuries the designs became more intricate and complex. No two khatchkars were ever identical, though certain styles and patterns became associated with particular areas. The figure of Christ was not normally included on the khatchkar and at least one French scholar has seen this as a reflection of Armenian theology. This may have interesting implications for the theological interpretation of Celtic crosses, many of which, particularly in Wales, also avoid depiction of the crucified Christ. For a brief period in the thirteenth century, however, this tradition was broken with the production of several

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Amenaprkitch or ‘Saviour of All’ khatchkars with powerful and moving portrayals of the crucified Christ. One, dated 1273, still stands in its original position in the monastery of Haghbat in northern Armenia, another, sculpted six years later, has been moved to the garden of the cathedral of Holy Etchmiadzin, the centre of Armenian Christianity. Some have suggested that these remarkable monuments were a reaction to the suffering caused by the Mongol invasion of Armenia, others see them as visual aids which Armenian Christians used to teach their new overlords about the Christian faith, in the hope of winning them over to it. The most remarkable example of a khatchkar in the original style was created by the extraordinary miniaturist, architect and sculptor Momik in 1308 for his beautiful monastery at Noravank. The pattern carved out of stone is so fine that it resembles lace, and indeed it is uncertain whether Momik drew his inspiration from Armenian lace-makers or whether the lace-makers modelled their work on that of the sculptor. Momik is buried at Noravank, but the khatchkar that he carved as his own memorial is small and simple in the style of the very earliest cross-stones. He clearly wished to make the point that his masterpieces were created to God’s glory rather than his own. From this fourteenth century peak the khatchkar went into decline, with designs becoming rougher and cruder as the cultural, political and economic situation deteriorated. There was a brief renaissance in the sixteenth and seventeenth century at Old Julfa in Nakhichevan, but sadly almost all of the elegant khatchkars produced there have recently been destroyed by the Azeri authorities in an act of chauvinistic vandalism. During the Soviet period the khatchkar acquired a new significance. In the 1960s Armenian seminarians would make covert expeditions to the hills, uncovering fallen khatchkars and re-erecting them. The KGB condemned this as ‘an expression of religious nationalism’ and put a stop to it. Since Armenia regained its independence new khatchkars, many of them of remarkable artistic quality, have been erected, often as memorials to those killed in the struggle for Nagorno-Karabagh. In November 2007 Wales acquired its first Celtic khatchkar in the grounds of the Temple of Peace in Cardiff, though tragically it was vandalised on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day the following year. The Armenian khatchkar had a parallel development to the Celtic cross. Its imaginative use as a national religious symbol by modern Armenian artists should prompt us to re-examine ways in which we can creatively develop our own ancient Christian sign to express the identity and spirituality of twenty-first century Wales.

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ENVIRONMENT

A Welsh future for Biomass GUTO OWEN

nergy is the world’s biggest business. In Wales, we are almost all passive consumers of energy resources from across the globe, despite the plentiful natural energy resources available to us. Most of this imported energy is in the form of fossil fuel, now controversial for many reasons. The Sustainable Energy Co-operative recently established by Carmarthenshire Energy Agency (CEA) will develop a biomass fuel supply chain for its members and sell woodchip to energy markets in south west Wales. Biomass is the term for wood or other organic material which can be converted to energy in a renewable cycle. There is huge biomass potential in south west Wales in the form of forest and farm residues: thinning from woodland and hedgerow, wood waste and from the growing

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of crops. The Sustainable Energy Co-operative will convert this resource into woodchip producing heating and electricity fuel of the highest quality. A core principle of the co-operative is that 100% of supply will originate from local, sustainable sources. Anything else would constitute a variation of our current wasteful and polluting energy supply. The process is carbon neutral because the plants absorb carbon dioxide when growing and release an equivalent amount when converted to energy. Quality of product, security of supply and sustainable land management will be key to the success of the co-operative. A network of ‘treestations’ will be established across the area to which wood can be brought, processed and stored. Exploiting the bountiful natural

resources available in south west Wales for clean energy generation in balance with the environment. This co-operative model is ideal for rural economic development and for combating climate change. All along the supply chain, it has job creation potential - in farming, forestry, processing and energy supply. It also has large roll-out potential beyond Carmarthenshire. Others are already actively developing such operations in Wales and it is not difficult to see a pan-Wales supply chain being established over the next few years. Technologies are available which can process all forms of raw biomass resource into clean, efficient fuel – whether in the form of solid fuel like woodchip or as biogas. There’s nothing new in this. Many European countries have large, welldeveloped biomass industries which employ thousands and generate large amounts of energy while reducing carbon emissions. New technologies could see ultraefficient connections between rural energy production and its use in energy-hungry towns and cities. A recent National Grid study has estimated that 50% of the UK’s domestic heating could be supplied by biogas by 2020. A separate German study found that the EU could produce the biogas equivalent of all its Russian natural gas imports by 2020. A serious push in breakthrough technologies including energy from algae could even

surpass these impressive forecasts. In tandem with energy efficiency and other low carbon and renewable technologies, it’s possible to rein-in the juggernaut fossil fuel economy. Many parts of Wales suffer from fuel poverty and rural areas are still off-grid in huge swathes. These two factors serve to trap communities in costly fossil fuel dependency and stymie economic activity. When homes, councils, schools, hospitals and businesses are constantly struggling to pay energy bills at the expense of other needs and core services (bills may be coming down slightly but the trend is ever upwards), to look to our own energy resources is to turn this problem on its head and see energy as an income opportunity. Yes, it needs investment. But what surer bet is there than an investment in clean energy to drive economic recovery?

It offers the opportunity for a small corner of the world to decouple itself from the crazy goings-on in the volatile global energy market and seek energy independence. The Sustainable Energy Co-operative has identified thousands of tonnes of biomass resource which can be processed for woodchip in Carmarthenshire alone. Over 40 companies and individuals have expressed an interest in joining the co-operative and the organisation is very grateful to the Waterloo Foundation which has generously provided it with funding to act as a springboard for development. The Co-operative will motivate and enable Welsh landowners and farmers to embrace diversification into sustainably produced energy crops. Although, existing traditional Welsh woodland, managed correctly and sustainably, could supply the majority of the fuel required for

SUSTAINABLE ENERGY CO-OPERATIVE Based in Carmarthenshire for South West Wales A Growing Business

high-quality, locally sourced woodchip for energy generation in boilers and combined heat and power units. This approach would in addition enable significant carbon sequestration through the reforestation of Wales, also improving and securing wildlife habitat and landscape. The SUSTAINABLE ENERGY CO-OPERATIVE is now open for business and is keen to attract members from Carmarthenshire and south west Wales who want to share in these exciting opportunities. Contact GUTO OWEN:

CYDWEITHREDIAD YNNI CYNALIADWY O Sir Gâr ar gyfer De Orllewin Cymru Busnes sy’n Tyfu

Co-operative Benefits Farm and woodland suppliers, foresters, tree-surgeons and energy users: x x x x x

Access to bioenergy markets Save on energy costs or gain revenue from a fast expanding industry Become part of a guaranteed, high quality woodchip supply chain Pooling of equipment including chippers, storage & transport Renewable energy and environmental expertise

Guto Owen Sustainable Energy Co-operative M 07974 565421 E gutoowen@yahoo.com

T: 07974 565421 E: gutoowen@yahoo.com

The True Welsh Daffodil DAVID JONES

pringtime in Wales. And roadsides, fields and meadows within the principality are spectacularly carpeted in solid yellow drifts with the golden bloom that has become the nation’s emblematic flower - the daffodil. For generations, thousands of Welshmen and women all over the world have proudly sported the flower in their lapels to celebrate St David’s Day. Yet for all the patriotic pride in the daffodil, many will be unaware that there is in fact a separate species of the flower, unique to our country, that can lay claim to the title of the true Welsh daffodil. The Tenby Daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus obvillaris) is a distinct, dwarf, early flowering member of the narcissus family. It has a medium, smooth textured, uniformly brilliant yellow flower. Its beauty has long been recognised, indeed E.A. Bowles, reputed to be the most experienced and discerning of all daffodil connoisseurs declared it to be: ‘…the most perfect in proportion and texture of any deep yellow trumpet, and for close-up observation unlikely to be improved upon…’ A flower of some mystery, the exact origins of the Tenby Daffodil are uncertain. Down the centuries, scientific theory and colourful legend have vied with each other to account for the flower’s inexplicable appearance and limited range with-

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THE TENBY DAFFODIL - Narcissus pseudonarcissus obvillaris

in West Wales. The least likely, but perhaps the most charming explanation, dates back to the time of the Phoenicians. It tells how a ship from the fleet of the ancient seafaring race following a regular trade route was blown off course and sought shelter at Saundersfoot. There, the Phoenician captain was intrigued to see natives cooking over fires fuelled by anthracite. Realising the potential of the fossil fuel he returned the following year to barter a cargo of daffodil bulbs for it. Another tale relates that the flower was introduced into Wales by a colony of Flemings, who, following the orders of Henry I, settled in West Wales around 1106. Certainly, following an inundation of Flanders, large numbers of Flemings did arrive in England in the twelfth century and eventually settled in Pembrokeshire. According to Welsh chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis, they had: “...been sent by Henry I King of the English, to colonise the district...” The theory that the daffodil could have been introduced by these exiles found favour in some quarters, possibly because the land from which they hailed was famous for cultivated bulbs. It is however inconceivable that fighting men, forced to take

flight from their homeland would have considered daffodil bulbs essential items for enforced settlement in a foreign land. Perhaps an altogether more plausible explanation, tells that the introduction of the flower was at the hands of medieval French or Italian monks. Certainly, many religious houses were founded in Pembrokeshire and it is possible the monks brought the plant with them for both ornamental and herbalist purposes. Such a theory however does not provide a solution to the problem, for there has been no record of the Tenby Daffodil colonies occurring in France or Italy nor anywhere else for that matter. A further, altogether less romantic theory may possibly provide the answer to the origin of the flower. This suggests that it is a descendant of a variety introduced into the area that accidentally hybridised, flourished in local soil and weather conditions and eventually became the dominant species. Yet even this theory does not provide a totally satisfactory answer and perhaps its true origins will forever remain shrouded by the mists of time. The first mention of the flower appears to have been made in botanist R.A. Salisbury’s Prodomus in Stirpium in Horto Ad Chapel

Finally, so great did the predation become that by the turn of the century few wild specimens remained. Today, as a legacy of the past, the Tenby Daffodil is regarded as all but extinct in the wild.

Allerton Vigentium of 1796 and it was Salisbury who finally named the flower Narcissus pseudonarcissus obvillaris. As to what the eighteenth century botanist meant by the

name ‘obvallaris’ is unclear. Famed Welsh botanist T.B. Rhys believed it was derived from a Latin word: “which means ‘well protected’, and which therefore describes how the essential organs of the flower are protected by its handsome and sturdy crown.” There has also been some confusion about the native range of N. Obvallaris. Certainly its stronghold has traditionally been recognised as fields in and around Tenby. However it has also been recorded in Carmarthenshire and isolated sites in Shropshire, the Isle of Wight and Gorey, County Wexford, Ireland. The origin of the popular name ‘Tenby Daffodil’ too has been the subject of much speculation. According to one theory, it was the name commonly used by Covent Garden porters but it seems most likely it was first coined by a Tenby nurseryman by the name of Shaw who sold huge quantities to bulb wholesalers in London. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Tenby Daffodils were witnessed in profusion in the fields

around the town from which it took its name. However the increasing horticultural trade of the time saw truck loads of the bulbs lifted and transported to London for sale at Covent Garden. According to one account, Shaw: “was enabled to engage a staff of collectors who scoured the greater part of South Pembrokeshire for several seasons in a vigorous attempt to meet the phenomenal demand.” Commenting of the eventual plight of the special daffodil, Tenby headmaster, T.B. Rhys wrote: “…As a rule, the farmers on whose land they grew regarded them as little better than weeds and readily parted with them for a trifle and sometimes for nothing…’ Nurseryman Shaw though did a roaring trade in the bulbs and his men: “as a result of three days excursion, often brought him a heaped cart load, which he sold for £160 or more. So well did he keep his secret that he had a complete monopoly of the trade until the supply was practically exhausted.” Finally, so great did the predation become that by the turn of the century few wild specimens remained. Today, as a legacy of the past, the Tenby Daffodil is regarded as all but extinct in the wild. It does however continue to survive, albeit as a cultivated bloom, and can be seen on roadsides and embankments of its native West Wales. At springtime, it can witnessed in many village hedgebanks between Meidrim and Narbeth, near houses and churchyards that border the A478 Cardigan to Aberaeron highway and on approach roads and Castle Hill in Tenby. The bulb of the true Welsh daffodil is also now commonly available from horticultural suppliers and has become increasingly popular with gardeners in recent years.

