Cambria Summer 2009 by Chris Jones

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WALES’S MAGAZINE

cambria The National Magazine of Wales MAY/JUNE 2009 MAI/MEHEFIN

Cylchgrawn Cenedlaethol Cymru £3.50 €3.50

R BRINLEY JONES

Wales and the world SIÔN JOBBINS

The Battle of Brittany Dafydd ap Llywelyn ‘SHIELD OF WALES’ Tregaron and the Wild West

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CONTENTS VOLUME 11 NUMBER 1

8 8 8

EDITOR’S LETTER

LETTERS

POLITICS& OPINION

CLIVE BETTS, SIÔN JOBBINS, ROYSTON JONES, HUW LAWRENCE

BEYOND CAMBRIA The Welsh people has helped enhance the quality of life of people all over the world says DR R. BRINLEY JONES

REMEMBERING THE SHIELD OF WALES DR CRAIG JONES on the life and reign of one of Wales’s forgotten heroes, the Welsh Prince Dafydd ap Llywelyn, honoured with the title ‘Tarian Cymru’ - Shield of Wales

TREGARON - WALES AND THE WILD WEST

Tregaron lies in the very heartland of Y Fro Cymraeg. World-renowned Celtic jeweller Rhiannon looks back on more than 30 years of change

MENDELSSOHN IN WALES The composer Felix Mendelssohn first visited Wales in 1829 staying at Rhydymwyn near Mold, but he was less than impressed by traditional Welsh folk music says DAVID JONES

8 8 8

ROY NOBLE

A fair to remember

TRAVEL

Touring France in the footsteps of Samuel Beckett

CULTURE

MOTORING

40 47 48 49 56 51 53 58 60

DIRECTORY

The best places to eat in Wales

FOOD

DOROTHY DAVIES

ONLOOKER

CeltFest09; West Wales Food Fair at the NBGW

FESTIVAL GUIDE

Gregynog; Two Rivers; Green Man

WEB DIRECTORY

cambria’s Welsh website guide

WHAT’S HOT

Events and happenings around the country

LITERATURE BOOKS POETRY MUSIC OPERA

8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8

NATURE ENVIRONMENT GARDENS

Y CLAWR / THE COVER: MARI LWYD

on Tregaron; Profile: CHRISTOPHER MEREDITH

GWYN GRIFFITHS MEIC STEPHENS SAM ADAMS:

on the publishing scene in Wales

Gone Away; GILLIAN CLARKE: Coins

NORMA LORD:

Alan Osborne’s This is the Day - The Oratorio

JOHN CHRIS KINSEY

Nature Diary; KARL SHOWLER on Bees

WOOD IS GOOD:

heating through wood gasification

CAROLINE PALMER:

Pontypool’s picturesque splendour

JOHN E. EDWARDS:

The long days before SatNav

on Garlleg gwyllt - Wild garlic

67 CeltFest09

CONTRIBUTORS 11 NUMBER 1 2009 MAI-MEHEFIN

VOLUME

MEIC STEPHENS,

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

MAY-JUNE

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.

PATRONS

SIÔN JOBBINS

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 one of Wales’s best-loved radio and television personalities.

ROY NOBLE

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.

EDITOR

Frances Jones-Davies POLITICAL EDITOR

Clive Betts FEATURES EDITOR

Frances Davies LITERARY EDITOR

Meic Stephens EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Siôn T. Jobbins

CARL RYAN is a professional photographer specialising in extreme sports photography and fashion.

ADVISORY BOARD

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

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

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

CHRIS KINSEY

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

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

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

MARI STERLING

- 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

‘THE LAND IS IN ITS PRIME’ SAID TONY, WHOSE COWS INHABIT THE FIELDS AROUND US. I had been commenting on the beautiful weather and luxurious growth of grass. Looking down the Tywi Valley bursting with health and vitality, it seems the perfect description of a promising early summer. Long may it remain so. It seems to me that recycling is common sense, if something can be used again, use it again, otherwise it is sheer profligacy. We live in bounteous times, in many ways no other generation has had it as easy as we have, yet we take it for granted; many of our day-to-day luxuries have become necessities. I don’t ever want to have to do without a washing machine. The thought of having to heat water manually for a bath is quite exhausting and off-putting. If we at cambria can use it again, we do. Many of you, perhaps, have experienced our recycled envelopes - I hope you don’t mind. We have had the odd rare complaint, but I believe that most of you will applaud our intentions. Please forgive this quirk as it is something we believe we should be doing, and we will continue to do so. In the last issue of the magazine we ran an article on bio-mass. In this issue we are following it up with a piece on wood burning boilers. We hope that over time, this series of articles will build into an overview of the options available as against contemporary electrical, oil-fired and hot water heating systems. Until recently alternatives to electricity or oil were prohibitively expensive to install, but this is no longer the case. Perhaps in the future many of us will become self-sufficient in terms of power, perhaps harnessing energy via individual small turbines (not from those state-sponsored environmentally inimicable monstrosities), or from streams, solar panels, ground-source heating systems, or using wood-fired boilers such as the one described in the article on page 53. MARI STERLING

Cambria certainly gets around, and sometimes surprises even us with its whereabouts. The other day we gained a new subscriber after the magazine had been found on a coffee table in the reception area of an hotel in Indonesia. Over the years we have had tales of babies, boats and even a farm in the Yemen (the banner of Owain Glyndwˆr is flown on the gate posts) being named after Cambria.

As an afterthought, I do not think of myself as a particularly political animal but it staggers me when I find that people don’t - or even can’t be bothered - to vote. I regard it not only as a right but as a privilege for which I am extremely grateful - less than a hundred years ago women died so that I might have the vote. I would guess that the majority of our readers do vote, but I am sometimes surprised hearing about those who don’t. Every vote matters, even if you think many politicians are a useless lot! Your vote is Wales’s defence - and her future.

FRANCES JONES-DAVIES

MYFYRDOD

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear ALAN COREN

(1938-2007) English writer and satirist.

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letters shakespeare and the welsh EDITOR

Only recently I came across the article Is Shakespeare Welsh? in Cambria July/August 2008. There was a reply in your your Sep/Oct issue of the same year. The discussion led me to dig out one of my old term papers written while I was doggedly pursuing a degree at the University of Delaware in the early 1970’s. Intrigued by the Welsh characters portrayed in some of the plays, I maintained that, unlike his predecessor Chaucer, Shakespeare did not introduce characters who spoke with dialects other than standard Southern or London merely to introduce humour, but to portray realism. His audiences would have been perfectly familiar with the peculiarities of Welsh pronunciation to be able to enjoy its representation on the London stage. His Welsh characters, portrayed through dialect, were of the race from whom the Tudors themselves had sprung, as had some of London’s leading citizens, including Mr. Secretary Cecil. For some years following the victory of Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485), London found itself full of Welsh traders, artisans, guildsmen, lawyers, teachers, and soldiers; their successful integration into all walks of public life meant that, in Shakespeare’s time, the only distinguishing feature of the London Welsh (apart from their legendary thrift and diligence) was (to Englishmen anyway) their peculiar dialect and resulting pronunciation of Elizabethan English. Welsh characters appear in four of Shakespeare’s plays: Richard II, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, and Henry IV, Part I. They may represent the playwrights’s own method of dealing with questions

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concerning the origin and characteristics of these enigmatic, strangetongued people who had produced a new dynasty in England, and who claimed for it the fulfilment of the old British bardic prophecies. You can be sure that Secretary Cecil or the Queen herself would not have been amused by representations of Welsh characters as clowns or buffoons. It is noticeable that Glendower and the Welsh Captain in Richard II derive their Welshness from their vivid imaginations and picturesque, descriptive language, not merely from their dialect. The name Fluellen seems to be a corruption of the Welsh Llewelyn or Llywelyn, with its initial consonant practically impossible for an Englishman to master. Shakespeare’s use of “p” for “b,” “sh” for “j,” (a letter unknown in the Welsh alphabet), “ff ” for “v” or “f ” and “t” for “d” represent fairly well the speech habits of native Welsh speakers affecting English pronunciation. Particularly subtle is the use of “g” for “c” when this sound ends a word, for this is a noticeable characteristic of the Welsh language even today, where it appears in the conjunction “ac” (and). Shakespeare was capitalising on the new popularity of the “stage Welshman” that had begun with Peel’s Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First (1593) and continued with Michael Drayton’s The Welshman (1595) and Anthony Munday’s John a Kent and John a Cumber (c. 1587). The successful reception of the Glendower and daughter scene in Henry IV, Part I may have induced the introduction of Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor as a Welsh parson, but it was Polydor Vergil’s History of England (1534) that had earlier stimulated literary curiosity in Wales, for it furnished a muchneeded background knowledge to a closer understanding of the people

from whom Henry of Monmouth and the Tudors had sprung. George L. Kittredge, a noted Shakespeare scholar, suggested that the Welsh captain in Richard II was modelled after the historical Owain Glyndwˆr and that the character was later rounded out in Henry IV Part I. Other scholars have seen Fluellen (in Henry V) as perhaps modelled after Roger Williams, a well-known Elizabethan soldier of fortune. Welsh patriotism was attested to by Ben Jonson in his Masque For the Honour of Wales (1618) in which one of its characters states, “The country has always been fruitful of loyal hearts to your majesty, a very garden and seed-plot of honest minds and men. What lights of learning hath Wales sent forth for your schools? What industrious students of your laws? What able ministers of your justice? When hath the crown in all times better servitors, more liberal of their lives and fortunes?” In the Shakespeare company before 1621 were a Phillips, a Rice, and a Gough, all of whom were possibly Welsh, and the proverb “Heb Ddieu Heb Ddim” (sic) appears on the first Quarto edition of some of the bard’s plays printed by James Roberts, a London Welshman. Some writers have put forward the theory that the author of Henry V and other plays was not Shakespeare at all, but John Williams, born in Caernarfonshire in 1582 who became Privy Councillor and Dean of Westminster under James I and whose portrait has been suggested as the one that has come down to posterity as that of Shakespeare (that it may indeed not be that of the poet dramatist, for a recent discovery of another Shakespeare portrait shows entirely different characteristics). Whoever wrote the Shakespeare canon, or parts of it, it is very noticeable that all the Welsh

characters come out well. They were never assailed with the rancorous hostility so often a note of Irish and Scottish portraiture, and they were never really considered as outsiders. Peter N. Williams Newark, Delaware USA