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Literature Spirit of Place

Founded on faith CATRIN ROGERS

quarter of a mile before you arrive at Llanfyllin, travelling north on the A490 which snakes through Montgomeryshire from Welshpool, you pass a remarkable sight on your right. The Union Workhouse is a large, magnificent stone building that gives little visual indication of its grim past. It was built in 1838, four years after the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed. Parishes were forced to group together and build workhouses rather than offer outside relief, institutions now legendary for the harsh, degrading conditions in which their inmates lived.The Llanfyllin Union Workhouse was no different. Parents were separated from their children, inmates were given very little food, wore distinctive uniforms and were severely disciplined. But this monument to a cruel and unjust system - which somehow lasted until 1930 - bears no relation to the lively, inspirational place Llanfyllin would later become. It is a deceptively small town. The population is little more than 1,400,

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but its history has made it the scene of many religious milestones in Wales. Its name derives from the seventh century bishop Saint Moling, who arrived from Ireland and set up the Llan. It is said he was the first person to perform Holy Baptisms in Wales, spending so much time immersing his parishioners in water that he became known as ‘Sant Mewn Llyn’ (Saint in the Lake), which later became Sant Myllin. He died in 696, and the well where he performed his ritual can still be seen, on Coed Llan Lane. One of the most significant figures in Welsh religious history, William Morgan, who translated the Bible into Welsh from Greek and Hebrew, was rector of St Myllin’s parish church (among others) from 1579 until 1601. It was during this time that his Beibl was published, in 1588, marking the birth of a new phase in Welsh literature. Then, exactly 1100 years after St Myllin’s death, religion took another step forward in Llanfyllin. On Easter Monday in 1796, a 19-year-old named Ann Griffiths from nearby Llanfihangel yng Ngwynfa, visited Llanfyllin’s Easter Fair. She overheard the Reverend Benjamin Jones of Pwllheli preach outside a pub - the Methodist revival was by then in full

It is said that he spent so much time immersing his parishioners in water that he became known as ‘Sant Mewn Llyn’ which became Sant Myllin swing - and was so moved by his words, that she converted from the Anglican church. Ann went on to become a hymnwriter and poet of international significance - a feat achieved in only ten years, before she died after childbirth at the age of 29. The Welsh verses of Cwm Rhondda (“Wele’n sefyll rhwng y myrtwydd/Wrthrych teilwng o’m holl fryd…”) are among her celebrated works. Ever since Llanfyllin was granted its charter and became a market town in 1293, it has shown itself to be as spirited and industrious a town as you’ll find anywhere in mid Wales, and in the last century, the © CARL

RYAN

town’s cultural reputation has exceeded its spiritual side. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Workhouse’s more recent history. The popular entertainer Ryan Davies was one of the town’s muchloved sons. © MARI

STERLING

RYAN

His family moved there when he was ten years old, and his father W. J. Davies became a warden at the Workhouse - by then a home for the elderly. Ryan attended the local school, and was a huge hit at its eisteddfodau - once miming to the Barber of Seville while waving a cutthroat razor. The opera singer Elizabeth Vaughan was a classmate, so the school of forty pupils was always well entertained. That era, you might say, marked the beginning of Llanfyllin’s cultural

awakening. Ryan is said to have brought his gift for entertainment home to the Workhouse on many occasions, so it’s fitting that the building should, today, be the town’s cultural landmark. The Llanfyllin Workhouse, as the building is now known, has housed the immensely popular annual Workhouse Festival since 2004, and last year opened its doors as the town’s arts, business and community centre. There is an annual Festival of Music at St Myllin’s Church, and an Agricultural and Horticultural Show. The Workhouse Gallery was opened in November this year, showing work by local artists and others from further afield. The Workhouse will soon even offer accommodation, when the bunkhouse it has won funding to build is completed. It’s all a far cry from the building’s Dickensian past, but a wonderful symbol of how an old-fashioned town with a rich history can look to the future.

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luned Phillips was the only woman to win the Crown at the National Eisteddfod twice. Born at Cenarth in Cardiganshire in 1914, she led a bohemian life in London and Paris, where she met Picasso and Edith Piaf, and wrote a biography of the poet Dewi Emrys. Her only volume of poetry, Cerddi Glyn-y-Mel (1985), includes a poem about a Welsh soldier fighting in the British army and a soldier of Welsh descent in the Argentinian army during the Falklands war. Her autobiography, The Reluctant Redhead, was published in 2007. She died in Carmarthen on 10 January 2009.

areth Alban Davies, former Professor of Spanish at Leeds University, was born at Tonpentre in the Rhondda valley, in 1926. In the 1940s he served as a Bevin Boy in the pits of south Wales. Educated at The Queen's College, Oxford, he was a distinguished Hispanicist; he also wrote essays and four volumes of poetry in Welsh. He was an authority on the Spanish poet Lorca. Among his books was a study of Owen Jones, the architect and designer of the Crystal palace in London. Since 1986 Gareth and his wife Caryl, with whom he translated Gide's novel La Symphonie Pastorale into Welsh, had made their home at Llangwyryfon in Ceredigion. He died in Aberystwyth on 9 February 2009.

neirin M. Thomas, Director of the Welsh Arts Council from 1966 to 1984, was a native of Cilybebyll near Pontardawe in 1921. He was the Arts Council's chief executive during what now seems like a golden age when its grant increased substantially and it played a central part in the cultural life of the nation. He died at St Hilary in the Vale of Glamorgan on 16 January 2009.

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T. Llew Jones 1915 - 2009 Poet and prolific writer of Welsh children’s books MEIC STEPHENS

. Llew Jones wrote some of the best-loved children’s books in the Welsh language. Long before Roald Dahl and J. K. Rowling, he enjoyed cult status among young readers in Wales, turning out some eighty books that were snapped up for their exciting yarns, thumping rhymes and sheer entertainment value. As both poet and prose-writer, he seemed to know instinctively what children like to read and, with no thought for adult taste or the approval of literary critics, provided them with their favourite reading, whether adventure stories, folk-tales, whodunits, magic realism, historical romances, ghost-stories or humorous verse. There is no school in Wales that does not have his books on its library shelves and hardly one he did not visit, often to the rapturous reception more usually reserved for pop-singers. He set such store by the response of his young readers that on one famous occasion, having been awarded the prestigious Tir na nOg Prize for his Tân ar y Comin (1975), a story about gypsies, he was prepared to bite the hand of the adjudicators because they had announced that, in their opinion, the book was good only in parts. ‘This prize has somewhat tarnished my reputation,’ he told them pointedly. ‘It was grudgingly given and I am accepting it in the same spirit. You are grown-up readers with jaded appetites, but the many thousands of children who have enjoyed my book have better judgement

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and theirs is the only one that matters.’ His interest in folklore provided him with themes for several of his best books, including novels about the pirate Bartholmew Roberts, known in Welsh tradition as Black Bart, and Siôn Cwilt, a smuggler who kept his contraband in caves on the wild coast of Cardiganshire in the eighteenth century. But his prose masterpiece is a trilogy about Twm Siôn Catti, the real-life highwayman who has a place in the hearts of Welsh children similar to Dick Turpin’s among young English readers: Y Ffordd Beryglus (1963), Ymysg Lladron (1965) and Dial o’r Diwedd (1968). These novels are enjoyed by adult readers for their polished style and gripping plots. Born at Pentre - Cwrt in Carmarthenshire in 1915, T. Llew Jones, a weaver’s son, belonged to a hardy breed of small farmers and sailors who had worked the land and gone to sea for generations. His interest in story-telling was awoken when, at the age of seven, as reward for good behaviour, he was allowed to listen to his headmaster begin reading a tale about a man who left his infant child with the keeper of a toll-gate and then disappeared into the night. Since, on account of some misdemeanour, he was not allowed to hear the next episode, T. Llew Jones never discovered what happened to man or child, and for years thereafter wondered what had become of them. The unfinished narrative troubled him until, in 1973, he was able to write the story

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF GWASG GOMER

from beginning to end as Un Noson Dywyll perhaps his finest novel. A voracious reader by the time he entered the Grammar School at Llandysul (he once told me that, before leaving primary school, he had read everything in the classroom cupboard, including The Life of Gladstone), he began writing a novel in English about a hard-hearted squire whom he called Enoch Allstone, but abandoned it after a friend who had read the first few pages complained that he knew exactly how it would end. A second attempt at writing a story during an English lesson came to nought when the teacher thought it so good that he accused the boy of plagiarism and caned him for it; this incident persuaded him that it was more important for primary school children to read than it was for them to be given exercises in ‘creative writing’, and he often said so. Having left school at the age of 16, but unable to train for Anglican orders on account of his father’s death and the need to supplement the family income, T.Llew Jones spent the next few years doing what manual work he could find in the vicinity of his home. His marriage in 1940 to one of the daughters of

Cilie - a remarkable group of country poets renowned in Welsh literary circles - proved the making of him, for it brought him into close contact with poets like Isfoel, Alun Cilie and Dic Jones, with whom he learned his craft in bardic contention, though not before he was called up (on his wedding day) and sent to serve with the RAF, and later the Army, in Egypt and Italy. From camp he began sending home poems which his wife passed on to Dewi Emrys, editor of a poetry column in the weekly paper Y Cymro. At the same time he began learning chess, a game at which he and his younger son, Iolo, represented Wales in the Chess Olympiads and about which they wrote a book together. His elder son, Emyr Llewelyn, born while his father was overseas in 1941, is among the most seasoned of Welsh-language militants. He has been fined many times and, in 1963, received a year’s gaol sentence for his part in sabotage at the site of the Tryweryn reservoir in Meirionnydd. Again in 2000 he was imprisoned for a week after refusing to pay his licence fee as part of the campaign to persuade BBC Cymru and S4C to ban English in their programmes. T. Llew Jones backed his son in all his bruising confrontations with the law, sharing his determination to defend the Welsh-speaking communities of west Wales from the influx of English settlers. On demobilisation in 1946, T. Llew Jones underwent a year’s fasttrack training as a teacher in Cardiff and soon afterwards took up a headmaster’s post at the primary school in Tre-groes in Cardiganshire. It was there he began publishing his short stories, most of which he had written in order to supplement his meagre salary. In 1958, having moved to Coed-y-bryn, near Llandysul, he

won the Chair at the National Eisteddfod with a poem on the theme ‘Caerleon-on-Usk’, the reputed site of King Arthur’s court. The poem was praised by the adjudicators for its mastery of traditional prosody and for its relevance to contemporary Wales; this feat he repeated in the year following with a poem entitled ‘Y Dringwr’. The best of his poems for adults are to be found in Swˆn y Malu (1967) and Canu’n Iach! (1987). Although he was never asked to become Archdruid, as he might have expected after winning the Chair twice, T. Llew Jones played a prominent part in maintaining the Welsh Rule at the National Eisteddfod against those who were calling for it to be slackened in the late 1970s so that some use could be made of English in competitions and concerts. He also proved a redoubtable champion of standard literary Welsh, deploring any attempt by the Welsh Books Council and the Welsh Joint Education Committee to promote a simplified version for the sake of those learning the language. For him, the vigorous speech of his boyhood would always be good enough as the medium for his writing. In his literary precepts he was conservative, resisting any attempt to tinker with the traditional rules of prosody and, as Chairman of Cymdeithas Cerdd Dafod, the society for poets writing, was able to exert an avuncular influence on younger bloods calling for change. He preferred to contribute poems, reviews and articles to Y Cardi, the county’s homespun magazine, than to the journals of Academe. In 1979 he caused a stir among more advanced bivouacs on the Welsh literary front by castigating, in a foreword to an anthology he had edited, what he considered to be ‘difficult poetry’, by which he meant

writing that was ‘capable of more than one interpretation’. In the same year he refused to become a member of the Welsh Academy, the national association of writers in Wales, on the grounds that he did not believe writers should form ‘cliques’ and, anyway, he thought the invitation had come too late. Ultra-sensitive to criticism, especially when it came from people who were not themselves writers, T. Llew could be prickly towards those who failed to pay him his full meed of praise. Nor was he very keen to see his work translated into English, relenting only once to let the poet Gillian Clarke make, under the title One Moonlit Night, a version of his book Lleuad yn Olau (1989), a collection of folk-tales. He gave a typically spirited account of his own life in his autobiography, Fy Mhobl I (2002). T. Llew Jones enjoyed his reputation as the foremost children’s writer in Wales but only on his own terms. The University of Wales awarded him an honorary MA in 1977, but he took more pleasure in appearing as Day President at the Urdd Gobaith Cymru Eisteddfod in 1981. During his speech, to his great delight, children swarmed onto the stage with placards illustrating the titles of his many books, to thunderous applause and leaving not a dry eye in the pavilion. He, in turn, paid affectionate tribute to his young fans because ‘they read with their hearts’ and spoke of his belief that, like Peter Pan, he had inside him ‘a child who refused to grow up or ever grow old’. Thomas Llewelyn Jones, poet and children’s writer: born Pentre-cwrt, Carmarthenshire, 11 October 1915; married 1940 Margaret Jones (died 2002, two sons); died Pontgarreg, Ceredigion, 9 January 2009. This obituary first appeared in THE INDEPENDENT.

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Wales’s Publishers:

Cinnamon Press MALCOLM BALLIN

talks to Jan and Mike Fortune-Wood

innamon Press is the new kid on the Welsh publishing block, less than three years old, founded and run by Jan Fortune-Wood and her husband, Mike. Based at their home, near Blaenau Ffestiniog, the firm hit its first fifty books in April 2008 and aims to exceed one hundred publications by April 2010. Cinnamon Press is a genuine family business. Jan manages the publishing processes on a pressurised full-time basis, while also homeeducating the youngest of their four children. Mike is an economist by training (working as a consultant in home education) but involves himself in running the firm’s extensive web site and in designing its covers, featuring their distinctive pale blue background with a cinnamon band on the back and the spine. Their son, Rowan, currently working for an MA in creative writing, also helps out in the business. There is some part-time assistance with proof reading. The books carry the strapline ‘Independent Innovative International’ and the firm strives to reflect these ambitions. Jan Fortune-Wood has an unusual career history. She studied theology at Cambridge, did a Doctorate in feminist theology, and started a career as a Church of England vicar. However, Jan had to retire after a series of terrifying work-place assaults. After an MA in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan, Blue Chrome published her first novel, A Good Life, in 2006. Her traumatic experiences in the church are explored in her 2008 prose-poetry sequence, Stale

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Bread and Miracles. Jan and Mike have now developed Cinnamon to a point where it ‘more or less’ provides the family with a living. Their poetry magazine Coffee House Poetry, originally produced almost as a form of ‘typewriter art’, was merged in February 2007 with the fifty-year old magazine, Envoi, following the retirement of Roger Elkin, Envoi’s long-serving editor. Under the Cinnamon imprint, Envoi celebrated its 150th issue in June 2008. The ‘Independent’ element in Cinnamon’s profile is therefore firmly established. The ‘Innovative’ aspect, celebrated on its covers, depends on a preference for being prepared to take on ‘risky’ projects, often experimental in character, sometimes originated by younger writers feeling their way or by experienced people who are moving into new territory. A good example is Cinnamon’s handling of Meic Stephens’s first novel, Yeah, Dai Dando, launched in the Wales Millennium Centre in September 2008 and identified as Waterstone’s Welsh Book of the Month. This deploys a stream of consciousness mode at times, when it is exploring the interior life of its hero, a sexy lad from Pontypridd with five GCSEs, a clerical job in a Cardiff Building Society, living in a grotty flat in Llandaff North. Despite its author’s long literary career it could well be that some other publishers would have been uncomfortable with this assured modernist departure. Threats by the organisation Christian Voice to disrupt a November 2008 signing event for Patrick Jones’s collection, Darkness is Where the Stars Are, led to

Waterstone’s cancelling the event. The attempt to censor this controversial book of poems has actually ensured considerable UK wide publicity for it. Jan Fortune-Wood offers a fuller service to writers than is the case with many publishers in Wales, including copy editing, proof reading and creative editing. This unusual extent of collaborative effort does mean, however, that each book can become a major project, entailing sometimes a six to nine month’s workload. This is part of the high price of independence and innovation on this scale. It means that, at present, as the web site makes clear, the firm has enough commissions to take it to 2010 and cannot cope with further submissions for the time being. Cinnamon are, at this point in their history, content with modest print runs, maybe up to a thousand for a novel or around five hundred for books of poetry. However, Bill Greenwell’s poem, Impossible Objects, which was short-listed for the Forward Prize has sold more than seven hundred copies. The Press’s readership is envisaged as ‘small and literary’, the age profile very variable, with a majority of younger people although others, especially the longestablished readers of Envoi, are substantially older. The ‘International’ part of the strap-line is served at present by ‘a trickle of books’ sold overseas, especially in New Zealand, Macao, South Africa, the United States and Finland. Cinnamon aims in the longer run to have about a third of its customers in Wales, a third in the rest of the UK and Ireland and eventually another third overseas. It publishes in English and has no present intention of working in the Welsh language. Cinnamon Press serves a great variety of writers. Many have links with academia, especially with English departments and schools of

creative writing. Writers like Rhys Trimble and Richard Marggraf Turley (winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize and author of The Fossil Box) are in their thirties; others such as Claire Potter (Spilling Histories), Holly Howitt (Dinner Time: a collection of ‘microfiction’) and Kate North (Eva Shell) are even younger. Herbert Williams is another mature writer who has turned to Cinnamon for his new novel, Marionettes, a further departure into new territory. New titles include the long narrative poem An Elusive State: entering alChwm by Steve Griffiths, which copes with the imagination and deconstruction of a utopian world, merging the writer’s experiences of Granada and Anglesey. There is a new novel, TAG [Talented and Gifted], by Stephen May: formerly the director of Arvon’s Ted Hughes Centre in Lumb near Heptonstall, crossing between perceptions of Wales and England, youth and middle age, exploring the condition of being ‘gifted’. Cinnamon’s authors appear to remain loyal to the imprint, maybe because they receive such dedicated editorial assistance. Cinnamon Press’s web site, largely

managed by Mike Fortune-Wood, is its main marketing tool. It is unusually comprehensive. As well as all the normal facilities (allowing direct purchases from poetry, fiction and nonfiction lists; competitions, events, and information on submissions) it has more experimental sections on cross-genre, ‘micro-fiction’, and prose poetry. There is a regular newsletter, a dedicated section for Envoi, and a blog, The current newsletter advertises readings in Bedford, Hoxton, Bangor and Cardiff. The section for You Tube shows video clips from readings and an intriguing ‘Second Life’ facility allows entry into a virtual world with scheduled readings from around the world. The firm’s marketing effort also includes energetic launches of new publications, usually organised in conjunction with authors and held in their own local territories. The launch of Sue Richardson’s poetry collection, Creatures of the Intertidal Zone, attracted about a hundred and twenty people to the Norwegian Church at Cardiff Bay. An attendance around seventy would be considered good, but on occasions, numbers can fall well below these levels. Launches

have been held around the United Kingdom, often in major bookshops, such as Waterstone’s, Borders or Heffers, in London, Oxford and Cambridge as well as throughout Wales. Cinnamon Press represents an interesting new addition to the range of publishers in Wales. It is new, selfconfident and determined to be experimental. It has a high degree of devotion to its authors and it gives them a de-luxe service, especially considering the restraints of a tightly manned family business. Cinnamon works hard at the promotion of its authors. It can fairly claim to be both ‘Independent’ and to be ‘Innovative’, though its genuine ambitions to be ‘International’ have yet to be fully realised. It may well be necessary for Cinnamon Press to expand beyond its present two-person band in order to maintain such a substantial presence and enlarge its scope. But the energies of its founders have already launched it into the market in a formidable way and the scale of its efforts to establish itself outside Wales compares well with other Welsh publishing houses that have been covered earlier in this series.

Poor Tom: a distant tribute to the author of Twm Shôn Catti

belonged to ‘the late Major Roteley’ (a veteran of Trafalgar, no less), where their victim lived on the ground floor. This was in World’s End, a tangled knot of noisome streets and alleyways neighbouring the gasworks, railway yards and Tawe wharfs of old Swansea. For the noseless one it must indeed have seemed the end of the world. Closer investigation by Yorath and later by Mr Dunn, the superintendent of police, disclosed the misery of the old man’s existence. It also revealed that he was no common down and out, for in the pitiful squalor of his room, where there was ‘scarcely a vestige of furniture’,

they discovered mouldering heaps of books and manuscripts. He was Prichard, the writer, author of Twm Shôn Catti, acclaimed by some as ‘the first Welsh novel’. Seeing a worthy cause, The Cambrian got up a subscription and formed a committee of locals with literary interests to save him. It was remarkably success-

SAM ADAMS

n November 1861, The Cambrian, that splendid nineteenth century Swansea weekly newspaper, told its readers that an old man, a skeletal figure with no nose, had been seen by ‘W. Yorath’ in a terrible plight, baited by a gang of boys and girls. The young ruffians were hurling stones at the windows and door of a cottage that had

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ful. Enough money rolled in to clean the hovel, buy furniture, supply food and coals for a fire, and pay a maid to call daily and see to his needs. Prichard, weeping with gratitude, sold his copyrights, including that of an enlarged edition of his novel, to Mr William Morris, chairman of the aid committee. He was 70, frail, gaunt and unprepossessing, his wax nose held in place by spectacles, but with the tribulations of authorship behind him, and warmth, food and comfort guaranteed, things were definitely looking up. Five weeks later he was dead, burned in his own fire. There was money enough to afford him a proper burial in Danygraig Cemetery, on a hill overlooking Swansea Bay. Thomas Prichard was born in Builth in 1790 and as a boy lived on a farm ‘Bryn Du’, high on a ridge overlooking Sennybridge. When still young he was wrenched from rural Powys and transposed to London, where, eventually, he had a theatrical career. He first appears as a writer with a poem in the June 1820 number of a magazine called The Cambro-Briton in the guise of ‘Jeffery Llewelyn’, a name he borrowed from the curate of the church at Sennybridge, and liked so much that he incorporated it with his own: on the title page of his first pamphlet of poems My Lowly Love (1822) his name appears as Thomas Jeffery Llewelyn Prichard. Thereafter he ditched plain Tom for ‘Llewelyn’, which presumably seemed more Welsh, more romantic, more impressive. By 1823/4 he had enough mostly lamentable narrative poems on Welsh subjects to fill a stout volume, Welsh Minstrelsy, which he brought back to Wales to sell by subscription and door-todoor. In 1826 he married Naomi James, a teenager from Hereford.

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Their first child, Tydvil Nest, was born a few months later. They settled first in Builth, but soon after moved to Aberystwyth. There, in 1828, Prichard brought out Twm Shôn Catti. He had great expectations of the book, which combined picaresque adventures based on old folk tales about Twm with satiric observations on the gentry, English landowners in particular, who stole from and abused the Welsh peasantry. Despite its lack of sophistication, it enjoyed considerable popular and critical success. Only two years later, however, Prichard was begging a handout from his one steadfast friend, the Revd William Jenkins Rees, Rector of Cascob. Thereafter plans unravelled, manuscripts got lost at printers, great projects foundered. He brought a growing family back to Builth, where he had a shop or market stall, and set about rewriting and enlarging his novel. But when that appeared in 1839, it was ‘printed for E. Poole’, who may have been a relative. Much of Prichard’s story must be the subject of speculation and it is not entirely absurd to suggest that whatever profit came of the second edition of Twm Shôn Catti was intended to support Naomi and the children, for at this point he disappeared from Builth and took to the road as an actor once more. Actors who lose limbs (like Sarah Bernhardt on one leg) win plaudits from audiences, but was there ever a successful actor without a nose? Prichard claimed to have lost his in a fencing match – and perhaps he did, but again one might speculate. Anyway, without a nose (and with the help of a fine library at the rectory in Cascob), he began writing Heroines of Welsh History, which he visualised as career peak and pension. He seems to have spent some time also at the library of Llanover

Hall, but fell out catastrophically with Lady Llanover, who might otherwise have been an important ally. When the book was published in 1854, its sick and aging author tramped the streets of industrial south Wales trying vainly to sell it. He did not return to his family (Naomi had died in 1848), but settled in Swansea, where things simply went from bad to worse. It is just possible that Prichard would have lived longer if he hadn’t been rescued by the combined efforts of a Good Samaritan and The Cambrian. But then, had he survived to expire alone and unrecognised, as he must soon have done, for, when found, he was sick and, literally, starving, his remains would have been tumbled into a pauper’s grave and we would certainly have known less about him than we do now. As it is, we are well informed about events surrounding his death (far better than any other part of his life), and the few known facts about him seem to have fallen into place from the perspective of those final days in World’s End.

Bwystfilod Rheibus Robyn Léwis, (Gwasg y Bwthyn, £9.95) ALWYN EVANS

t takes a pretty different type of person to join Plaid Cymru as a schoolboy, defect to the Labour party and become their candidate at the age of 26, rejoin Plaid Cymru (passing Elystan Morgan going in the opposite direction), stand again, this time for Plaid in the 1970 election, laying foundations for Dafydd Wigley’s subsequent victory - and

then leave Plaid again because Eleanor Wigley accepted the OBE. But then, Robyn Léwis has always been a bit of a maverick, and this autobiography does nothing to change that perception. What we have here is a quirky self-portrait of this extremely talented, complex, and always controversial man. Best known to Western Mail and Daily Post readers as an inveterate letter-writer often propounding ‘extreme’ arguments many of which must be tongue in cheek - he still manages to irritate and amuse in equal measure. He is not afraid to tell a story against himself, for example, being prosecuted while a student for driving off the Swansea University bus. Overall, however, his writing tends at times to be self-promoting, and he rejoices in quoting examples of his quickness of thought and riposte. But then, he does have a great deal going for him: author of about twenty books; fluent in French; for many years a local and national newspaper and magazine columnist; regular broadcaster; politician; Archdruid; Literature Medal winner, as well as solicitor, deputy district judge, and well after he retired, a barrister. This book is a timely reminder to us also of the debt the Welsh language owes him for his three increasingly monumental dictionaries of the Law, which have been his preoccupation for the past forty years. Without the regularising of terminology that his efforts provide, the use of Welsh in the Senedd’s

law-making would have been that much harder, and its usage in court much less. Indeed, the constant themes that come out most strongly are his love for the language, and his love of his ‘milltir sgwâr’ of the Llyˆn peninsula. Though he writes about virtually every office he has ever held (even a two-year period as the Nefyn Show secretary), he says relatively little about his period as Archdruid, despite being the first to be openly elected by the Gorsedd of Bards to that position. One would have expected more on the internal politics of that election, and back-stage incidents in that august body. His only real comment is to include Hywel Teifi Edwards’s reference to his period of office (in a Cambria review of his book A Fu Heddwch?) as ‘flashes of inspired daftness’. It is typical of the man that he appears to regard this description as a compliment. His observations on such matters as “No win; no fee” lawyers, or deficiencies in the Legal Aid system are always trenchant. The description of George Thomas’s autobiography as ‘ffuantus’ (hypocritical, or dissembling) strikes a chord with many whose memory is of George the politician, rather than the admirable hospice service that bears his name. Robyn Léwis has always been a republican, and an antiRoyalist - writing about the Investiture, he christens Prince Charles ‘the Pretender’. In one or two cases his memory seems selective; for instance, he remembers addressing the ‘first public meeting of the newly formed Cymdeithas yr Iaith…’ in 1967 five years after the date of its actual formation. His frequent role in defending protesting law-breakers, and his support of more recent pressure groups such as Cymuned and Cyfeillion Llyˆn attest to what

he himself stresses, that he is on the cultural and language side of the nationalist movement. The second half of the book is less cohesive than accounts of his earlier life. But maybe that’s one of the features of any autobiography, where one’s recent history is still ‘work in progress’. Nevertheless, the titbits he offers, such as why he wears a white poppy, or his memories of R S Thomas, are fascinating. It is clear from this volume, too, that his friends locally and the common people of Llyˆn are as important to him as the public figures of Wales, whose names he drops so frequently.