A NEW DARK AGE? EDITOR

Could it be that this current government is leading the country inexorably to a second Dark Age? The state of the economy is now a basket case, with such investments as Premium Bond prizes now being no more than when these bonds were introduced in 1956! To be sure, the blind rush to cover our shores and land with impotent wind generation will almost guarantee the lights going out, and in more senses than one, usher in a second Dark Age! dis aliter visum (man proposes, God disposes).

country whose people and culture I love, I feel I cannot allow this to go unchallenged. I would be very interested to learn how he can justify his comment that Wales is dying, because all my travels in the past few years indicate that, praise be, it is not only surviving but thriving. Indeed its economy also appears to be coping with the financial crisis considerably better than countries such as Ireland and Iceland. I do realise there are areas of deprivation but these are no worse than those I have seen in London’s East End, Manchester, Glasgow or my home city of Liverpool. His categorical statement that Britain is the sick man of Europe also puzzles me. There are lots of facts we could consult to assess the health of a country but one I value more than most is unemployment. For that, the latest statistics show that the United Kingdom’s jobless rate is lower than many of our continental neighbours, including France, Belgium, Germany and Spain. If Britain is sick then vast swathes of Europe are terminal. Sorry, Terry, your pessimism is overdone. Wales is not a basket case.

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.

of cawl and shinkin

EDITOR EDITOR

In Terry Breverton’s lament about windfarms (Cambria, March/April) he states that ‘Wales is dying - we are the poorest part of Britain, itself the sick man of Europe’. As an Englishman who is a regular and frequent visitor to Wales, a

Judith Toms Aberdare

Neil Dunkin St. Albans Herts

Dave Haskell Boncath Sir Benfro

wales is thriving!

terms of what I have learnt/heard in Wales I thought these two tips may be interesting. My Welsh friend, and erstwhile business partner improved on the cawl recipe I inherited from my mother-in-law, suggesting that once it was thoroughly cooked through it was a good idea to lift two ladles of the vegetables out of the mix, liquidise them and then return to thicken, and at the very last minute to add a generous amount of chopped parsley for colour, flavour and aroma. The other tip is hardly a recipe, more a Welsh idiosyncracy; my husband’s grandmother enjoyed a cup of tea with a slice of cheese floating on top, it apparently softened with the heat, she called it shinkin. I have never tried it, and it doesn’t appeal to me, but I wonder if anyone else has heard of this?

I do not pretend to be a wonderful cook - having only about four recipes I feel entirely comfortable with and the results of which are completely devoured. However in

er serchus gof Peter Robert Everard Willey 1922-2009

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POLITICS

Clive Betts

The politics of history

recisely why has a crucial part of the history of Wales been near-hidden from the general Welsh public and from tourists for so long? Was this done by the former Labour Welsh government for political reasons? And why did it take an English-born civil servant and her staff working for Cadw to bring them to light ? Everyone knows about the giant fortresses of Caernarfon, Conwy, Beaumaris and so on dotted along our northern coast, but what has the Assembly itself had to say about the resistance which led to the Conquest of 1282? In all of 10 years - hardly anything. A perusal using the Senedd search engine turns up precisely one item - a question from Plaid AM Leanne Wood (South Central) asking then Labour minister Alun Pugh (Clwyd West) for a listing of sites associated with Owain Glyndw ˆr, the national hero and Prince of Wales, who kept the English on tenterhooks until his disappearance around 1416. Ms Wood aimed to spark interest and activity surrounding the military campaign to revive Wales. Yet the question fell off the end of the oral-answer list and never again was the subject mentioned by anyone of any party. Tory Lisa Francis, the former member for Mid and West, pointed out the need to mark the sites of battles fought in Wales, and won an agreement from minister Pugh to consider publication of a map “to help walkers and history buffs”. In fact, the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historic Monuments has since done much of that work. But, earlier this year everything changed. Alun Ffred Jones (Arfon), Plaid’s heritage minister, quietly handed out £2m for the upgrading of eight historic sites of “iconic significance to Welsh culture, heritage and nationhood”. It was certainly a quiet announcement, made in the middle of a holiday period. Other AMs had heard rumours about it, but only a few. Liberal Democrats heritage spokesman Eleanor Burnham (North) was angered. ‘Why has this announcement been slipped out without debate?” she demanded. “This is a continuation of the secrecy which is becoming far too common in the Assembly. “Under our committee system prior to the last election, we could have expected the minister to tell us in the committee what he was planning, take our questions, and in this way ensure higher-quality government.” Ms

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There is a strong suspicion that former minister Alun Pugh stood in awe of some of Labour’s old-guard who regard Edward I’s castles as protectors of their own constituency votes.

Burnham is a strong supporter. But then perhaps the coalition government doesn’t want to shout everything from the rooftops. And politics is the reason. There is a strong suspicion that Alun Pugh, although he was a good devolutionist, stood in awe of some of Labour’s old-guard who regard Edward I’s castles as protectors of their own constituency votes. Tory leader Nick Bourne said Labour “refuses to acknowledge as history anything prior to the formation of the trade unions and of the Labour Party”. He spoke of the way the trust caring for the Owain Glyndw ˆr Parliament House in Machynlleth had been steadily ignored by Labour. “They don’t even have a phone.” Could there be some truth in these complaints ? When Cambria spoke to Mr Pugh for this article he denied leaders such as Owain Glyndw ˆr had been ignored. “Welsh Labour people have a keen sense of Welsh history,” he said. “But it is understandable that they have a special interest in the industrial revolution, which brought the Labour Party into being.” Alun Cairns (South West), the Tories’ culture spokesman, smelled electoral politics. He didn’t disagree with the new moves, but merely hoped that the minister hadn’t chosen the sites “to further his political agenda”! Even the minister was defensive when asked the reason for his decision to upgrade and open to the public sites from the period of independent Wales - such as Sycharth the manor-home of Glyndw ˆr near Oswestry, and of Glyndyfrdwy, the castle motte near Corwen where Owain raised the banner of revolt in 1400. The minister gave credit for the list of 18 to his civil servants rather than to himself. Mind you, a long-serving nationalist said

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Mr Jones was just being crafty when faced by a journalist seeking to cause trouble. Mr Jones denied that Cadw and the Royal Commission were still under the influence of staff who were too English-influenced and uncaring-ofWelshness. It has sometimes been said that their experts have found it hard to believe that the independent Welsh princes could build castles every bit as fine as the Normans. That canard was scotched, of course, by the massive excavations which recently uncovered Dolforwyn, near Abermule, from the turf-covered wreckage of ages. But even the minister has said that just a decade or so ago Glyndw ˆr could not have been honoured so unequivocally as the national hero of Wales. It’s still difficult to believe that his name has been attached to Wrexham’s new (Glyndw ˆ r) University. Check on the university’s web-site for the academics’ paeons of honour. And a flip through the Royal Commission’s web pages for the great Welsh fortress of Deganwy Castle, near Llandudno, another of the Welsh sites being honoured, turns up an entry referring its greatest owner as being “Maelgwn, tyrant of Gwynedd”! Admittedly, John Davies in his History of Wales refers to the most powerful of the kings of Wales as “a man of impressive sinfulness”. We can surely see in that one-word description the old-style belittling of anything Welsh. No such insult is attached to the Lord Rhys, who occupied Nevern Castle in Pembrokeshire, another site being upgraded by ministerial fiat. The commission say this is “a key but strangely neglected site in Welsh history”. It was one of the sites occupied by a princely llys (or court), and Cadw intend to uncover some of those remains. The same will happen at the extensive but mysterious Abergwyngregyn, near Bangor. As the home of both Llywelyns, I and II, this is one of the most important sites in Wales. For nigh on two decades, the owners have pleaded - in vain - for a proper investigation.