The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum Penny Simpson, (Alcemi, £9.99) PETER FINCH

en Deighton wrote his nineteen-sixties cold war thriller, Funeral In Berlin, allegedly without ever visiting that city. He read the histories, sent a researcher, made a lot up. Writers are supposed to do that, of course. Create. Penny Simpson, however, whose first novel The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum is set largely in the same city, has left nothing to chance. Using an Arts Council travel grant, she did her fact-find-

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ing firsthand on the German streets. And it shows. Her book is as dense as a Russian novel with similar unfamiliar nomenclature and hard-to-pronounce names. Purimspiel, Eislebenstrasse, Scheuenviertel, Nollendorfplatz, Akademierstrasse. This layer of Germanic particulars lends the writing a credible authenticity. Esther Rosenbaum, the hero, is a Jewish giantess. Seven feet tall, thin as a rake, given to wearing men’s suits and cooking wherever she goes, she moves from the ghetto in Augsburg, where her parents die in a black-market insurance scam, to Berlin. There she takes up a job as head chef at Schorn’s celebrated (although invented) restaurant. In the kitchens she creates magic-realist dishes layered with Jewish folk inventiveness. They make a fortune for the establishment’s owner, the black marketeer Leon Wolf. Everyone is always eating. The book is a novel driven by food. Rosenbaum cooks her life, her loves, her Jewish sense of place and the moving fickleness of time into all her dishes. Hare-in-a-Drum, Wolf ’s Pig Nose, Heart-of-a-Deer, Frank’s Apfelkichen, Clock Cakes, Lott’s Pear Tree Cake and bowls of Kisses-of-Hope and Pen Nib Hearts. She is for ever researching new recipes and rehashing old ones. Giving her best away to the needy at soup kitchens. Making presents of dishes for friends. Food as creativity, as art. At times it’s hard to see where the fiction ends and the stomach begins. Around her the stark, pre-War world of brown-shirt Germany shudders and shakes its Nationalist Socialist Aryan-pure fists. Rosenbaum’s group of close friends cover themselves in culture. They star in the plays of Bertold Brecht, make films for Fritz Lang, write

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their own. They paint and sculpt. They compose and sing. It’s a bohemia that fulfils. The risk is that some Nazi will step in and smash it all up. And this, inevitably, is what finally happens. Postwar the characters who are left alive gather in the burned-out Berlin bomb site that was once Schorn’s to start again. An al-fresco kitchen. Chef ’s hat made out of sackcloth. Bowls of Die Suppe Rosenbaum. The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum marks new ground for Welsh fiction in English. Not one mention of our tiny country. Instead a supremely entertaining, often moving, fantastic roll through European history.

Llyˆn Anthology Edited by Dewi Roberts (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch £7.50) JOHN IDRIS JONES

y Taid would drive me to Cricieth, park facing the sea, and talk about y bobol a’i hanes. It seemed that out there, the other side of the castle, lived bobol tlawd. My later experience of Llyˆn, the wind-torn land, small farms with sod-built walls, low-roof buildings, seemed to confirm this. The Victorian BaringGould wrote: “Farmhouse fare is of a notoriously Spartan kind…In nine farmhouses out of ten in Caernarfonshire the menu will be…For breakfast, barley bread and buttermilk; for dinner, potatoes and buttermilk, with a piece of salt meat from the brine pot; for tea, bread with butter or cheese, while porridge and buttermilk are served

for supper when the day’s work is ended.” Bradley’s account of Dic Aberdaron is high comedy: “..surely the most prodigious intellectual freak that ever came out of Wales…he wore a cap of hare’s skin with the ears stickingup. From his ears hung pieces of cloth, on which were inscribed sentences in Greek and Hebrew, and thus attired he would drone out the song of Moses in Hebrew to astonished audiences in Welsh village streets…he could speak fourteen languages fluently…” Personally, I would confine this proposition to the same category as the ‘20,000 saints buried on Bardsey’. Kyffin Willliams has lively recollections. His mother had an exchange with the Abererch vicar. “It’s no good making excuses…have you called on the Pollecoffs yet?” This orthodox Jewish family had settled on a farm on the hill. “Well, no, Mrs Williams.” “And why not? They are very good people and send their servants to church regularly.” Nant Gwrtheyrn gets good coverage here as does Bardsey Island. Llyˆn’s No. l politician has his brother’s assurance that he was when younger a devout Christian: “My brother was baptised in a little brook running in front of Penymaes Chapel..on 7th February, 1875…Dafydd was then in the thirteenth year of his life.” And Jan Morris gives an account of the great Lloyd George’s first local political victory, over the squire Ellis-Nanney, in 1890. This is another rich anthology from Dewi Roberts. We hope it is not the last.

Books The continuing struggle for it’s and its MEIC STEPHENS on the battle to

save the apostrophe.

t seems the battle to save the apostrophe is almost lost. The other day my wife received a letter from a gas company addressed to Mr’s Stephen’s. I come across countless examples of ‘the grocer’s apostrophe’ almost every day. Why can’t people get it into their heads that ’s is either possessive as in ‘the dog’s tail’ or is used to denote a missing letter as in ‘it’s raining’ and that there’s a difference between it’s and its as in ‘its tail’ or ‘its eyes’. The pedant in me winced when I saw in the second volume of 20 Stori Fer (Y Lolfa, £6.95), an anthology of short stories edited by Emyr Llywelyn, one of the contributors’ names given as O’Henry. What’s wrong? Well, O. Henry was the pseudonym of the American William Sidney Porter, the prolific and masterly writer of short stories who lived between 1862 and 1910. The editor probably knows this, which is all the more reason why he, or a good copy-editor, should have spotted the obvious misuse of the apostrophe that made him an Irishman! That apart, both volumes will be enjoyed by anyone with a taste for the contemporary short story in Welsh. I have also enjoyed two more books in the Real series: Real Wales (Seren, £9.99) by Peter Finch, editor of the series, and Mario Basini’s Real Merthyr (Seren, £9.99). Again, a good copy-editor was needed.

When Peter Finch writes of a conference held in Merthyr to celebrate the work of Glyn Jones, ‘Tony Brown lectures us on Glyn and the nebulous’, I am pretty sure he means ‘the numinous’, which is quite different. Peter Finch’s book is stuffed full of zany anecdote and fascinating detail about places in Wales most of us will never visit, while Mario, a true son of Merthyr, casts a critical but affectionate eye over one of the most ramshackle towns in Wales. That Seren, the Bridgend-based publisher, is still our leading imprint when it comes to poetry in English, is borne out by the constant stream of new titles coming from it. Five have given me particular pleasure in recent months: Sheenagh Pugh, Long-Haul Travellers; Ruth Bidgood, Time Being; Pascale Petit, The Treekeeper’s Tale; Kathryn Simmonds, Sunday at the Skin Launderette; and Meirion Jordan, Moonrise. All five are attractively produced and reasonably priced at £7.99. Those dwindling few who still read ‘the national newspaper of Wales’ (note the inverted commas) will know that Hafina Clwyd writes a weekly Welsh column in which she dilates on anything that catches her eye or on which she has an opinion. She has a lively and well-stocked mind and can make the quiddities of her life entertaining and informative. She is especially interested in genealogy, not just her own family tree but everyone else’s, so she knows who is related to whom ‘to the ninth degree’. This talent, in someone of lesser literary skill, might go to the making of a gossip or a self-opiniated bore. But Hafina is good company and manages to write crisply and in excellent, readable Welsh about

I come across countless examples of ‘the grocer’s apostrophe’ almost every day.... both the eminent and the lowly. In Rhywbeth Bob Dydd (Carreg Gwalch, £8.50) she has managed to draw on her encyclopaedic knowledge and write about what has happened in Wales on every day of the year. The book is a marvellous source-book for broadcasters, especially those at Radio Cymru, who no longer have the excuse that they have to rely on lists drawn up in London. Dip into it and you will be richly rewarded by a journalist who knows her Wales intimately. Lastly, a new novel by Wiliam Owen Roberts, Petrograd (Barddas, £11.95). The story begins in St Petersburg in the summer of 1916 and traces the fates of two families caught up in the Revolution of October 1917 which brought the Bolsheviks to power. The epigraph is an ominous quote from Ilya Ehrenburg: ‘The tramroutes remained unchanged but no one knew the route of history.’ This is a slow-burning novel which at 541 pages will test the concentration and endurance of the reader used to lighter reading. But I rejoice that Wales can still produce a novelist with such soaring ambition and tremendous ability as Wil Garn and novels of such high seriousness as this one that they demand to be read by all Welsh-speakers with an interest in the turbulent century that has just drawn to an end.

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POETRY MYLLIN AT LLANFYLLIN I’m a Celtic saint, see. I cure warts, cancel errors, promote fertility. It isn’t smoke and mirrors. This well where I sit invisibly awaiting supplicants is dead quiet. It’s hardly speed dating. Once women would come with secret ailments, whisper a prayer, then slink home with the hope of abeyance. The old superstitions have given way to the careless and happy-go-lucky: expeditions to Carphone Warehouse, Argos, Ann Summers. But I’ve got patience, and still welcome all-comers with an open hand. PAUL GROVES

BARDDONIAETH The publishers are most grateful to the trustees of the HARRI WEBB FUND who have generously sponsored this page. A fee will be paid for every poem published. Poems for consideration should be sent to: DR MEIC STEPHENS, 10 HEOL DON, WHITCHURCH, CARDIFF, CF14 2AU

MEIC STEPHENS ALSO RECOMMENDS •

Kevin Sinnott, Behind the Canvas (Seren, £19.99)

•

William Owen, Methu Peidio (Bwthyn,

£6.95) • Gruff Roberts, Man Gwyn (Bwthyn, £6.95) • Eurig Salisbury, Llyfr Glas Eurig (Barddas, £6)

• Hywel Dix, After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain (UWP,

£18.99)

•

Dyfed Edwards, Dynion Dieflig (Lolfa, £6.95)

(Carreg Gwalch, £8.50)

THE NATIONAL MAGAZINE OF WALES CYLCHGRAWN CENEDLAETHOL CYMRU

• Llion

• Gwyn Thomas, The Alone to the Alone (Parthian, £7.99)

Enid Roberts, Bardsey Bound (Lolfa, £5.95)

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Ioan Roberts, Pobol Drws Nesaf

• Glenda Beagan, The Great Master of Ecstasy (Seren, £7.99)

Iwan, Yr Anweledig (Gomer, £7.99)

•

Rhiannon Wyn, Codi Bwganod (Lolfa, £5.95)

Music First Love Bryn Terfel London Symphony Orchestra and guests (Deutsche Grammophon) NORMA LORD

he incomparable Bryn Terfel has long been a champion of many, if not most Western musical genres. Unlike some other opera greats, he does not fall into the trap of performing everything as if it were an operatic aria. Indeed one might argue that his very success on the opera and concert stage is a result of his habitually “singing modern music as if it were Mozart, and Mozart as if it were modern music”. The title of this album is a straight translation of Cariad Cyntaf, the traditional song on the third track, and the album showcases folksongs from several centuries and the five nations of the British Isles. It’s a “must-have” on all counts; the singing, it almost goes without saying, is superb, and the accompaniments, arranged by Chris Hazell for the London Symphony Orchestra, are sensitive and lyrical, extensively using more or less solo instruments with orchestral interludes. The wistful string scales behind Passing by are particularly beautiful, and in complete contrast to the equally effective, rousing brass of Molly Malone. The disc is also an interesting discourse on folk music history: several of the songs have very similar words, suggesting that their aural heritage has spread them from place to place and preserved each in a slightly different form, as regularly happens too with the tunes. Probably the oldest melody on the disc is Marwnad yr Ehedydd, unique here in being, perhaps, the least easy in an orchestral setting, but the song retains its power through passionate singing. Not since the 1960’s series of Janet Baker and Gerald Moore has British folksong been so lavishly celebrated. Scarborough Fair, Terfel’s duet with Kate Royal, is great listening, and works well. The Londonderry Air, with Ronan Keating is less successful, with Keating’s crooning style sounding like a diesel engine to Bryn’s Formula One racer. Sharon Corr has some glorious fiddle moments in My Lagan Love and She moved through the Fair. All in all a treat, and an album to “put down” for the future.

Chris Kinsey

Nature Diary

ccording to Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth century poem, ‘The Parliament of Fowls’, the14th February is traditionally the time that Nature convenes a parliament where birds select their mates. In modern times, few wait this long. For the woodpecker that drums then spurns the hen he attracts, it’s a fraught business. At this rate, this couple, like the birds in the poem, will defer mating until next year. At the end of the poem various birds sing to welcome the new summer. Mistle thrushes have been singing since the thaw on 16th January, though the snowfalls of early February silenced them again. I’ve been delighted to hear a new song mixing in with high rise thrush, especially in the evenings. Blackcaps are known as the ‘Nightingales of the North’. I’ve heard blackcaps, fluting and glimpsed them flitting, with other warblers, through the leaves of summer alders, but I’ve never known them over-winter in Newtown before. Shy at first, they’ve braved coming clear of cover to feed and have grown progressively bossier about possession of food. A female has just made a whole flock of long-tailed tits back off and wait whilst she has her peck of suet. As soon as I think that this sort of command usually goes to the quick-flit nuthatch, there’s a stand-off between a male blackcap and a nuthatch, on the top bar of the gate. The nuthatch flies a second faster, but there’s no real competition, because he takes a peanut and the blackcap is fat-ball bound. Many days, since mid-February have had the kind of bright blue clarity which brings the mountains, Cadair Idris and Aran Fawddwy, closer to the Kerry Hills. The range of blues from powder to steely, calls up contrasts close to hand: snowdrops and clouds; the emerging yellows of hazel catkins wafting pollen, and celandines. With their welcome mats of heart-shaped leaves and varnished yellow crowns, I think they are the true flowers of

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The 14th February is traditionally the time that Nature convenes a parliament where birds select their mates. Valentine’s Day. On the 20th February I saw a first bumblebee drowsily foraging a bank of snowdrops and celandines. Mated queens are the only ones to survive winter. Their first priority is to build a nest of moss or grass, often in old mouse holes, and to gather pollen and nectar to feed the future colony. By her lemony bands and prominent white tail, this one is Bombus lucorum. On St. David’s Day, loud buzzing alerts me to two, huge bees nudging about in separate bramble patches. These are bufftailed, Bombus terrestris, with slightly more orangey stripes. Buzzing evokes a blast of summer, but I’m not one to hurry any season. My gaze shifts to the pussy willow because I always associate it with bees. Most buds are still silver like back-lit cloud. A few have a small halo of pollen. Before long, they’ll be as yellow and downy as chicks. The mallards, moored in water crowfoot, seem to catch my drift. They’re remarkably un-randy for this time of year. They’re also unmoved by my greyhound bitch’s sharp stare, but hounds aren’t given to water-sports or even wading, unless there’s a heat wave. She’s distracted by otter spraint - thank goodness I manage to talk her out of rolling. March 2nd and my deadline for sending this in. Perhaps the woodpeckers aren’t going to defer mating after all? I saw six this morning, all still playing hard-toget in the tallest tree crowns, but they were in three distinct pairs. BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year and well-known greyhound laureate Chris Kinsey from Powys, will be giving a poetry reading in Swansea to raise money for two Welsh charities: Greyhound Rescue Wales and The Gower Bird Hospital are set to share the proceeds of the event which will take place at the Dylan Thomas Theatre on Thursday 11th June at 7pm. She will read a selection of poems on greyhounds and birds from her acclaimed collection Kung Fu Lullabies, Houndlove and new work. Information and tickets: 0300 0123 999 or greyhoundrescue_wales@yahoo.co.uk

Art SCULPTOR JOHN MEIRION MORRIS

Inspiration from Celtic themes RHODRI PUGH

retrospective of the works of John Meirion Morris will be held in the Gregynog Gallery at the National Library from 28 February to 29 May 2009. This is the first time that the Gallery, the biggest single exhibition space in Wales, has been given over totally to the work of a single sculptor. Born and raised in Llanuwchlyn, near Bala, Morris became a professional sculptor in 1995 having taught as a university lecturer in England, Ghana and Wales for almost 30 years. In 1989 Morris completed a MPhil at the University of Bangor, North Wales for research into Celtic art. Celtic mythology and the Mabinogi in particular are primary influences on his work. Sculptures at the exhibition include pieces entitled Lleu, Blodeuwedd and Rhiannon. The exhibition will also feature a smaller version of John Meirions Morris’s most recognisable work, the Tryweryn Monument. The work, designed to stand at the side of Llyn Celyn, is in the shape of a giant symbolic water bird whose outstretched wings shelter a choir singing out in protest. Morris described the work as a passionate gut reaction to the events at Tryweryn in the 1960s when the village of Capel Celyn was drowned by the Liverpool Corporation to create a reservoir that was supposed to supply the town with water. The work conveys a conflicting mix of emotions: fear, anger and frustration in the open mouthed faces of the choir, but hope in the

John Meirion Morris: TRYWERYN

form of the rising bird. It is not yet known when this monument will be put in place. The Archbishop of Canterbury, TRYWERYN (DETAIL) Dr. Rowan Williams, has written of Morris’s sculptures: ‘They are exciting - remarkable, powerful, elegant, with a kind of fluency. They have made a deep impression on me’. Along with his pieces inspired by Celtic themes, the exhibition will also showcase Morris’s portraiture work. Familiar faces at the exhibition will include the late T. Llew Jones, Gerallt Lloyd Owen, Gwenallt and Gwyn Thomas. Arwel Jones, the National Library’s director of Public Services described John Meirion Morris’s work as being “full of excitement and tension and will appeal to a wide and varied audience. The National Library is extremely privileged to be able to play host to this exhibition and one of Wales’s most important contemporary artists.” JOHN MEIRION MORRIS - PRESENCE 28 February 2009 - 29 May 2009 NATIONAL LIBRARY OF WALES, ABERYSTWYTH Monday - Saturday - 10.00am - 5.00pm www.llgc.org.uk T: 01970 632 800

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Art IAN JACOB

Luminous dimensionality FRANCES DAVIES

headed out of Haverfordwest, wending my way along ever smaller roads, and thankful as I spotted each landmark which had been spelt out on a set of very detailed instructions. The road ended at the estuary’s edge and just to the side, behind a wall, stood a house with a pretty verandah - perfect in its surroundings. Ian Jacob was born in Black Tar and has known the house all his life, his grandmother used to work in the garden and he painted it when he was a boy doing O Level art. The picture now sits on the wall in the dining room. Jacob and his wife Christine were living in Connecticut when the house came on the market and bought it on impulse; they brought the verandah back with them. It is beautiful, full of light and colour, surprisingly bright and bold yet calm and incredibly well ordered. It is so perfect, in fact, that I almost feel I am on a period film set. Glancing at a Deco drinks’ trolley on the landing, sparkling with cut crystal glasses, Poirot comes to mind. This is a home free from clutter, and as I

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gratefully accept a very delicious glass of sherry (from the excellent Ultracomida) I can hardly think of anywhere more restful and enchanting than in this spot looking out over the estuary. This is Graham Sutherland country. It is an area of outstanding beauty and despite its proximity to the A40 it feels remote and dreamlike. This countryside is the inspiration for Jacob’s exhibition, ‘Secret Waterway’, being held at The Tabernacle, MOMA Wales, from 16th March to 9th May. The intricacy and the work behind the twelve pictures on display (they don’t have names just the longitude and latitude reference) staggers me, I hadn’t anticipated the complexity involved in the work. Jacob is thrilled that a full set of his paintings has been bought by the National Library and they are producing prints for sale. After leaving school Jacob spent five years at art college where he specialised in print making (The Arts

WWW.ARTWALES.COM Council of Wales bought one of his prints from those days). His next move was to take a position as a lecturer in printmaking, but, a complete career change led him into marketing and advertising, and bizarrely, on the business side rather than the creative. He spent the next twenty-five years between London and New York. In 2005 having been chairman of Alcone Marketing UK (part of the Omnicom group) since 2000, he retired. As an artist Jacob is commercially driven and relishes the idea of collaborative relationships with galleries. He loves the work of Mondrian, Bridget Riley, and Warhol, all of whom have been great influences, and he says he has ‘learnt a lot from David Tress - a very focussed individual.’ Riley’s influence comes through in his love of colour and his portrayal of geological formations, and Jacob finds the structure of rock particularly inspiring. He has a passion for geology and it is a recurring theme in his work. Incidentally, he owns a Bridget Riley, which looks wonderful in the setting of his home and the painting gives him intense pleasure. Jacob is currently working on another exhibition ‘Root and Branch’ for next year which will also be shown by MOMA Wales in the Owen Owen Gallery. ‘Secret Waterway’ sees a return to his roots, ‘stretching the medium of print and photography’, and it is also a reflection of his experience and the various influences on his life. The exhibition comprises a series of triptychs, incorporating photographs with watercolour constructed in layers, and panoramic views blurring out at the edges emulating peripheral vision. Jacob muses about what Warhol might have created with a Mac and Photoshop and it is brought home to me the craft required to achieve the perceived simplicity of some of Warhol’s work, and, indeed, Ian’s for that matter. Jacob’s studio, in the garden, is immaculate. One side is solid glass vitrine with a desk looking out across the estuary. Another has a large window which provides the setting for an easel which he and his wife found while travelling in South America and lugged it back as hand luggage. This is angled so that it too looks out across the water. A variety of works in progress: watercolours, prints, drawings are all housed neatly in a draughtsman’s cabinet. He lays some out on the floor for me, illustrating the different stages of construction, but I wonder if these pictures with their wonderful textures and three dimensional elements, might not lose their solid structural qualities when reproduced as prints. Jacob is highly enthusiastic about his work, and tells me of a recent Tom Wesselmann exhibition he had seen in London’s Cork Street, with pictures cut out of steel. He loves modernity and inspiration is everywhere; for

‘Cottage, Marloes’ oil on canvas 2009 15 x 21cm

SMALL PAINTINGS SHOW 20 March - 18 April

‘Unwanted Attention’ oil on linen 2008 56 x 71cm

KEVIN SINNOTT 23 April - 23 May

‘After Chatterton’ oil on panel 2007 38 x 52cm

SALLY MOORE 28 May - 20 June

MARTIN TINNEY GALLERY 18 ST. ANDREW’S CRESCENT CARDIFF CF10 3DD

Tel: 029 20641411 mtg@artwales.com

IAN JACOB

example he is captivated by the intricacy of pop-up books, and is driven to explore and push the boundaries of print. Much of his work is done with an airbrush, and I am rather taken aback at the thought of paint being sprayed at high pressure in these pristine surroundings and the beautiful wood floor. But all the airbrush work is done in the garage, so we go and have a look. The airbrush machine is large, but sure enough, I find myself in one of the tidiest garages I have ever seen!

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As I leave, I look over towards a pergola covered with the frail skeletons of rambling roses, and think of how resplendent this scene would look in high summer. This is a place of beauty, with every detail, whether large and small, carefully conceived. I shanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t forget the kindness and hospitality of Ianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wife Christine, who proffered a delicious roasted tomato soup and home-made bread, nor the tinge of awe I felt at how her beautiful amber beads matched the mellow complexion of the sherry!

The Rising Problem of Rats

he rat population in the UK has been steadily increasing, with marked rises in infestations in domestic premises in both urban and rural areas. Surveys have shown a 39% increase in infested domestic premises over the previous 20 years and a continuing increase in infestation levels. There are now probably more than a million houses in the UK infested with rats. Before attempting to control pests it is important to understand their biology, behaviour and ecology. Action taken must be effective, safe, legal and humane. Rats need to find food, water and safe shelter and may travel more than two kilometres in a night. Rats cause serious health problems, furthermore, gnawing causes severe damage to woodwork, textiles and especially electrical cables which in turn causes fires. FACT: Damage on farms alone caused by rats is estimated to cost the UK farming industry ÂŁ14 to ÂŁ28 million a year.

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Opera WELSH NATIONAL OPERA

The Marriage of Figaro Salome NORMA LORD

t is, I imagine, a co-incidence that WNO premiered Lluis Pasqual’s new Marriage of Figaro alongside the revival of the 2003 Opera North’s Elixir of Love which was so successfully updated into 20th century farce, surviving changes of setting, character background, military force and transport. Only if one can hear and understand the Italian libretto do these changes impinge on or disrupt the performance. (It is hard to see why this production did not use a suitably adapted English (or Welsh?) text) So far as I know, the only member of the original Welsh cast was Neal Davies as Dulcamara, whose great gift for comedy eclipses even the Neapolitan sunshine of the cheery set, and makes the blowsy “tarts’ chorus” seem overdone. Camilla Roberts tossed off Adina’s difficult music with style and lyricism, and Greek New Yorker Dmitri Pittas’s house debut as Nemorino showed great promise. Handicapped though he was by beginning “un furtive lagrima” so far upstage as to be hardly audible, he was rather more at home in his arias and the “obbligato, obbligato” duet with Dulcamara than in his duets with Adina. Glorious singing from the entire cast, The Marriage of Figaro

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Glorious singing from the entire cast, a deliciously frisky rendering from the pit and a seaside postcard set make this a welcome Summer interlude in the midst of a grey Welsh Winter

a deliciously frisky rendering from the pit and a seaside postcard set make this a welcome Summer interlude in the midst of a grey Welsh Winter. A similar treatment failed miserably to enhance The Marriage of Figaro, and the two productions would make a succinct demonstration for theatre students in the difference between Mozart’s operas and those of Donizetti. Our moans seemed to have been foreseen, as the Figaro programme was full of historical dogma denouncing the notion of droit du seigneur, (Nicolas Till) suggesting that servants outwitting their masters is unacceptable in the original period, and quoting Beaumarchais’ intention of writing the play as “a comedy of errors”(both Jaume Radigales). None of this helps. The existence or otherwise of droit du seigneur as a formal concept will never alter the fact that women may choose, or be obliged, to exchange sexual favours for material gain, and it is on this premise that the opera hinges. But this production disappears down a multitude of other pitfalls not the least of which is that, unlike The Barber of Seville, this opera is not a

Salome

farce, and suspended belief will only take an audience so far, Mozart’s very essence being that “art” becomes nature, and that the most preposterous coincidences are validated by the subtle use of counterpoint and modulation. Conductor Michael Hofstetter clearly understood this and must, I fear, have been frustrated by the shenanigans on stage. So, when the curtain opens on a vast, full-height set, one side entirely walled with mirrors and another with trees viewed through glass, and the only obstacles to at least six double beds are two barres, we are thrown by the question of why the Almavivas are renting Figaro a ballet studio. Figaro is in pinstripes and Susanna looks as if she has strayed from Lyon’s Corner House counter. There is nowhere to hide, and the cast’s acting ability is consequently sorely tested and only just triumphs. We wait hopefully, for some coup de theatre to explain the mystery, but if this happens, it eludes me. Similarly, the Countess’ boudoir is a nearly empty nineteenth century drawing room - have the couple been obliged to sell all the furniture? - which does have a very convincing fire where incriminating documents could be burned, but aren’t. Only in the last Act does the set, magnificent in itself, come to serve the scene, when the first act mirrors turn into electronically lit tree-imaged, panels magically weaving across the stage like in a breeze in an arboretum, whilst Susanna, the Countess, Cherubino et. al., dwarfed by their size and grandeur, dart between them for their various trysts. At last: Magic! That said, the ensemble comedy was sublime and most of the singing highly creditable. David Soar and debutante Rosemary Joshua exceeded the highest expec-

tations as Figaro and Susanna even in the wilderness of the first Act, and were, perhaps the only ones whose singing seemed unaffected by the athletic demands of the comedy. Rebecca Evans excelled in her arias, notably Porgi amor, but still appeared uneasy in the ensembles and, on the night I was there, was not at her scintillating best. Nor was she helped by Jacques Imbrailo as the Count. Imbrailo has a beautiful voice and delivered some exciting bel canto moments, but again, he seemed to find the style of the comedy an impediment to vocal relaxation. Fiona Murphy, hiding behind nothing and jumping over balustrades, had a very hard time as Cherubino, despite a strong voice and sound technique; she was not entirely convincing in plus fours, and was not helped by a horrible girly “disguise”. As so often in a stage-oriented production, the cameo characters regularly stole the limelight from the main cast. Both Sarah Pring’s Marcellina and Arwel Huw Morgan’s Antonio were treasurable. Richard Strauss’ Salome introduced to the UK Swedish soprano Erika Sunnegardh who entranced the house with her performance in the title role of Andre Engels’ classic production, tightly revived now by Carmen Jakobi. Vocally lacking in power initially, Miss Sunnegardh’s volume and passion grew minute by minute as, during the opera, she emerged from the chrysalis of troubled teenagerhood to develop organically, if dysfunctionally, into a free-flying psychopath. Her dance, so often a director’s nightmare, was fluently beautiful, demonstrating Miss Sunnegardh’s early dance training, but also spectacular and visceral, and the final scene attracted and repelled the audience in appropriately equal measure. Matthew Best being ill on the first night, Jokanaan was sung by Robert Hayward, detracting from the performance not one bit: WNO was fortunate to find a cover of such calibre. The original set, small though it seems by WMC standards, wears well, and serves to concentrate the action suitably claustrophobically, and Lothar Koenigs finely controlled the complicated layers of Strauss’ score, allowing the spine-chilling, solo sections great force, to create a very exciting evening.