Cadw also has a list of secondary sites.We can be sure that the mysterious Castell Morgraig, overlooking Cardiff from beside the Travellers’ Rest pub on the Caerffili road is among them. Is this, as many argue, a late-independent Welsh castle or, as in the eyes of the Royal Commission a Norman site, which they say was a cavalry base linked to what remains of a warning beacon for signalling to Cardiff Castle a mile away? If Cadw act at Morgraig, the first job - after a drink at the pub - is to shore up the ruins which have tumbled since they were first exposed in 1908. The second, surely, must be to dig into that mysterious “signalling station”. In addition, we need a modern method of explaining what has been found. These are all monuments too small to justify a staffed presence, but Cadw realise the need for modern interpretative methods to replace the standard iron boards: audio guides perhaps and, more importantly, the posting of information booklets on-line. The glories of Welsh history lie in the medieval and early industrial periods. During the latter, Wales often led the world. Cadw have already inaugurated a massive survey of the early ironworks scattered around the northern rim of the southern industrial valleys. In his time, Mr Pugh was an enthusiast for an important project to uncover the very beginnings of the world’s industrial revolution (and, don’t let’s forget, global warming!). The annual publication Archaeology in Wales devotes 200 large, tightly-packed pages to the year’s discoveries, but far more needs to be done. The Assembly is hampered in leading the way through the abolition of the old committee system which enabled the sharp questioning of ministers and their being held to account. At present we suffer nothing less than a stylised copy of a Westminster system which fails to penetrate to the nub of both decision-making and policy-execution. No wonder important issues slip, so easily, under the radar.

Welsh History in the making!

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OPINION

Siôn Jobbins

The Battle of Brittany

2009

sees the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War. In the national narrative of the British state it is the Great Patriotic War. For all in Wales it is a just war. However, it is a much more awkward event for many other small nations. These are the nations of Eastern Europe, like Latvia, caught between Hitler and Stalin as they chanced their dice fighting with one side or the other, desperate to retain some semblance of independence from the claws of two genocidal dictators. But how many of us know of the fate of the Wales’s cousin, Llydaw - Brittany? And, maybe more pertinently, as we debate and deliberate the war how would we as Welsh people have acted were we in their predicament? For the history of the Nazi occupation of Brittany from 1940-44 is a Greek tragedy. Gwenno Piette was born and raised in Aberystwyth and is the author of the University of Wales Press’s recently published Histories of Europe: Brittany - A Concise History. Her family’s story throws an interesting light on this largely forgotten story; a story which still divides Breton society. Gwenno’s father was Arvel Piette, a Breton patriot who settled in Aberystwyth after the war. He was loosely associated with a handful of Breton nationalists and patriots who fled, sometimes for their lives, to Wales or Ireland following the ‘Liberation’. Arvel was born Jean Piette in 1920 in Lille in north eastern France, the son of a non-Breton speaking Breton mother and French father. In his late teens Jean learnt Breton, adopted a Breton name Arvel Even, and became involved in what the Bretons call the Emsav (‘renovation’), the national movement for Breton rights. At the outbreak of the war he found himself studying botany at the University of Rennes, the capital of Brittany. The situation of Breton at the outbreak of the war was dire. Lessons in Breton, were prohibited in schools, in fact the French Education Minister, M de Monzie, succinctly announced in 1926 that ‘for the linguistic unity of France, Breton shall be exterminated’. Breton was prohibited on Radio-Rennes. There was no status for Breton in civic life at all. And it wasn’t as if there had been no call for such recognition for the language - a language spoken by an estimated one million people. Many Bretons had not forgotten the betrayal of the

An estimated one million Bretons were drafted to fight for France (out of a total population of some 3 million). Tens of thousands of them spoke no French and a quarter of them never returned - the highest ratio of any ‘region’ of France.

ideals of men such as the poet Yann-Ber Kalloc’h (the c’h in Breton is pronounced as the Welsh ‘ch’). Like our Hedd Wyn, Yann-Ber was killed in battle in 1917. An estimated one million Bretons were drafted to fight for France (out of a total population of some 3 million). Tens of thousands of them spoke no French and a quarter of them never returned - the highest ratio of any ‘region’ of France. Like the Ulster Unionists, Yann-Ber thought that at the end of the war the French would recognise the sacrifice and fidelity of the Bretons and reward them. He drew up a petition intended to be sent to the Paris government asking for Breton and Breton history to be taught at school. Yann-Ber never lived to be disappointed. However, many like the Marquis de L’Estourbeillon did. The Marquis even made requests to the Peace Conferences of 1919 and to President Wilson himself for status for the Breton language, only to find his pleas fall on deaf ears. For, it seems, unlike the Ulster Unionists, being faithful servants of the state didn’t bring the Bretons any rights. Is it any surprise then than a section of Breton society believed in 1940 that the Germans couldn’t be any worse for Breton culture and language than the French? In many respects the ‘mistake’ of a section of Breton nationalists was the same mistake as the French army they both fought the last war. Where the French invested theirs in the Maginot Line, some Bretons invested their hope in the old Irish adage, ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Some Breton nationalists (around 80 individuals

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according to one estimate) actively collaborated with the Germans to try and promote independence for Brittany within a ‘Greater German Reich’. Thousands more kept their heads down but grabbed the relative linguistic freedom of Nazi occupation to promote Breton language and culture. Although never a prominent player, Arvel knew many of the leading names of the period and played his part in promoting the language he had come to love. Writing under various noms de plume he contributed articles to Breton magazines and even assisted with the historic Breton language broadcasts on Radio Rennes-Bretagne. Amazingly, Breton had never before been broadcast on French radio - it was the Nazi occupation that made it possible. Radio Rennes-Bretagne/Roazon-Breiz broadcast programmes in French and Breton and, by June 1943 under the direction of Roparz Hemon, there were hourlong broadcasts on a daily basis. Arvel’s use of noms de plume and his relatively low profile meant that he escaped the ‘justice’ meted out to many Bretons in similar situations and at an annual Breton language summer school shortly after the war, Arvel met Mair Phillips, Gwenno’s mother. Mair was originally from Pont-y-pridd but had moved to Birmingham to work at her brother, Delwyn’s, drapery. Delwyn’s home became something of a safe house for Bretons after the war. Delwyn also gave sanctuary to Yann Fouéré and Gildas Haffrennou. This latter was the son of Taldir (a well-known Breton nationalist who was in gaol) and escaped from Brittany to work as a tailor under the assumed name ‘Claude Gwinamann’. Many Bretons were punished by ‘civil degradation’ (being stripped of citizenship) and others were sentenced to death. One such person was Roparz Hemon. Fortunately for Hemon, a young reporter from the Welsh weekly Y Faner attended his trial in Paris in December 1945 - much to the consternation of the French judiciary. That reporter was Dewi Watkin Powell - now Judge Dewi Watkin Powell - ever since an indefatigable fighter for the Welsh cause. Dewi’s report and the subsequent correspondence in the Faner offer a fascinating glimpse into a highly testing and nervous period which culminated in a phenomenally brave bilingual pamphlet (published in Welsh and French) by the Council of the National Eisteddfod - Adroddiad y ddirprwyaeth i Lydaw Ebrill 1947 (Rapport sur la Visite en Bretagne de la Delegation Galloise, Avril 1947). The publication made a forceful case for the linguistic rights of the Bretons to be respected and for any punishments to be lenient. It also aimed to challenge and dispel the common prejudice of the French psyche against the Breton people and their language, in a manner not

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A letter by ‘Breton I’ estimated that at least 3,000 Bretons were arrested from 1944 onwards and many more were in hiding. The majority of these people, he attested, were not involved in politics. Members of Breton dance and pipe-bands were taken into custody as were many priests.

achieved since Carnhuanawc’s report of his travels to Brittany in the first incarnation of Cambria in 1840. Arvel in Gwenno’s words ‘slipped under the radar’ and in time found a job at the Plant Breeding Station outside Aberystwyth, but thousands of other were not so lucky. Following Dewi Watkin Powell’s report, Y Faner published a series of letters on the situation in Brittany. These can be seen in the excellent anthology of Breton literature, The Turn of the Ermine by Jacqueline Gibson and Gwyn Griffiths (Francis Boutle Publishers, 2006). A letter by ‘Breton I’ estimated that at least 3,000 Bretons were arrested from 1944 onwards and many more were in hiding. The majority of these people, he attested, were not involved in politics. Members of Breton dance and pipe-bands were taken into custody as were many priests. All Breton papers were banned in August 1944 including the Breton children’s magazine Olole. Brezoneg er Skol, which provided books for teachers and pupils was deemed illegal in December 1944, its chairman Yann Fouéré thrown into prison, and the teaching of Breton history in primary schools prohibited. Ropaz Hemon, director of Radio-Roazon was imprisoned under the incredible charge of ‘cultural relations’ - which amounted to broadcasting programmes where Breton farmers discussed Breton literature. The correspondent lists those who were executed or condemned to death. As ‘Breton II’ wrote in Y Faner 23 January 1946, ‘Many feel it is the language itself that is on trial’. It is quite obvious that the French authorities - with

the willing help of pro-France Bretons - saw the German capitulation as an opportunity to get rid of the Breton movement, or at least to weaken it fatally. The alleged collaboration and treachery (to which country?) was excuse enough for the collective punishment of a whole culture. There were neither mass killings nor expulsions but the Breton culture and language became, conveniently, associated with Nazism - a ruse still used by some to this day as a stick to beat even the most modest of demands for the language. This anti-Breton psychosis seems to ignore the inconvenient fact that millions of French-speakers collaborated with the Nazis, but that their language wasn’t attacked. Didn’t millions of Germans also collaborate with the Nazis, but was that language discriminated against on German soil? With the defeat of a vile philosophy based on the concept of ‘Untermenschen’ (sub-humans), the French state slid back to the state philosophy of Untersprächen (sub-languages) with ease. The very DNA and philosophy of the French Republic it seems, breeds an arrogance in those who adhere to it which takes as evident that some languages deserve to die - the politics of the Republic of Spite. However, as we recall the anniversary of the beginning of the war, things are changing in Brittany. For instance

there is currently a mass campaign to reverse the Nazi’s decision to split Nantes (the historical capital) from Brittany, and the culture and language so long ridiculed and humiliated by the French state has refused to die. Etymologists believe that the Welsh word for Brittany ‘Llydaw’ - has the same Indo-European root as ‘Latvia’ and the Latin word from which derives ‘littoral’: land by the sea. But etymology isn’t the only link. Like Latvia and other East European countries, Llydaw, Brittany, was put in an unenviable situation from which we in Wales were gratefully spared. Their choices were how to keep their culture and language alive - decisions which could mean the difference between freedom and imprisonment for men like Arvel or life and death for others. Brittany, like Latvia, found herself on the wrong side in a war between forces far stronger than herself. Maybe, twenty years after Latvia and other countries managed to throw away the stigma of defeat in the Second World War, Brittany can do so too. There is certainly a new confidence in Brittany, and that is good news for Europe, as the morality of our continent is her languages - large and small. Seventy years after the war innocent Bretons, like Arvel Piette, who wanted nothing more than dignity for their language and culture will be vindicated.

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Royston Jones

Croeso?

s that great and prolific poet Anonymous said around 1250, “Sumer is icumen in... ”. To judge by the rest of the quatrain he was obviously looking forward to it, but then, he didn’t have tourists to worry about. Loud varlets in convoys of ox-carts with their ill-mannered offspring and loud-talking spouses, taking over his local ale house and insulting him and his quaint rustic ways. Then, purses bulging with groats, scouring the locality for cotts and hovels to buy. No, indeed; the only visitor old Anon. knew was the “cuccu”. Not that I am agin tourists per se. For we’ve all been tourists at one time or another; perhaps every year, or more than once a year if we’re lucky (or Assembly Members). But the readers of this august publication are

unquestionably decorous and responsible tourists. Not for us the ‘Kiss Me Quick’ hats or that curious driving style that sees a map spread over the steering wheel of the company car travelling at ox-cart speed and holding up a stream of traffic. When we travel we seek knowledge, and we sympathise or even empathise with different cultures and ways of life. (This needn’t involve travelling far. As a boy I can recall travelling from my home on the north side of Swansea for days out in exotic Mumbles. Occasionally, among the older residents there, I would hear an echo of the old south Gower ‘down along, out along’ accent. But, ah! I was ever the sensitive child.) Regrettably, neither medieval poetry nor misty-eyed reminiscence prepares us for a consideration of the ravening monster that is tourism in contemporary Wales. Which may give a clue that my view of tourism in Wales

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departs from the authorised version on a number of vital points. More importantly, I shall touch on those aspects and corollaries of ‘Welsh’ tourism that the propaganda machine, unsurprisingly, ignores completely. Before launching my critique - for I am a fair-minded man - let me concede that tourism in Wales does indeed create jobs, business opportunities and, thereby, it generates wealth. But there my agreement with the propaganda machine ends. To begin with jobs. I believe that the current figure claimed by politicians and the tourism industry for jobs provided by tourism is over 100,000, which means it amounts to well over 10 percent of our total workforce. What these savants will never concede is that most of these jobs are seasonal, and even within the season they tend to be part-time, with the pay generally at or below the minimum wage. By and large these are unskilled jobs. So little to crow about there. How do we fare then with business opportunities? In a word, badly. First time visitors to Wales, particularly to the north and the west of the country, are struck by the absence of Welsh involvement in tourism. Apart from farm tourism and its associated caravan sites there often seems to be no Welsh involvement at all. Anyone hoping to enjoy the much-heralded ‘Taste of Wales’ will be in for a shock, for just about all the hotels, restaurants, cafés and pubs seem to be English owned and, because they’re generally family run, English staffed. Or visit a site maintained by Cadw and you’ll invariably be met by staff unable to properly pronounce the name of the historic site for which they’re responsible. The same applies to the tat-shops (‘gift shops’, to you) bedevilling almost every town and large village, that seem to source their dreary products from the same Asian sweatshop. This lack of Welsh involvement makes a mockery of ‘Welsh’ tourism. But surely tourism generates wealth? Here I cannot disagree. But from what I’ve already written it should be obvious that Welsh people see little of that wealth. Furthermore - and even conceding that some of that wealth stays in the locality - because the Welsh economy is so closely integrated with that of England much of the wealth generated finds its way back to England. Reaching everyone from the suppliers of candy floss machines to the Exchequer. Wealth creation in a colonial environment rarely, if ever, benefits the indigenes. Only an independent Wales could maximise for the Welsh the benefits from tourism. These then are the alleged benefits from tourism in Wales which, if considered honestly, prove to be chimeric and much less beneficial to Welsh people than the tourism propaganda machine would have us believe.

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First time visitors to Wales, particularly to the north and the west of the country, are struck by the absence of Welsh involvement in tourism. Apart from farm tourism and its associated caravan sites there often seems to be no Welsh involvement at all.

But that same propaganda machine refuses to concede that there are any drawbacks whatsoever. Which fails to paint the full picture of tourism’s effect on Wales and the Welsh people. Let us begin with aesthetic considerations, for much of the tourism we suffer is just plain tacky. Not even the most ardent defender of tourism would argue that a stretch of coastline is improved by row upon landscapeblotting row of trailer homes. Some developments are so crass that one wonders what the councillors involved were drinking when they gave planning permission. (Though it may be significant that many site owners are themselves councillors, or related to councillors, or else men belonging to the same ‘fraternal’ organisation.) I recently took a trip to Llangollen, and I followed the road towards Valle Crucis abbey and Eliseg’s pillar before heading up the Horseshoe Pass. This country road taking you to two of the most important sites in Welsh history is a mess, belittered with establishments offering bed and breakfast, ice cream, fast food, ‘medieval massage’ and God knows what else. On cresting the beautiful Bwlch yr Oernant itself one is greeted by an ugly concrete and glass complex of café, B & B, lavatories, tat-shop, etc., called .... The Ponderosa! While sheer ugliness is obvious, less apparent is the damage done by tourism to the Welsh population of the afflicted areas. Tourism areas are low wage areas. But they attract people with greater spending power than the

locals which, inevitably, results in most locals either being priced out of the private housing sector altogether or else having to buy a smaller property than would have been the case if, as elsewhere, property prices were roughly in sync with local wage levels. For example, a three-bedroomed terraced house in the Heads of the Valleys area might sell for £80,000. A similar property anywhere from Pembrokeshire to Ynys Môn costs three times that amount. Apologists for tourism - and that of course includes estate agents - would say that this disparity is due to the ‘attractiveness’ of western Wales; but western Wales has always been beautiful, it’s taken tourism to make the area known to millions of potential English buyers, and resulted in the influx we have experienced over the past thirty or forty years. Others, who cannot afford to buy a property, simply move to private rented accommodation or social housing. Make yourself homeless in Birmingham, move to rural Wales, and some agency or other must provide you with a place to live paid for out of public funds. Into this category come many misfits and undesirables who can best be described as white trash. The scale of this influx is now so great that it is changing the identity of rural and coastal communities from Welsh to English. To put it starkly, the Welsh are becoming a minority in their own country, and all thanks to tourism. It would be a revelation to someone from Tredegar or Neath to watch the Wales v England game in a pub in coastal Meirionnydd and see that the pub staff and most of the ‘locals’ support the team playing in white. So, yes, tourism creates jobs and generates wealth; therefore it is ‘good for Wales’. The problem with that assessment is that it divorces Wales from the Welsh; it treats Wales as a geographic expression devoid of an indigenous population, without a language, a culture, traditions and identity of its own. Which is a major reason for tourism proving so disastrous for the Welsh. Worse, those that understand this are deterred from speaking out because tourism has become almost a deity, from which naught but good flows, and therefore to question or criticise places one in the ranks of the heretics or the insane. While others - and for these I feel truly sorry - have been so well brainwashed that they believe the propaganda: struggling by on the minimum wage in a job unrelated to tourism, with no chance of ever owning a home, seeing the community they grew up in die; one hears them repeat unquestioningly the mantra taught them by their ‘betters’, “Where would we be without tourism?” As some Russian malcontent once mused, ‘What is to done?’ Well, without a meaningful Welsh government