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G ardens Discovering Welsh garden coffee-table books CAROLINE PALMER

or years there has been no coffee table book about Welsh gardens, and then, what do you know, two come along at once! Both are launched in March, and vie for the same market - a lavishly illustrated gift book to send out to friends and relations, and to allow us to brag subtly about our own more intimate knowledge of Welsh gardens. The two books are The Gardens of Wales by Helena Attlee and Discovering Welsh Gardens, by Stephen Anderton. They are of similar squarish formats, the former slightly larger and hardback, the latter thicker, and softback, and they are only £2.00 different in price. Both are, of course lavishly illustrated by distinguished garden photogPHOTO: ALEX RAMSAY

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raphers: Anderton, who lives at Abergavenny, is teamed with Charles Hawes, the owner, with his wife Anne Wareham of a remarkable modern garden at Veddw House, Devauden. Attlee, of Presteigne, in Powys, is teamed with photographer Alex Ramsay. Looking through both books reveals a close consensus between the two authors. Anderton’s book described twenty gardens, of which fourteen also appear in Attlee’s selection of twenty seven. Taking this as our guide the torch for top garden must therefore be awarded to the common fourteen. These, alphabetically, are Aberglasney, Bodnant, Bodysgallen, Bodrhyddan, Cae Hir, Dewstow, Erddig, National Botanic Garden of Wales, Brondanw, Plas Newydd, Plas yn Rhiw, Powis Castle, Veddw, and Wyndcliffe Court. The makeweight gardens in Attlee’s book, are in the main, other significant gardens of substantial houses, Anderton’s six wild cards lean more towards the quirky cottage garden: places like Dyffryn Fernant, near Fishguard, Nant-yr-Eryd, Boncath or Lower House, Hay on Wye. His notable newcomer is Tony Ridler’s

FROM THE GARDENS OF WALES BY HELENA ATTLEE [FRANCES LINCOLN £16.99]

If you belong to that rare group of people who actually sit down and read the prose in coffee table books - the remainder of this article is for you sculptural topiary garden in suburban Swansea. So which book to buy? Well, both, if you like pictures, and your favourite garden is among those featured. You can hardly have too many photographs of gardens, an evocative photo is more memorable than the most expressive prose. But if you, or your gift recipient belongs to that rare group of people who actually sit down and read the prose in coffee table books, the remainder of this article is for you. Attlee’s prose, is elegant, well turned and selectively describes aspects of history or people which are memorable and pleasing to the raconteur. At Bodysgallen she informs us of the eccentric Lord Mostyn’s love of shoes, and his habit of dispersing local children playing football in the rose garden by firing his shotgun at six o’clock. At Brondanw we find a quote on how the young Clough Williams Ellis viewed each £10 cheque from his architectural practice as a yardage of yew hedge, or extra paving slabs for the terrace of his old family home. At Veddw House she plunges directly to the heart of the matter: what influences caused Anne Wareham to create “the most controversial garden in Wales”. Allowing the pictures and their captions to speak for themselves

ABERGLASNEY

FROM DISCOVERING WELSH GARDENS BY STEPHEN ANDERTON, (GRAFFEG, £18.99)

about the gardens’ appearances, she feeds us snippets of garden and social history. There is a lot of white space in the design layout of this book, and gardens may be accompanied by as little as 600 words, but they are well chosen words, and one would not tire to read them out loud. Anderton by contrast sets out to provide a critical ramble about each garden, describing what he sees, PLAS BRONDANW

and his reactions to it. Though the text is lengthier much floats past the consciousness until one is arrested by a personal interjection. His similes are unlikely to make it to the Dictionary of Quotations. Dewstow he sees as “a fat lady in a booth sort of place”, Aberglasney “an old Quaker dress salvaged from a trunk”, and many historic gardens open to the public are likened to “the old whore whose grandfather

FROM DISCOVERING WELSH GARDENS BY STEPHEN ANDERTON, (GRAFFEG, £18.99)

was an archbishop”. “On the railway line to horticultural heaven, soothing is only a few stops short of boring” he warns us. There is a “whiff of nursing home” about Bodnant Hall, while Bodrhyddan brings on a staccato style: “You have to smile.” .. “ You expect confetti” .. “It’s all great fun”. When he gets to Brondanw he decides to abbreviate Clough Williams Ellis “(let’s call him CWE)”. The seven subsequent pages are larded with this unexpected acronym. Perhaps some of the responsibility lies with the publishing house and the editor. Anderton’s publisher is Graffeg, of Cardiff, and over and above the individual authorial style they have let some howlers slip through. Aficionados of the misplaced apostrophe will reach for the red pen, and there are sentences in which word order, or the verb, have gone seriously astray. Perhaps most culpable are the errors of fact: William Emes the eighteenth century landscape gardener should not be spelt Eames; Nant-yr-Eryd, Boncath is not in Ceredigion. Frances Lincoln, by contrast has a long track record in producing mouth watering picture books with impeccable text. This book showcases a selection of Welsh gardens, presents pictures of extraordinary allure, and text panels which illuminate the humanity of the owners and gardeners. I think it will sit better on the discriminating coffee tables of the world. THE GARDENS OF WALES

by Helena Attlee, (Frances Lincoln, £16.99) DISCOVERING WELSH GARDENS

by Stephen Anderton, (Graffeg, £18.99)

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MOTORING

Duke races to the rescue JOHN A EDWARDS

otor sport takes many forms - circuit racing, rallying, hill-climbing, and karting - to name just a few, but can it sometimes also be included as a part of warfare? If so, the most famous practitioner was possibly Bend’Or, the second Duke of Westminster who in keeping with his status as the richest man in Britain ran his own private fleet of armoured cars during the Boer War and the First World War. Was this motor sport or serious warfare? For the adventurous duke, probably a bit of both. Either way, during WW1 his bravery freed a ship’s mostly Welsh crew from captivity in the North African desert. Bend’Or succeeded to the title in 1899 and inherited extensive estates including prime properties in London’s West End. As might be expected, he was a pioneer motorist with, not surprisingly, Rolls-Royce as his favourite make of car so it was only logical for him to use them for his fleet of armoured vehicles. There’s no need for one to rough it just because there’s a war on you know! The Rolls-Royce model used was the famous 40-50hp 7-litre Silver Ghost modified with a gun turret, armour plating and twin rear wheels. Despite the extra weight, top speed was 50mph and even 40mph in reverse. Even for a duke, discretion can sometimes be the better part of valour!

C a mbr i a THE NATIONAL MAGAZINE OF WALES CYLCHGRAWN CENEDLAETHOL CYMRU

A ROLLS-ROYCE ARMOURED CAR SIMILAR TO THE ONE USED IN THE RESCUE OF THE CREW OF HMS TARA. NOTE THE METAL DOORS TO PROTECT THE RADIATOR IN ACTION.

His private army of armoured cars saw WW1 service in Flanders until the roads became too churned up for them to operate successfully. My father Llewelyn who was in 1/1 Welsh Heavy Battery Artillery in the Great War and won the Military Medal always said that horses were preferable to motor vehicles which frequently broke down and then blocked the muddy, cratered roads. So the Duke with the rank of Major took his private army off to North Africa where the terrain was more favourable to the armoured cars and the enemy was the Turkish Ottoman Empire. An ideal gung-ho adventure immediately presented itself. In 1915, the British gunboat HMS Tara had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean by German submarine U35 killing 12 of her crew. The U-boat captain then humanely towed the 93 survivors in their lifeboats to the Libyan coast. It’s hard to imagine that kind of chivalry in today’s often barbaric ‘War on Terror’.

HMS Tara was originally the SS Hibernia Holyhead-Dublin ferry which had been converted into an Auxiliary Patrol Boat for war service and most of the crew were from the Holyhead area many personally known to the Duke due to his frequent visits to Ireland. The crew were then imprisoned under harsh conditions in a Libyan desert outpost by the Senussi Arab brotherhood who were allies of the Turks, And while the Turkish commanding officer allowed them to sing hymns in Welsh and English he drew the line at ‘God Save the King’ - he must have had an ear for music! Several of the prisoners died in captivity including a sailor called Hodgson and at his burial H.O. Jones a Tara fireman who was a chapel deacon in Holyhead said a prayer in Welsh which reduced the men to tears. The Duke volunteered to effect a rescue and a collection of various vehicles headed by his Rolls-Royces tore across the desert and encountered very little resistance. As so often happens in war there was

some unnecessary violence and a number of innocent Senussi including women and children were killed although the prisoners had not in fact been illtreated during their nearly five months in captivity but were starving because of the limitations of their captors food supply due to the Allies sea blockade. However that was the end of the Duke’s war adventures. He was awarded the DSO (apparently a VC was considered too ostentatious for a man in his lofty position) and returned to Britain as his death or capture would have been an invaluable propaganda coup for the enemy. This is almost certainly the last time a ‘privateer’ unit fought as part of the British army. I’m not absolutely sure, but it seems probable that the Duke’s 12 armoured cars were then handed over to Tremadog-born Lawrence of Arabia and used in his desert adventures. As Lawrence enthused: “A Rolls-Royce in the desert is above rubies…and worth hundreds of men.” The Duke’s main estate was at Eaton Hall, Chester where by the standards of the time he was a model employer. Unlike the recipients of today’s so-called ‘honours’ the Duke did not choose to inherit his title which carried the onerous responsibility of running a business employing hundreds of people and affecting the well-being of whole communities. He had a human side and for example gave a ton of coal to his tenants every Christmas and when his workers died, allowed their widows to retain the tenancy of their home. But with his immense wealth he could also afford to be a little selfindulgent. For example in 1927 he was staying with some friends at his

CREW OF HMS TARA IN HOSPITAL IN ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT FOLLOWING THEIR RESCUE FROM CAPTIVITY IN MARCH 1916. [COURTESY ANGLESEY COUNTY RECORD OFFICE ]

Lochmore estate in Scotland but unfortunately the shooting was poor and when a lady in the party revealed over dinner that she had never been to Naples nor seen Vesuvius he said ‘Right we’ll go there tomorrow’ - as one does. He immediately summoned the captain of his yacht the Cutty Sark, a converted naval destroyer chosen for her speed rather than comfort, to get ready to sail for the Mediterranean the next morning. At the same time he told his chauffeur George Gude to drive down and meet them in Naples. So George had to drive from the northern tip of Scotland to Chester to pick up his passport and then on to Dover and across a non-motorway Europe to Italy. After the Duke’s party arrived by sea, George drove them the short distance from their Naples hotel to Vesuvius and when they arrived back he asked the Duke for further instructions, he said: “Just drive back to Chester, I don’t need the car any more!” But then

the Duke wasn’t worried about fuel costs and was in the happy position of never having heard of global warming. The Duke’s given names were Hugh Richard Arthur but he was always known as Bend’Or which is derived from the Dukedom’s heraldry: bend = diagonal stripe and or = gold. The name was originally used for the first Duke’s favourite racehorse and because the second Duke had chestnut hair similar in colour to the horse, the name stuck. But then horses have always been held in reverence by the English aristocracy. Surely, in no other country would a duke be named after a horse.

LLANDOVERY

MOT MOT MOT 01550 720335

the cambria directory - hotels & restaurants nationwide caerdydd

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ELEMENTS CHAMPAGNE. BAR. RESTAURANT Harbour Drive (off Pierhead Street), CF10 4DQ Tel (029) 2050 4043 Brunch, lunch or dinner, this elegant new restaurant and bar caters for business meetings or after work partying. Classics such as Eggs Benedict and loin of rabbit, or slow baked breast of Gressingham duck. A la carte menu, but you can also graze, think tapas but with a French fillip. Choose from 6 or 7 dishes that can be shared and picked at. Free internet access, delivery service, sushi, salads and sandwiches too. Open weekdays from 8 am, Saturday from 6 pm, closed Sundays.