we cannot hope to stem the flow of tourists nor the ugliness and Anglicisation that tourism brings. It will takes years if not decades to clear up the mess. But at the very least, and in the short term, we should be trying to make tourism work for, rather than against, the Welsh people. One obvious method is a tourism tax, such as is currently employed in many countries. In Italy, for example, Florence and Venice can charge up to €5 a day per person, while Sardinia levies a tourist tax on villas and yachts. (Even Berlusconi has to pay when he docks his floating palace.) A tourism tax has even been considered in south west England and Cornwall. There is no reason such a tax could not work in Wales with a devolved administration. The money raised should be spent in the areas from which it has been levied to alleviate the problems suffered by the indigenous population. It could be used in grants to help locals in the private housing market, or to help locals compete for the business opportunities now going to wealthier buyers from over the border. A larger portion could go to local authorities to repair the damage done to local infrastructure or to reduce council tax charges. Thus funded, councils might even be able to build new council houses. To argue that such a tax would reduce the numbers coming to Wales is no argument at all. Many more Welsh are disadvantaged by tourism than benefit from it, so how can we as a people lose out if fewer tourists come? Five million tourists paying the tax is better than twenty-five million untaxed tourists. Five million people staying an average of seven nights and paying two pound a head per night amounts to £70,000,000 every year. Let’s divide up the cake thus: £40,000,000 to local authorities; say £5,000,000 for collecting and administering the tax; leaving £25,000,000 to be distributed among individual locals to help them buy a home or go into business. That could work out at 500 grants of £50,000. Every year. In a decade we could see tourism benefiting rather than punishing our people. Merely considering such a tax would be a step in the right direction because it would show that, at long last, we are moving away from the blind acceptance of tourism as an unmitigated blessing. Whatever remedies or reparations we consider must begin with such an acceptance. The Wales we all love can no longer sustain - and will not long survive - the crass mass tourism we currently suffer. Tourism in Wales has become like the ‘cuccu’ of the poem and is displacing us from our nest. So let’s start making tourism work for the Welsh, rather than have it serve some disconnected and increasingly alien entity called, ‘Tourist Wales’.

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OPINION

Huw Lawrence

Hype and tradition

o someone who can remember further back than the nineties there are two noticeable things about Wales today, its apparently high profile and yet its fading sense of national definition. Cardiff has become a sexy destination. We have our own national opera company and we have Hay and the Faenol and the Brecon Jazz Festival (postponed but now back for 2009) and Sesiwn Fawr, and we have a truly remarkable crop of international stars in every field of entertainment, many of them Welsh speaking and none trying to avoid sounding Welsh. We have a Welsh Assembly and Wales is accepted as a nation. We can be proud to be Welsh, can’t we? Truth is we’ve always had our international stars and we should ask what this Cool Cymru image actually reflects, other than for those few who benefited from a boom in Cardiff, or those politicians who rose intoxicatingly from Council to ‘national’ politics. Yes, the Assembly gave our politics a ‘national’ rather than a ‘regional’ dimension, but we are miles from true national, law-making politics. We should ask how we appear to others. Nothing of any depth has come to replace our lost, mainly South Wales profile of industrial left-wing proletarianism. We have nothing like Scotland’s profile. We have no European profile at all, outside of rugby football, and not much of a British profile. Even in the Seventies and early eighties several London dailies had staff correspondents in Wales, but now none do, and Wales hardly figures in their pages. Oh, how we needed that Welsh daily newspaper that Plaid Cymru knifed in the back! We could do with a decent allWales national daily in English, too. But instead of pursuing genuinely enhancing initiatives our leaders gave us Blairist hype. Behind it languishes the reality of a nation becoming more and more invisible. I grew up in a dirtier, smokier country full of productive and extensive industrial communities, still recognisably the Wales documented by writers like Jack Jones, Lewis Jones and Gwyn Thomas, a Wales with far more Welsh speaking communities, their belief in social justice a binding factor. Today it is hard to see any visible means of support behind the glitzy image, and even less visible is anything for people to believe in. I grew up with so staunch a socialism that people didn’t grasp what the Beasleys were on about in Llangennech where I went to primary school - refusing to pay their rates like that

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For eight years the bailiffs took away the Beasley’s furniture before Llanelly (sic) Rural and District Council sent them a bilingual rates demand. Yet back in those days almost every councillor spoke Welsh.

because the form wasn’t in Welsh! The adults around me scratched their heads and used the word ‘fanatics’. For eight years the bailiffs took away the Beasley’s furniture before Llanelly (sic) Rural and District Council sent them a bilingual rates demand. Yet back in those days almost every councillor spoke Welsh. It was all to do with some political party I hadn’t heard of. I was ten. I hadn’t heard of Dylan Thomas, either, who died at that time. But I did know the Beasleys, in the sense that I went to school with one of their children. Their struggle is now a milestone on a road I myself took years later when I joined Plaid Cymru. Before that could happen a certain famous demonstration had to occur. The blocking of Trefechan bridge in Aberystwyth highlighted the language issue and set off a train of political events. I was a student in Manchester at the time of that demo, a city where I found work after graduating and where I got married, not returning to Wales till the seventies, with two small children I wanted to bring up speaking Welsh. Chance took a hand. A Manchester friend, born in Llanfrothen, invited me into a rainy, outlandish time warp where warm reserves of human spirit survived under towering slate tips. No longer would Gwyn Thomas’ characters seem larger than life. That was usual in Blaenau Ffestiniog, a town where Plaid Cymru found natural support but which returned a Labour member. First time I went in the Tap in Tanygrisiau I was asked who I was, where I was from and what I was doing there, and was expected to understand my questioners’ Welsh and account for myself. The more of my life that got spread out on the bar the more drinks got bought. I decided to stay, and moved into 1 Barlwyd Terrace,

that conveys meaningful social context. We can’t wish the past back, as every ‘movement’ relates to the special tensions and problems of its particular period, but we can call upon tradition. Wales’ traditional way of seeing and portraying people has always been as part and parcel of a wider social reality, but I find that recent writing, especially fiction (and not just in Wales) tends to portray the individual as disassociated, often as in existentialist trouble. Our tradition of seeing individuals as members of the social group tended to save us from this, but now publishers’ lists abound with novels whose characters focus only on personal perceptions and problems that do not weave into any fabric outside of personal life. I grant it’s a true reflection of the state we’re in. However, writers are not just mirrors, but influences. They influence their readers and also each other, forming ‘schools’ and ‘movements’, which in their turn move tradition forward. The strong feeling for Wales experienced in ordinary life and expressed through a literary tradition of extraordinary longevity cannot suddenly have just disappeared. It is dormant, surely, awaiting resuscitation by the new writers of a new and better age. What evil spell put it to sleep? What specific change turned the kind of past I remember into this political catatonia, this tailor’s dummy dressed in hype? What can account for so drastic a loss of vitality? We got over the virtual disappearance both of God and socialism, refocusing on our own identity and destiny. Then, it’s as if some thief came and sucked out the egg. Whatever you thought of it all, whatever side you favoured back in my day, there was at least something to think about and sides to be taken. That is what was taken out of life. To be specific, it happened in the year 1997. It is mainly remembered as the year of our successful devolution referendum. But far more pervasively as regards our present situation, it was the year things went badly wrong in mainstream British politics, with consequences for the whole of Britain. It was the year Blair and Brown took over. It was the year New Labour broke its pledges to restore trade union rights and instead stole the entire Tory wardrobe, the ‘flexible workforce’, the ‘free market’ and ‘individual freedom’, which came along with their only deducible ideological corollary, a hedonism encouraging us to rejoice in consumerism and trivia. With two Tory parties in Westminster, disagreeing loudly but only about the cost of things, policy became a matter not of values but of money. Hollow justifications calling on ‘initiatives’ that ‘delivered products’ replaced values, and jargon and ‘spin’ replaced truth. Wales was subjected to a new British adoration of celebs and the trappings of wealth and fame, property developments, marinas, and above all, media hype. As if that reflected us! If history bothers to remember it at all, I’m sure it will have a sardonic hurrah for Cool

Cymru and the inadequates purveying it. For underneath lay the political and social consequences of removing ideological opposition, the undermining of that important consensus achieved as a result of democratic discussion. When ideological differences get resolved at the polls, it underlines the unity of the nation. The greater people’s differences and a country’s internal tensions, the more alive and taut is the sense of belonging to a democratic political unit. Blair and Brown turned that achieved political consensus into a lukewarm bath of popular political indifference that came to define an ever more lost-looking Britain. However, nations are defined in other, perhaps stronger ways. The Celtic nations far more than England retain a residual sense of binding traditions, a cultural sense of history, of ancestry and myth, of belonging – the identity of a separate nationalism. We have not forgotten how to see ourselves. We can still see the present in the light of the past. That is tradition in action, and it is what we are in need of right now. We need to restore ‘individuality’ to its rightful and obvious place within a wider social existence based on historic self-understanding and culture. We need our writers and artists to do this because our politicians are unlikely to help. Plaid, seduced by power, has gone the way of all flesh and Labour is entering the wilderness after three terms of misrule. It really doesn’t matter under whose banner we start to realise once again that we have each other to care about and not just ourselves. And haven’t writers always been the unacknowledged legislators of society, politics usually following on behind? The mirror that present writers hold up to alienation is not merely valid, but vital. But what will the mirror show in the immediate future? I have a feeling that the time is ripe for a new ‘movement’, one working within the Welsh tradition again, holding up the mirror to health as well as to sickness. It’s an ill will that blows no good. The gravity of the world situation sinks in. Capitalism called the tune without checking risk or social cost and the piper is piping chaos. Economic controls once scorned for being Old Labour’s are wheeled out of cold storage. New Labour imposes them while denying they are what it once condemned, denying blame. Plaid maintains the arrogance that has lost it the respect of its grass roots on the language issue. Cool Cymru evaporates alongside jobless families having their homes repossessed. In the fast arriving future, hard times may find us more heedful of each other’s problems and sufferings, thinking and acting communally again, a people once more asking where the road should be leading. Only communally does the future make any sense. Granting that recent fiction is true enough a mirror of how little there is left to believe in, let us get back to believing in each other and ourselves as a nation.

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Beyond Cambria: WALES WAYLAYING THE WORLD DR R BRINLEY JONES

elshmen over the centuries of recorded history have contemplated the lands beyond with a sense of freedom, challenge, promise, betterment and fortune. There were those with mission in their hearts and others with money on their minds: there were those with political motives. Within these islands, even before the Acts of Union 1536-1543, Welsh people emigrated to English towns - Shrewsbury, Chester, Bristol, - London, in particular. Later, London and Liverpool were to be the main areas of their dreams though many slipped away to Manchester, to the Midlands and elsewhere. The centres of Higher Education attracted those who wished to improve their minds and chances. There were those who had particular military skills - the bowmen of earlier centuries, for example, who found they were in great demand, at home and abroad. And there were those with strength in their feet who drove their cattle and sheep and geese to the English fairs and did so from the fifteenth century to the latter part of the nineteenth century. Others were tempted far afield - individuals on pilgrimage, on study tours, on grand tours and some offering their own particular skills and talents in a multitude of endeavours. And, occasionally, ideas emanating from these hills and valleys were to shape thinking and writing and to enrich life experience. When they left in groups, the Welsh settled into communities, often taking their language, customs, religious observances and culture with them, keeping close ties with home. Despite the fact that Welshmen had, over the ages, left for opportunities elsewhere, it was the nineteenth century which witnessed the most substantial emigration from Wales. It is estimated that some 250,000 Welsh people settled overseas between 1790 and 1939. The establishment of emigration societies in Wales in the middle of the nineteenth century is an indication of the interest. North America was the greatest attraction from the latter part of the seventeenth century on: up until the middle of the nineteenth century Welshmen were literally moving to new pastures. From the 1820s it was the industrial areas that beckoned. The middle years of the nineteenth

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Others were tempted far afield - individuals on pilgrimage, on study tours, on grand tours, some offering their own particular skills and talents in a multitude of endeavours. And, occasionally, ideas emanating from these hills and valleys were to shape thinking and writing and to enrich life experience.

century witnessed the Welsh settling in Canada, Australia and to a lesser degree in South Africa. By the end of the century, 100,000 people who had been born in Wales were domiciled in the USA, 13,500 in Canada and 13,000 in Australia. The reasons for their departure were varied but, in summary, conditions at home and, maybe, greater promise abroad. The Roman conquest of what we know as Wales was probably completed by AD 80: by the early years of the fifth century the Roman armies had left but, doubtless, over the centuries of their stay there was a certain intermingling and among the native inhabitants there were those entranced by the charms of Rome, who may have emigrated to other parts of the empire. By the time of the exodus of the Roman armies and, maybe, as a result of a religious awakening in Gaul, Christianity was gaining ground and spreading to Wales and Ireland bringing with it a combination of the ascetic and evangelical strains which was to produce a body of wandering missionaries: it was to become a recurring theme in Welsh history. For example, Cadog (fl. c.450), founder of the Celtic monastery at Llancarfan, was known for his learning and piety and churches associated with him exist in Brittany and Cornwall. Another esteemed school of secular and sacred learning was attached to the monastery of Llanilltudfawr (Llantwit Major), a school which prepared many for the mission-field. Missionary activity and learning became intermingled. Alfred, King of Wessex from 871 to 899 was to attract a circle of learned

men to his court: among them was Asser of the monastic community of St Davids. By the eleventh century, following Norman control, the Welsh Church became subject to the mother church of Canterbury and more aware of being an integral part of Latin Christendom. From 1050 onwards, monastic life in Europe was to be invigorated and new orders founded. Such growth and the presence of monastic and mendicant orders were to find favour in Wales. But those apart, there were individuals who would follow the pilgrim paths, both to sacred places within Wales and further afield - to Canterbury and Walsingham, for example, and well beyond. The tenth century had witnessed a noticeable increase in pilgrimages to the Holy Land: just as David, Teilo and Padarn are reputed to have done, the Welsh went to Jerusalem. In 1128 Morgan ap Cadwgan of Powys went to do penance.... and in 1431 John Cliderow, Bishop of Bangor, was on pilgrimage there. Rome was popular, too. The Chronicle of the Princes relates, ‘Nine hundred and twenty was the year of Christ when King Hywel the Good, son of Cadell, went to Rome’. It was to attract Gerald of Wales, born in Manorbier and well-travelled (educated at Gloucester, Paris, Oxford and Lincoln): he was to visit Rome on at least four occasions. He was to claim of the Welsh, ‘Of all pilgrimages they prefer going to Rome and pray most devoutly when they reach St Peter’s’. Gerald was to accompany Archbishop Baldwin on his preaching mission in Wales in 1188, in favour of the Crusades, encouraging Welshmen to take up arms in defence of the Holy Land: there were very many, according to Gerald, who responded to the call. ... In the fifteenth century the poet Lewis Glyn Cothi referred to ‘three blessed fountains ...... Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela’ and the Welsh had been to all of them. The pilgrim paths and the paths of the Crusades were to take Welshmen away and set their eyes on new ways and new thoughts. But Wales exported ‘themes’ too: the example par excellence was the tale that captured the mind of medieval Europe and one which was to last for a long, long time. It was the theme / legend of Arthur, the Welsh folk-hero probably first placed on the European literary stage by Geoffrey of Monmouth whose Historia Regum Britanniae c.1136 re-created the figure of the ‘dux bellorum’ (leader of battle) of Nennius in his Historia Brittonum of the early ninth century, a work based on earlier sources, It was Chrétien de Troyes (fl. 1166) the influential French poet who composed several metrical romances based on the Arthurian theme and was to convey the tale into the mainstream of European literature. It was to invade English, Dutch, German and

Iberian writing. In all cases there was to be native literary injection but the original theme was Welsh. And it was more than a tale: it had its effect on the social mores of people. The state of war was a continuous condition of the Middle Ages: foreign wars, civil wars ... and holy wars. The Welsh played no small part in all of them. In 1174 the Lord Rhys had dispatched a thousand men from Deheubarth to assist Henry II in his wars against Louis VII of France. Fundamental changes in the technology of warfare appeared in the second half of the thirteenth century: the battles between the Welsh and English proved to Edward I the strength of the Welsh archers and their long-bows, weapons which may well have originated in Wales. There were Welshmen galore at the decisive battles of the Hundred Years War ... at Crécy in 1346, at Poitiers in 1356, at Agincourt in 1415. And Welshmen were to serve with courage over the centuries. (Sir) Rhys ap Thomas (1449-1525) contributed substantially to Henry Tudor’s victory at Bosworth Field. For Henry VIII he commanded some 3,000 infantry and light cavalry at the sieges of Thérouanne and Tournai and played a significant part in the victory over the French at the Battle of the Spurs ... General (Sir) Thomas Picton (1758-1815) commanded a division in the Peninsular War and, despite being wounded led the charge at Waterloo ... General (Sir) Hugh Rowlands (1828-1909) played a vital role in the Crimean War: he was the first Welshman to be awarded the Victoria Cross. The combats, the courage, the conscription ... ‘Rorke’s Drifts’, the ‘D-Days’ and ‘Belgranos’ were, all of them, to witness the service of Welsh men and women, as have the skirmishes of more recent times. Other travellers were the drovers and dealers who conducted shod-cattle, sheep and geese from the Welsh grasslands to the fattening pastures of the Midlands of England, taking them to the stalls of East Anglia and the markets of London. Their trade may well have originated in pre-medieval times. They were ambassadors of a kind (not always trusted): they took tales and documents with them and brought money and news back. The arrival of the railways changed their ways. Despite Owain Glyndwˆr’s desire to establish two universities in Wales, nothing came of his dream until centuries later. For those Welshmen who wished to enlighten their minds and prepare for openings and advancement, it was necessary, for a long long time, to leave Wales. Welshmen of promise, religious and secular, were to attend the universities of the Middle Ages - Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Bologna, Perugia and Rome for example - Oxford in particular. There were those who pursued studies abroad because they were attracted there:

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others, later, were forced by religious persecution. Many made a mark: one ‘de confinio Wallie’ killed a cook in Oxford in 1238 ... another, Hugh Thomas, later to become Principal of Grove Hall, was accused of having attacked a town ironmonger in 1430 ... and in 1461 a certain Robert Greffyth was sent down from Oxford ‘for evil deeds and enormities’. But the majority, by far, were industrious and successful students. By the 1570s the Welsh had what became a little Wales beyond - Jesus College, Oxford, a society that was to attract Welshmen over the generations. When particular religious sanctions closed the doors of Oxford and Cambridge pro tem, aspiring Welshmen went elsewhere, - Nonconformist Academies and Scottish universities for example. And, over the centuries, London and the Inns of Court attracted a fair share of students from Wales, mainly from gentry background. (One of the Inns, Thavies, was founded by a Welshman, John Davy in the fourteenth century). With the increasing importance of the exercise of English law in Wales, such training was ever more imperative. For Welshmen the Inns became particularly popular from the early years of the seventeenth century on. Emigrants sometimes started young: boys attended English schools Winchester, Eton, Bedford, St Paul’s, Westminster, Christ’s Hospital, Merchant Taylor’s, St Albans, Shrewsbury, Hereford, for example ... and over the centuries some were to serve as masters: Shakespeare’s best known schoolmaster was a Welshman - Sir Hugh Evans. Some were to reach high appointments: Jenkin Thomas Philipps from Llansawel, who died in 1755, had been a student at Basle and tutor to the children of George II. In 1889 Ogwen Jones was appointed tutor to the granddaughters of John Hughes, the engineer and pioneer of ironworks in Russia. Over the centuries Welshmen were enticed to leave home for hoped-for fulfilment elsewhere - religious freedom, identity, work-possibility (particularly agrarian and industrial) and missionary zeal. Sometimes they left as individuals: often they emigrated in groups. Near home they left for London and Liverpool. By the eighteenth century Welsh focal points in London had become think-tanks of Welsh nationhood: indeed, it was in London on Primrose Hill in 1792 that the gorsedd met under the direction of Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams 1747-1826) reminding those who needed reminding of the antiquity and distinction of the Welsh race. Teachers became a commodity that emigrated. And by the mid

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nineteenth century there was an exodus of dairymen (and milk-maids) and drapers. (The names of Alban Davies, Walthamstow, D H Evans, Oxford Street, Dickens and Jones, Regent Street and Peter Jones, Sloane Square are reminders of their presence). Welshmen were to walk the political stage, no-one more successfully than David Lloyd George. Others were to go far, far away establishing, eventually, Welsh communities in distant lands. There were emigrants to North America (the location of the first Welsh communities overseas, consisting of religious dissenters from 1660 to 1720). ... Later, at the very least 3,000 Welsh-speaking Welshmen were to enlist in the Union armies of the Civil War waged between 1861 and 1865: in some cases numbers were large enough to form their own ‘companies’. There was emigration to Argentina, the first group of which emigrants left these shores on 25 May 1865, eventually settling in the Welsh colony par excellence in Patagonia, Y Wladfa: emigration continued, mostly from the valleys of South Wales until 1914. Patagonia remains the case supreme of ‘Wales in another continent’. Australia was another (comprising, at the start, involuntary emigrants - convicts - between 1788 and 1868, and later, free-settlers from c.1840 to 1920 and later). One such emigrant, born in London of Welsh parentage was William Thomas (1793-1867) who was to become assistant protector and guardian of the Aborigines, called Marminata (Good Father) by the natives. Another, ‘one of the most brilliant and powerful orators of the Empire’ was William Morris Hughes born in Pimlico of Welsh parentage ... Prime Minister from 1915 to 1923. Other shores to entice the Welsh were Canada, New Zealand and South Africa (attracting farmers and miners charmed by the discovery of gold and diamonds). And there were those who were moved by missionary zeal from the later eighteenth century onwards, just as their predecessors had been many, many centuries earlier: they were to travel to Africa, Asia, the South Seas, India, China and Madagascar for example. In some one hundred and fifty years the Welsh had colonised missionary activity converting hundreds of thousands to the Christian message. Among Welsh people of the ages there were those who were to make a notable contribution to thinking and to practice: those who were to enhance the quality of life of people all over. Wales has made its mark on the world.

Roy Noble

A fair to remember

is nose was big - that was the problem! Wherever he went, his nose got there a fraction before him and in the ring of that boxing booth, it was a tempting and frequent target for his opponent. The sign outside was clear enough, ‘last three rounds of two minutes each against our National Champion, and win £10’. Once ‘the drink is in, the sense is out’, in the same way that when your logic goes to your loins - you’re lost! Bravery gets to the brain when the fourth pint makes you Tarzan. Our local hero and challenger was flattened in the second round, his nose hitting the canvas first. As a boy that was my first visit to a proper booth at Brynaman Fair. Twice a year, Spring and Autumn, the Fair came to the village and filled the patch of ground between Siloam Chapel and Ebenezer Chapel with noise, colour and exciting temptations. There weren’t many ‘ rides’, but there were just enough to use up the limited money around. As you got older you graduated from the two small children’s roundabouts, with their double- decker buses, fire engines, steam locomotives and cars, up to the Noah’s Ark Carousel, where the animals went up and down as they went around. Come to think it - I don’t know why we called it Noah’s Ark, because it only had horses on it! The Stable or The Cavalry would have been better names. The sail boats, or ‘swings’ as we called them, were always down the bottom end of the field, where Gareth kept his buses and coaches. The swings were a favourite of mine, especially if the girls were watching you, because it was showing off time then, sending the swings high, towards the coal tips that rose behind the public toilets. Even the newly invented ‘pac a mac’, which was easily wind affected, was no restriction at all. The ‘Dodgems’ were always called the ‘Bumpers’ in Brynaman, and they were the last stop on the maturity trail for youngsters as they got older and braver. It was all very physical and it was always a dash to get a vacant car when they stopped. Brynaman Fair offered me the first taste of toffee apples, candy floss and butter- kissed popcorn. There was a fish and chip stall, but there was no excitement going there - we had a couple of those in the village all

The woman in the Tableau was nude - naked as the day she was born! ....I think it was on that night that my abiding interest in history began. year round. I was never lucky at the competition stalls, roll a penny, roll a ball, poke a ticket out of a straw, but if you had three consecutive goes without success, the attendant, who was the first man I’d ever seen wearing an earring, gave you a prize anyway. There was an early bingo or tombola stall but I didn’t understand how it worked, so I kept away from it. I wonder if anyone did actually win one of those big baskets at the top of the stall - the ones with the full tea-set inside. Maturing in fairground rides evolves like a graph I suppose, you start low and simple, on the children’s merry-gorounds, on the little fire engine and cars, then you graduate to Noah’s Ark , and then, gradually, on to the swings and bumpers. A ‘Waltzer’ turned up one year, but that was a swing too far for me, green is not my best facial colour. Finally, as you get older, you are back to the ‘manageable’ again, standing alongside the little carousels and merry-gorounds with your grand children. As for the booths - well, you take in the boxing, the Mystic Meg Crystal Ball gazer, unusual exotic animals and, finally, the quiet stalls, those selling rugs, mats and linen. There was the one booth, though, that stays in the mind, the best ever at Brynaman Fair. It was the ‘Historical Tableau Exhibition’. I couldn’t understand why one of our neighbours said to me “Hey, you shouldn’t be going in there - you’re too young,” but it all became wonderfully clear as we entered the tent. The woman in the Tableau was nude, naked as the day she was born! She posed behind a thin gauze curtain, in various historical character guises. When the thick curtains first opened, she was ‘Cleopatra at the side of the Nile’, holding a basket of fruit. Next came ‘Boadicea in her chariot’, her helmet being her only attire! Then, ‘Queen of the Incas’ in head bandana and on to ‘Josephine - waiting for Napoleon’ lounging on a French flag counterpane. I think it was on that night that my abiding interest in history began; Brynaman Fair was the academy that set me off.

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DAFYDD AP LLYWELYN

PRINCE OF WALES

Remembering the Shield of Wales DR CRAIG JONES

n the history of medieval Wales, there is no shortage of great leaders and statesmen. Hywel Dda, Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, Owain Gwynedd, Llywelyn Fawr, Llywelyn II and Owain Glyndwˆr each in turn united a country often plagued by dynastic rivalries and discord. Yet there is one name that rarely appears alongside these well-known giants of Welsh history. There can be few leaders in the annals of Wales who have accomplished so much, and yet are so little known, as Dafydd ap Llywelyn (Dafydd II), Prince of Wales from 1240 to 1246. It is easy to understand why this should be: sandwiched between two of the most lauded men in Welsh history, his father Llywelyn Fawr (c. 1174-1240) and his nephew Llywelyn II (c. 12231282), it should come as no surprise that Dafydd’s short reign has often been overlooked by writers and historians. If his exploits as prince are anything to go by, however, there seems every chance that, had he lived, Dafydd would have gone on to rival his father as one of Wales’ most famous rulers. Dafydd was born around 1215, the son of Llywelyn and his princess, Joan (or Siwan; d. 1237). After Llywelyn’s death in 1240, Dafydd assumed the Welsh throne, but his reign had the most challenging of beginnings. His half-brother Gruffudd contested his right to the throne in 1240, plunging Wales into a brief but bloody civil war that weakened Dafydd’s power. Sensing an opportunity to curb the power of a Welsh prince whose father had been so bold as to march into England and take Shrewsbury in 1234, the King of England, Henry III, duly invaded Wales the following year, and forced Dafydd to submit to him and yield much Welsh territory - including Dafydd’s homelands of north-east Wales - to English control. Yet Dafydd soon overcame these difficulties, uniting Wales under his leadership in 1244, and solidifying his position as the undisputed Prince of Wales. Modern historians see Dafydd as an enlightened and