THE HORSESHOE INN Mamhilad, Pontypool, Gwent NP4 8QZ Tel: 01873 880542 Picturesque pub with real ale and good food, and excellent traditional Sunday lunch. traditional pub bar food served alongside some well thought more sophisticated fair.You could start with a blue cheese panacotta with redcurrant syrup and rocket salad, then move on to oven-roasted Brecon venison served with honey and rosemary mash, or free range chicken served with roasted butternut squash and a mustard velouté, finishing with panettone bread and butter pudding. From £17 for three courses

LE GALLOIS Romilly Crescent, Canton, Cardiff Tel (029) 2034 1264 www.legallois-ycymro.com With its city location this modern, stylish restaurant occupies two floors, one of which has a balcony overlooking a colourful rear garden. The fixed-price menu offers an unique blend of Welsh and French cuisine, for example the deep-fried lambs’ tongues accompanied by a salsa verde. For a main course choose the red mullet, and to finish, the pannatone bread and butter pudding. From £17.95

caerfyrddin THE ANGEL Salem, Llandeilo Tel (01558) 823394 Former Welsh Chef of the Year Rod Peterson has built up a well deserved reputation for top quality produce and cooking at this highly acclaimed restaurant cum pub which features in The Good Food Guide. Swansea bay mussels with Thai green curry sauce, roast saddle of venison served with prune boudin, all done to perfection. Breads and ice creams are also freshly made on site.Two AA rosettes. From £20. From £22 FAIRYHILL BAR AND BRASSERIE @ MACHYNYS Machynys Peninsula, Llanelli, Carmarthenshire Tel: (01554) 744994 (for Brasserie bookings) Looking onto the Loughor Estuary and the Gower, the ethos is consistent with that of Fairyhill at Reynoldston and the ambience is assisted by contemporary wood and slate. The Bar offers hot griddled paninis, and local pork sausages, mash & onion gravy, while the Brasserie serves dishes like real prawn cocktail & spicy sauce, and Machynys fishcakes, warm tartare sauce and steamed greens. Starters from £3.25, Main courses from £10.00. Y FFIGYSBREN - THE FIG TREE Dryslwyn Fawr, Llanarthne Tel (01558) 668187 Converted from a threshing barn this stunning contemporary restaurant is Routier Listed with menus which include delicious slow roasted lamb shank in a port and black cherry sauce and pan fried chicken supreme with chorizo and sunblushed tomatoes. Wonderful home made puddings and ice creams also feature on the Sunday lunch set menu - £16.95. Accommodation 1 available in 5 cottages from £60.00 per day.

gwynedd BODYSGALLEN HALL Llandudno,Tel (01492) 584466 www.bodysgallen.com A magnificent seventeenth century country house surrounded by wonderful gardens, with traditional country house style cooking. Sample the baked Welsh goat’s cheese soufflé, baked turbot with noodles and a Provençale dressing and chocolate fondant to finish. From £22 LLWYNDU FARMHOUSE HOTEL Llanaber, Barmouth, Gwynedd, LL42 1RR Tel (01341) 280144 www.llwyndu-farmhouse.co.uk 1597. Welsh boy goes to Cambridge. You can stay in his family home and enjoy good food, fine wine, cosy rooms and a rather relaxed atmosphere in a 16th century farmhouse and converted Granary. Situated in southern Snowdonia overlooking Cardigan Bay it is a great location to explore the quieter parts of the National Park but convenient for Portmeirion, Lloyd George Museum. Good walking without the crowds. PLAS BODEGROES Pwllheli Tel (01758) 612363 www.bodegroes.co.uk Elegant, romantic and unpretentious. A very pretty Georgian house set in beautiful grounds with something for every season. A classic menu with style: seared breast of pigeon on bubble and squeak, smoked chicken and celeriac soup, kebab of mountain lamb on a bed of cous cous, apricot and ginger parfait. Michelin Star Sunday lunch £17.50 Appetiser and three courses £40 GWESTY PORTMEIRION HOTEL Portmeirion Tel (01766) 770000 www.portmeirion-village.com Set in one of the most famous villages in Wales, the food at this hotel reflects the flamboyance and exotic nature of the architecture. Some examples include pan-roasted partridge, seared scallops with cherry tomatoes, roasted peppers and green beans, and apple crumble with sultanas, almonds and sabayon sauce for dessert. From £15 CASTELL DEUDRAETH AT PORTMEIRION Portmeirion Tel (01766) 770000 www.portmeirion-village.com A modern hotel, set in a castle in the village of Portmeirion, features a large menu, including local produce such as Anglesey turbot, Pen Llyˆn crab and lobster, Afon Wen bass, Welsh corn-fed chicken, beef and lamb. From £20.

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THE FALCONDALE MANSION HOTEL Llanbedr-pont-steffan/Lampeter West Wales. Tel (01570) 422910 This Victorian mansion is situated at the head of a forested valley, overlooking the university and market town of Llanbedr-pont-steffan/Lampeter, in fourteen acres of parkland with a ten-acre lake. Signature dishes on the Brasserie menu include Pantysgawn goats’ cheese croute, braised lamb ‘Henrietta’ with a honey and mustard sauce, and banana fritters in cinnamon sugar as a dessert. From £18

BUSH INN St Hilary, Cowbridge, CF71 7DP 01446 772745 Charming Thatched inn with stone spiral staircase and roaring log fire in the huge Inglenoon fireplace. Real ales and a blend of traditional and modern cuisine. Faggots, fish and chops, sausage and mash feature on the bar menu, or go a la carte – perhaps warm smoked trout with potato and dill blinis served with chive and lemon crème fraiche, rump of Welsh lamb with dauphinoise potatoes and white beans with a thyme foam, moving on to white chocolate and orange crème brulée.

YR ORENDY / THE ORANGERY 10 Market Street Aberystwyth Tel: 01970 617606 www.orangery.uk.com An unique coming together of cafe, restaurant and wine bar with its own bakery. A spacious, relaxing atmosphere with a secluded courtyard. Pizza, tapas and a good selection of specials are served all day, along with cream teas, great wines, beers, cocktails and much more. Weddings, parties and large groups catered for; rooms are available for private hire. Also has a beautiful, intimate French restaurant just around the corner. THE BELL INN Caerleon Tel. 01633 420613 Set in beautiful countryside, this charming old pub offers a warm welcome, a well kept cellar, good food, a boule pitch, a variety of other pastimes and live music. Local food with a Breton fillip and a lot of comfort: Glamorgan sausages with sautéed potatoes, moules marinière, loin of pork stuffed with leeks and mustard in a creamy Breton apple and cider sauce or roasted pigeon and apple faggots on a Welsh potato cake with a Dijon cream reduction.Three courses approximately £20.

FAIRYHILL Reynoldston, Gower, Nr Swansea Tel (01792) 390139 www.fairyhill.net This charming hotel has ample grounds to explore, including woodland and a trout stream. A wide variety of choices on the menu include chicken and laverbread sausage, Welsh Black fillet of beef with a crispy won ton and chilli sauce, followed by seasonal poached pears in red wine. From £18.95

mynwy THE BELL AT SKENFRITH Monmouthshire Tel (01600 750235) www.skenfrith.co.uk OS 457200 More a restaurant with eight extremely comfortable rooms,The Bell is perched on the banks of the River Monnow, surrounded by beautiful Welsh countryside.The regularly changing menu offers fresh, seasonal food from mainly local suppliers with vegetables, herbs and fruit from The Bell’s own kitchen garden. Scallops, Fillet of Welsh Beef and

Steamed Sponge Pudding, Earl Grey Syrup and Jam-on-Toast Ice Cream are some of the hot favourites.The wine list is extensive and very good value.After eating, try one of The Bell’s very popular walks. THE CROWN AT WHITEBROOK Whitebrook, Nr Monmouth [MICHELIN1] Tel (01600) 860254 www.crownatwhitebrook.co.uk This converted restaurant, once a drover’s cottage, is surrounded by peaceful woodland.The cooking has a contemporary European feel to it, from the leek and Skirrid cheese flan to the breast of duck with foie gras boudin. Desserts include raspberry créme brulée. From £22.50.

newport THE CHANDLERY RESTAURANT Newport, NP20 1EH Tel (01633) 256622 www.thechandleryrestaurant.com Beautifully restored Grade 2 listed building – a relaxing place to dine. Former National Chef of Wales, Simon Newcombe and wife Jane have achieved accolades in all major food guides, including 2AA rosettes and a Michelin Bib Gourmand. Seasonal à la carte and business lunch menus updated regularly on website. Enjoy Trio of Duck (potted duck, Lady Llanover salt duck, foie gras), Roast Loin of Brecon Venison with balsamic braised red cabbage, pommes cocotte, Hot Chocolate Fondant with white chocolate mousse, milk chocolate sorbet. 3 course a la carte approx. £27.00. 3 course business lunch £12.95.

penfro LLYS MEDDYG Trefdraeth / Newport. Tel (01239) 820008 A cosy bar, walls hung with paintings by Peter Daniels, an open fire and candlelight, provide an intimate atmosphere. To start, try the Double-Smoked Salmon Surprise, followed by Supreme of Organic Chicken with Ginger, Lime and Green Onion, and the Chocolate Orange Truffle Cake for dessert. From £19.

powys BARN AT BRYNICH Brynich Aberhonddu/Brecon Tel (01874) 623480 www.barn-restaurant.co.uk Converted 17th Century barn restaurant in a beautiful courtyard setting with panoramic views of the Brecon Beacons. Also self catering accommodation adjoining. Superb seasonal menus featuring home grown and local produce including Welsh Black Beef and Breconshire lamb. Main courses from £9 to £18. CARLTON RIVERSIDE (FORMERLY CARLTON HOUSE) Llanwrtyd Wells Tel (01591) 610 248 www.carltonrestaurant.co.uk This restaurant with rooms has changed location but maintained its strong culinary identity in Britain’s smallest town.With an impressive backdrop, the menu is as breathtaking as the scenery that surrounds it, inside and out! The menu embraces the ingredients of Wales but unleashes them in a European style that shows itself in such dishes as the Warm Salad of Seared Scallops, which incorporates Carmarthen ham and the Roast Fillet of Local Beef with a morel and Madeira sauce. Daily Menu £35 for four courses. Room rates from £40 FELIN FACH GRIFFIN Felin Fach, Nr Aberhonddu/Brecon Tel (01874) 620111 www.felinfach.com This is a traditional, farmhouse style inn, with a very relaxed atmosphere. It has a good variety of seasonal soups, gazpacho being one of them, divine Wye salmon, accompanied by new potatoes with chive butter, and home made chocolate mousse, making it simple yet still managing to get the taste buds going! From £18 THE DRAGON INN Crughywel/Crickhowell, Powys NP8 1BE Tel (01873) 810362 www.dragoncrickhowell.co.uk 1 1 This Grade 11 ,Visit Wales 3 , historic Inn on Crickhowell High Street has been providing hospitality for over 400 years. Under head chef Robert Duggan the restaurant offers a combination of traditional British and modern European dishes, sourcing local meat and vegetables. Fish is brought in daily from Plymouth and Swansea. Dishes include Monkfish & Prawns in a creamy, garlic sauce; pheasant with Stilton and bacon on braised red cabbage and port wine sauce; breast of duck on wilted Pakchoy with egg noodles and honey & soy dressing.

cernyw/cornwall GURNARD'S HEAD HOTEL Treen, Zennor, Cornwall Tel. 01736 796928 Sister to The Griffin at Felin Fach, the Inkin brothers have created another superb venue for eating, drinking and sleeping, at this fabulous old inn looking out to the Atlantic. An hospitable and comfortable base, whether you are yomping about the countryside or hiding from the weather. Fantastic local produce, perhaps a fish stew served with pink fir apple potatoes and rouille, oxtail ravioli or seared duck with spiced lentils followed by Chocolate Torte, Honey & Lavender Ice-cream Tunisian Orange Cake, Clementine Sorbet. From £20.

If it’s not here, how can we recommend it?

TYDDYN LLAN RESTAURANT WITH ROOMS

THE HAND at LLANARMON

Voted Wales' Good Food Guide Restaurant of the Year 2008

A centuries-old inn set in the heart of the beautiful Ceiriog Valley “The Valley of the Poets” - some of the most breathtaking countryside in Wales. Superb cuisine, freshly prepared from locally sourced produce with a minimum of fuss and formality and, of course, drinks for every taste. Comfortable accommodation in ‘Character’ and ‘Country’ rooms, maintained to the highest standards.

Some of the finest food in Wales Please contact us for up to date special offers or visit www.tyddynllan.co.uk LLANDRILLO, NR. CORWEN, DENBIGHSHIRE, NORTH WALES LL21 0ST TEL 01490 440264 FAX 01490 440414 EMAIL tyddynllan@compuserve.com

The Felin Fach Griffin

Between Brecon and Hay-on-Wye (01874) 620 111 www.felinfachgriffin.co.uk

THE HAND AT LLANARMON, LLANARMON DC, CEIRIOG VALLEY, LLANGOLLEN LL20 7LD T: 01691

60 06 66 E: reception@thehandhotel.co.uk www.thehandhotel.co.uk

THE

CARREG C A F É B A R - R E S TA U R A N T 4 Contemporary dining with Black Rock Grills 4 Varied menu with an emphasis on locally sourced produce

EATDRINKSLEEP LTD RESTAURANTS WITH ROOMS IN BRITAIN’S MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACES

32, HIGH ST, NARBERTH, PEMBROKESHIRE, SA67 7AS TEL: 01834 862990 www.thecarregrestaurant.co.uk

The Dragon Inn The hotel is open all year for lunch and dinner except Sunday evenings. The Dragon is a superb base for exploring Powys, Gwent and the South Eastern Valleys.

TEL:

THE DRAGON INN, CRICKHOWELL 01873 810362 www.dragoncrickhowell.co.uk

”Pure indulgence”

T H E O R I G I N A L R E S TA U R A N T W I T H R O O M S

also in aberystwyth

Whitebrook, Nr Monmouth, Monmouthshire NP25 4TX Tel 01600 860254 www.crownatwhitebrook.co.uk

TheWelsh Kitchen

DOROTHY DAVIES

Laverbread

ust before Christmas somebody asked me whether maybe I could do some articles on traditional Welsh ingredients. ‘Of course’ was my immediate reaction, it seemed so obvious why have I not done more along these lines. Probably because I tend to dwell upon dishes I cook fairly frequently, day to day family fare with the odd special occasion piece thrown in, not particularly aligned to any sort of cuisine but dictated by ease and familiarity. I love laverbread but my children are not very keen (yet), unless I put it in in such small quantities that you can’t tell it is there. What is the point of that, iodine deficiency apart? In regency times it was part of the recommended diet at Bath Spa. High in protein, low in fat, easily digested, its high mineral and iodine content make it a very good tonic. In the Far East it is often used for its medicinal properties and during the recent flu scares it was touted as a possible cure. Heston Blumenthal’s current programme on medieval feasts is ridiculously, overly indulgent but one thing it does do is highlight how tastes have changed. Lampreys may well have been eaten almost to extinction but I can’t imagine them making it to the luxury list nowadays, along with various other innards and gobbets, we have become squeamish. Laverbread does not repulse the modern palate in this way but it has slipped from the commonly eaten list and many people do regard it as rather exotic. Once upon a time Laver was a serious industry, a good source of income around the Gower, and further along the Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire coastline. Larousse was pretty snooty about seaweed in general and did not admit that it was eaten in France at all, sea kale apart which he likens to asparagus and advises serving in similar fashion. ‘It is, however, eaten only in times of scarcity, except in Scotland ....This dish, however, has not found much favour with any visitor.’ Commenting on usage in Japan, he says ‘used more as condiments than as actual food.’ Despite that my first encounter with seaweed was in a French restaurant many years ago, one of my earliest ‘wow’ encounters with food, it provided a green layer in a dish similar to coquille Saint Jacques. Laverbread (porphyra umbilcalis or the brilliant green Ulva latissima) - seaweed - has been eaten around these shores for centuries, and most people seem to agree that it was survival that drove people to eat it in the first place rather than its come hither qualities. It is extremely labour intensive in its preparation, as far as I am concerned one of those things that should be bought but not attempted from scratch at home! It requires very careful washing (you may have been unlucky enough to experience the unpleasantness of gritty laver) followed by long hours of boiling until it becomes a thick dark green mush. The first mention of it, in Camden’s Brittanica 1607, describes collecting "Lhawvan" from the beach of Eglwys Abernon near St David´s in Springtime. It is also known as bara lawr and more recently was commonly had for breakfast by the miners. There are several different types of edible seaweed: porphyra is also popular in the far east, in Japan it is known as Nori, nine billion sheets of it are consumed annually, it is a main ingredient of sushi and often used in soup.

C a mbr i a THE NATIONAL MAGAZINE OF WALES CYLCHGRAWN CENEDLAETHOL CYMRU

Apparently, one should only use a wooden or a silver spoon and an aluminium pan when preparing the laver. Ways with Laverbread Laverbread makes wonderful canapés, here are a few ideas: little patties turned in porridge oats, do go easy on the oats though as it is very easy to turn them into little canon balls, fry in olive oil until tinged with gold. Savoury salt, slightly chewy and just as good cold (if not better), slightly larger they are perfect for breakfast with bacon and mushrooms. Cut some thin bread into mouthful size squares, fry them in butter until golden, or brush lightly with olive oil and bake in a hot oven, meanwhile fry some good quality, finely chopped ham or bacon, top the toasts with a small spoon of warmed laverbread and a sprinkling of the ham, or a squeeze of lemon or Seville orange. Laverbread warmed through with a good squeeze of Seville orange juice and some freshly ground black pepper is a traditional accompaniment to mutton (another dish our taste-buds have lost the yen for). Warmed through in the same way with lemon juice it makes a good sauce for all shellfish. (Seville oranges can be frozen entire). Fish sautéed in butter with mashed potato is brilliant comfort food, but not a good colour combination, I like to beat half a tub, or a small tin, of laverbread into the potato with lots (and lots) of butter, with a few carrots, what could be a very pallid plate becomes beautifully colourful. Half a cup added to chowder gives it an added richness and depth, this goes for cawl made with lamb as well. MWYNHEWCH! If you would like to share any memories and recipes handed down using traditional Welsh ingredients, please send them to DOROTHY DAVIES, PO BOX 22, CARMARTHEN, SA32 7YH

IMAGES OF WALES

as greeting cards : as Christmas cards

as calendars : for decorating your home for brightening your office : for gifts and presents for use in brochures for magazines and journals for websites Whatever you want an image of Wales for, visit:

www.stoppedintime.com

A ‘MUST-DO’ FOR YOUR VISIT TO NORTH WALES ! Two spectacular narrow gauge steam railways running through the scenic heart of the Snowdonia National Park. The historic Ffestiniog Railway runs 13½ miles from the harbour at Porthmadog to the slate-quarrying town of Blaenau Ffestiniog. North Wales’ Newest Railway - the Welsh Highland Railway - opens new extensions in 2009, completing a 25-mile link from Caernarfon to Porthmadog, via Beddgelert and the dramatic Aberglaslyn Pass. Visit our website, or phone, for latest information and further details.

FFESTINIOG & WELSH HIGHLAND RAILWAYS Harbour Station, Porthmadog, Gwynedd, LL49 9NF enquiries@festrail.co.uk

01766 516000

www.festrail.co.uk

The Sixth National O N L O O K E R

What you didn’t see in the “Welsh media”

St David’s Day Parade The greatest Welsh event they tried to ignore!

O N L O O K E R

Videos of the Parade by Mikael Baudu: • www.dailymotion.com/user/Treveur/video/x8nmsj_bagadig-plougastell-in-cardiff_music>

RYAN

This year’s Parade warmly welcomed the Bagad PlougastelDaoulaz, one of Brittany’s most renowned pipe bands and the Bleuniadur Dance Group from the town of St Pol de Léon. Breton and Welsh tradition holds that our patron saint studied under St Pol himself in Whitland, Carmarthenshire, and just three miles from St Pol de Léon is the village of Dirinon, burial place of Non, St David’s mother, showing how closely linked our two countries are.

The St David’s Day Parade PHOTOGRAPHS

GARETH AP SIÔN

Video of the Parade by Chris Jones: • www.stdavidsday.org Members of the Bagad Plougastel-Daoulaz and the Bleuniadur Dance Group with the Lord Mayor of Cardiff, Cllr Kate Lloyd, and the French Consul, Mme Rapport

O N L O O K E R

SAIN Y GÂN

Spring is in the airs

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The Welsh Gold Collection Traditions SCD2559 Tracks and artists on the 3rd CD in the Welsh Gold series: Mympwy Llwyd - Crasdant; Y march glas - Ar Log; Set y golomen - Calan; Si hei lwli - Dafydd Iwan; Ei di’r deryn du? - Siân James; Aberhonddu - Carreg Lafar; Cainc y datgeiniad - Gwenan Gibbard; Hoff jigiau Robin Huw Bowen; Y deryn du a’i blufyn sidan - Plethyn

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The Complete Collection on 3 CDs by the great Welsh tenor; The faerie song; Come Margarita come; Annabelle Lee; Silent noon; Who is Sylvia?; Hyder; Arafa don; Cartref…

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ffôn 01286 831.111 ffacs 01286 831.497 archeb@sainwales.com

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Web Directory & CLASSIFIED

ARCHITECTURAL SERVICES/ GWASANAETHAU PENSAERNIOL Martin Watts, Maesyreos, Llanwrda, Sir Gaerfyrddin Plans prepared for new dwellings, extensions, conversions, renovations, disabled adaptations, listed buildings. All drawings on CAD system. Martin Watts, Maesyreos, Llanwrda. SA19 8HD 01550 777 591 martin@watts5712.freeserve.co.uk

ART GALLERIES www.orielqueenshallgallery.org.uk Spacious art gallery on the top of the Queen’s Hall, Narberth, which shows contemporary works of art. Exhibitions change monthly. Also, ceramics, sculptures and installations in a smaller gallery below. www.artwales.com The original and best website for Welsh art by Wales' premier gallery. Work by Wales' leading artists, past and present. This essential website is updated daily. www.bridge-gallery.co.uk Landscape and Wildlife Fine Art Gallery showcasing artists from Wales.

CLOTHING

PHOTOGRAPHY

Kids Casuals www.kidscasuals.com Kid friendly t-shirts, caps, and clothing in colourful designs that children love.

www.photolibrarywales.com The largest collection of images of Wales: the arts, travel, sport, business, lifestyle, personalities, environment and concept images to over 1,000 clients worldwide.

FOOD

CARMARTHEN CAMERA CENTRE YOUR LOCAL PHOTOGRAPHIC DEALER CALL: 01267 222300

www.foodloversbritain.com A virtual foodlovers fair. Tried and tested quality food and drink producers in your locality (simply tap in your post code), advice on what’s in season, where to find it, recipes, offers and comment. The Blue Boar Bistro 3 WATER STREET, CARMARTHEN TEL: 01267 233875 Comfortable, welcoming and child friendly. A simple unpretentious menu. Proper home cut, home made chips are a rare treat; home cooked ham, faggots, soup of the day, sandwiches. Or just relax on the sofa with a coffee and the paper. OPEN TUESDAY TO SATURDAY. EVENING MEALS FRIDAY AND SATURDAY ONLY.

GARDENS www.aberglasney.org A charming website which not only gives a good idea of the garden but incorporates tips and advice, forthcoming events and details. Beautiful illustrations, the flowers and plants you might see in any given month.

WELSH GOODS www.cadwyngifts.com Gifts from Wales and Fair Trade Gifts from the Developing World. Our company was set up by people involved in campaigning to secure a future for Welsh-speaking communities and to win freedom for Wales to take it's place among the nations of the world and make direct contact with other peoples. www.popethyngymraeg.com Nwyddau Cymraeg a Chymreig o bob math! All sorts of Welsh language goods. 'Croeso' doormats, CDs, DVDs, clothing, flags, games, books, language learning, beauty products, posters and more. Worldwide shipping. Site Navigable in Welsh and English. www.t-d-r.biz t d’ r’ Publishers of Welsh music for piano, organ and choir. MODEL AGENCY

GREAT OUTDOORS AUTO www.gravells.com The Renault dealer - the oldest Renault dealership in the UK www.thomasservices.co.uk Over 20 years providing specialist Renault servicing and quality new and used cars and vans in Carmarthenshire.

Walk in Wales www.walkinwales.com Photofeatures, guides, maps of walks in Wales. HELPING OTHERS www.makingswanseaproud.com Do you like a challenge? To find out a bit more, visit our website.

www.lushmodelagency.co.uk Male and female models for all your business occasions. INTERNET SERVICES www.clickbridge.co.uk ClickBridge Solutions: Professional solutions for website projects, eMarketing and eCommerce. www.scl.co.uk SCL Internet:Business Services Provider

Internet

CALLIGRAPHY

MARKETING

STORAGE

www.ieuanreeslettering.co.uk Ieuan Rees Lettering & Calligraphy: Ieuan Rees is the world-renowned lettering designer and artist.

www.camfa.com Camfa Cyf/Ltd. Copy writing and marketing for businesses in all industries, specialising in web content.

www.storagesolutionswales.com Storage Solutions Wales Ltd. Self-storage and archiving facilities for commercial and domestic needs.

To advertise your site here please call 01267 290188

C a mbr i a THE NATIONAL MAGAZINE OF WALES CYLCHGRAWN CENEDLAETHOL CYMRU

What’s

hot in Wales

90 YEARS OF SAVE THE CHILDREN FUND - SAVE THE CHILDREN’S 90TH ANNIVERSARY Save the Children was founded in 1919 by two sisters Eglantyne Jebb and her sister Dorothy Buxton who campaigned for children threatened by starvation following the First World War. Eglantyne then went on to campaign for the rights of these children which led to the formation of the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights Of the Child. The Woman Who Saved the Children written by Save the Children fundraiser, author and mother of three young daughters Clare Mulley will be published on the 24th of April 2009 by Oneworld Publications. All author royalties will be donated to Save the Children. Save the children Fund has close ties with Wales: Eglantyne Jebb, spent much of her very happy childhood in the hills west of Oswestry. She was well aware that many children in this country were living deprived lives as much as those in far off places, and during the strikes of the 1920s Save the Children Fund set up centres for mothers and young children providing milk and a meal. Events to mark the 90th anniversary will also be held in Wales. The annual Women in Wales Lunch held on April 24th at the City Hall, Cardiff will mark this milestone with the great comic actor Victor Spinetti as guest speaker, a raffle, a silent auction, and a live auction. The Lunch is the major Save the Children fundraising event in Wales, raising over £45,000 every year. If you would like to attend contact Sharon Donald at the Save the Children in Wales office on 029 2080 3250. Save the Children Week is also held this year from Sunday 26th April to Saturday 2nd May, and the charity is calling on everyone to get involved to raise funds by holding a ‘Go-Tea-potty party. For information please contact Jessica Evans, Community Fundraising Executive - Wales on 029 2034 5224 for a GoTea-potty pack or email: j.evans@savethechildren.org.uk. More from www.savethechildren.org.uk/goteapotty

ST DAVIDS CATHEDRAL FESTIVAL,

22 – 31ST MAY. The Festival celebrates its thirty-first year in 2009 with a stunning array of concerts. This year sees the première of two new festival commissions, one by the world-renowned concert organist David Briggs, ‘Briggs: St Davids Service’, commissioned by The Friends of St Davids Cathedral, and a première of Mark Blatchly’s ‘St Davids Mass’ for treble voices. David Briggs will also be giving the Welsh première of his transcription of Mahler’s 6th Symphony. A host of performers will provide a wide variety of entertainment, including The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, Natalie Clifton-Griffith, The Corelli Orchestra, The Tallis Scholars, Natalie Clein, BBC National Orchestra of Wales and many more. Tickets: Lionel Griffiths, Tel: 01348 831033 Information: contact the Administrator on 01437 720057, or www.stdavidscathedral.org.uk

RHEILFFYRDD FFESTINIOG

AC ERYRI / FFESTINIOG & WELSH HIGHLAND RAILWAYS - The Welsh Highland Railway (Rheilffordd Eryri) carries passengers behind the most powerful two-foot gauge steam locomotives ever built, through some of the most spectacular scenery in the UK. The last phase of an eleven year project uniting North Wales’ newest railway with the world’s oldest independent railway will be complete this year providing an excellent opportunity to enjoy the dramatic scenery of Snowdonia. From May 21 you can travel through the Aberglaslyn Pass to Hen Hafod! Hen Hafod is just one-and-a-half miles south of Beddgelert, but will allow passengers to travel through the magnificent Aberglaslyn Pass! Information Tel:

C a mbr i a THE NATIONAL MAGAZINE OF WALES CYLCHGRAWN CENEDLAETHOL CYMRU

01766 516000 or www.festrail.co.uk