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able ruler. During his time as prince he accomplished much, revising native Welsh law, and in the war of 1244-6 he regained the territories in north-east Wales he had been forced to sign away to Henry in 1241, capturing the castles of Dyserth and Mold. Though cowed by Henry in the summer of 1241, the loss on that occasion owed less to any perceived lack of military cunning on Dafydd’s part and more to the weather, which favoured the English, and the propensity of the minor rulers of Powys to side with Henry’s men. In actuality, Dafydd possessed a formidable intellect in all matters military, using catapults to besiege English castles (one of the first princes of Wales in history to do so), boarding English supply ships, and defeating Henry’s army in battle during his second invasion of Wales in 1245. Yet it was in the field of diplomacy that Dafydd excelled. His ingenuity in pressing the Welsh case knew no bounds: even in the embattled days of 1241, he sent ambassadors to the king of France, and saw the sense in pursuing good relations with Henry (who was, as it happened, his mother’s half brother). He may, too, have cultivated diplomatic links with the kings of the Isle of Man; it is conceivable that he met Godred, heir to the Manx throne, while Godred was prominent in the company of Dafydd’s nephew and future heir, Llywelyn. His most impressive diplomatic achievement, however, was the diplomacy he carried out with the Pope in 1245. This masterpiece of political sleight-of-hand resulted in the (albeit fleeting) recognition of Welsh independence, and a summons by the Vatican for Henry III to appear before a panel at Caerwys church to explain his actions an audacious request that must have made Henry’s blood boil! In the end, the depth of Henry’s pocket trumped Dafydd’s brazenness. A payment or two to the Vatican put Henry once more in favour; but even when the Pope’s decision in favour of Dafydd had been reversed, the prince stood unbowed. This young ‘lion-whelp’, as J. E. Lloyd once described him, was no dilettante; nor was he an idealist. On the contrary: Dafydd dealt in realpolitik with a ruthlessness of which today’s politicians would be proud. At the height of civil war in 1241, he had unceremoniously removed his half-brother Gruffudd from the scene by a treacherous ruse, capturing him when he came to parley. In his relations with

Henry, he thought nothing of playing for time, stalling negotiations with all sorts of imaginative excuses while exploring other diplomatic options. When he could not fight, he let others do it for him, even sending military support to minor Welsh rulers fighting against Henry in mid-Wales in 1241. Given his remarkable capacity for statesmanship, it is no wonder that every senior member of the prince’s council first established under Dafydd’s father remained loyal to the son throughout his reign; but it did not last. Under the strain of a long war, Dafydd’ s health faltered, and four months after Henry agreed a truce and withdrew his army to England, the prince died at the royal court at Abergwyngregyn near Bangor on 25 February 1246. It is a testimony to Dafydd’ s leadership abilities that Welsh resistance crumbled shortly thereafter, and the Treaty of Woodstock signed between England and Wales in 1247 left the country divided and weakened. Dafydd’s princess, Isabella, died childless the following year, and the governance of Wales passed to his nephews, one of whom, Llywelyn II, would ultimately be responsible for reuniting the country and gaining the first - and only - recognition of the leader of Gwynedd’s status as Prince of Wales by the English Crown. As for Dafydd, his contemporaries were in no doubt as to his greatness. The poet Dafydd Benfras composed an elegy to him, and it seems that a later successor as Prince of Wales, perhaps his nephew, Llywelyn II, commissioned a biography of his life; while the writer of the Welsh chronicle Brut Y Tywysogyon called him ‘tarian Cymru ‘ - the shield of Wales. There can be few medieval Welsh heads of state whose lives are so little celebrated, which is why the Dafydd ap Llywelyn Committee was formed after a public meeting at the Flintshire National Eisteddfod in 2007. The committee is a voluntary, non-profit-making organisation with the aim of erecting a monument to Dafydd in his homeland of Flintshire, Wales, in which county a chapel was erected in his honour at Castell Hen Blas, Coleshill. It is the committee’s hope that Dafydd’s monument will shortly stand comparison with those to other Welsh leaders, such as that to Hywel Dda at Whitland, Llywelyn Fawr at Conwy, and Dafydd’s nephew and namesake, Dafydd III, at Shrewsbury, where a plaque commemorating his execution in 1283 can be seen. The monument will stand for the benefit of all, to raise awareness of Wales’ past, and bring the people of Wales together in celebration of a remarkable man, and an unique cultural heritage.

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RHIANNON

Wales and the Wild West

“Tregaron was the Wild West they would come down from the hills for the market, horses would run down the road and

FRANCES DAVIES

It is nearly thirty years since Rhiannon opened her shop in Tregaron. Looking back, she remembers, ‘Tregaron was special then but it doesn’t have the characters it used to and one really feels it. It was the Wild West, they would come down from the hills for the market, horses would run down the road and Cayo Evans would be there with his stallion servicing mares on the square.’ To Rhiannon Tregaron might not feel as wild as it once was but coming from Carmarthen it still feels pretty wild. The town is, of course, famed for its connections with Twm Siôn Cati in the wild, lawless days of Elizabethan Wales, and much later on as a great droving centre, the last outpost on the long and dangerous trek across the Cambrian Mountains into England for the cattlemen of Ceredigion. Later still, it was the birthplace in 1812 of Henry Richard, nonconformist minister and Liberal MP for Merthyr Tydfil, internationally known as ‘The Apostle of Peace’ in recognition of his work with

THE HEADQUARTERS OF RHIANNON JEWELLERY, MAIN

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Cayo Evans would be there with his stallion servicing mares on the square.”

the Peace Society. Richard’s bronze statue stands sentinel over the town’s square, and as local wags will tell you, is squarely positioned with his back to the town’s principal public house, the Talbot Hotel. Rhiannon Evans grew up in Aberystwyth where, as a child, she was ridiculed for speaking Welsh. Her father (Jac L Williams, seen by many as the father of modern Welsh language education) was Professor of education at Aberystwyth. She married Dafydd Gwyn, the colourful and visionary entrepreneur and scion of the Evan Evans Tours business founded by his SQUARE, TREGARON Llangeitho-born father, who left to seek his fortune in London. When they had children she was determined that they should grow up in ‘Welsh-speaking countryside’, hence the return to Dafydd Gwyn’s ancestral bro. Though Rhiannon trained as a scientist, arts and crafts were what really fascinated her and in 1971 she opened her first shop. Thereafter she was always on the lookout for things to stock, and meet-

RHIANNON AT WORK IN HER STUDIO

ing craft workers she became increasingly involved with the design, both suggesting and commissioning goods influenced by Welsh tradition. These lines proved a great success. ‘Things were so much better in the ’70s, now one has to use persuasion to get people to either customise or ‘Welshify’ crafts’. There is apparently no public support for Welsh crafts. Wales is a culturally rich country and there are many people involved in the arts and crafts industry; modern communications mean selling abroad is every bit as easy as selling here, perhaps more so, but Rhiannon finds that this has its own problems: designers often tell her that there is little incentive to produce their crafts with a definite Welsh twist as demand can be greater from abroad than here within Wales. For example, she would love it if Creative Paper Wales, producers of Sheep poo papers and cards would supply Welsh language versions, but producing them in

French and German is more economically viable than Welsh. Rhiannon feels that the demand doesn’t exist simply because the products are not there to buy. If they were out there then more people would buy them. “There is a real need for a Welsh trade fair,” she says. “There used to be a Welsh trade fair but apparently there were convincing arguments for closing it down; most people are prepared to go to the NEC in Birmingham.” Nevertheless, a fair where Welsh buyers can see a whole range of Welsh products under one roof seems a very good idea. Our conversation moves on to Ireland, where the government’s encouragement of all the arts is the envy of many and ‘the training of their people is top quality’, she adds. The development of craft and the business side of it contributes to the success of the Irish economy. The 1970s saw a re-emergence of Celtic art. The designs of Courtney Davis were popular on record covers and posters. During this period Rhiannon visited a Celtic design exhibition in London, and looking around THE STUNNINGLY MODERN ATRIUM AT THE CENTRE OF THE BUILDING

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ANOTHER VIEW OF THE ATRIUM

she felt she understood the design, that it was part of her. She knew then she wanted to create and make things herself. She says she was fascinated by the link between art, poetry and music, how in Welsh tradition they all come together. Metal seemed to be exactly the right medium, so she decided to craft new designs using ancient traditions. The introduction of Wales’s heritage and language has always been a deliberate consideration, and the response has amazed and delighted her. She has, in the past, been accused of ‘racism’ because of her preference for Welshspeaking staff, but the feedback she gets is that people visiting her studio love this, and in the ’70s it was touches like this that helped build the uniqely Welsh attraction of the Rhiannon enterprise. It is no mean feat to make a success of a shop in the wilds of the Cambrian Mountains. Although five roads lead into and out of Tregaron - a legacy of the town’s illustrious droving past - it still remains ‘off the beaten track’. ‘It took five years to get people coming on a regular basis from London and the home counties,” Rhiannon says, “ten years from Cardiff, and a lot longer for those closer to home!’ The visitors’ book on the

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CARL RYAN

counter has an entry that reads ‘Drove 40 miles, disappointed’, and below it has been written ‘Flew 2300 miles, well worth it!’ In part it Tregaron was due to that remoteness, to the fact that it was sufficiently different, wild, untamed and full of characters with, according to some visitors, more nightlife than London. What Rhiannon was selling was the whole package, the jewellery, the designs, the cultural heritage of Wales and the wild untamed surroundings. People always seek after what is different, surely Wales should emphasise its differences not try to emulate what can be had elsewhere. The land around is still steeped in tradition and traditional ways. As Rhiannon tells me “There are people around here who still farm on horseback.” Of course, at the heart of a jewellery business is precious metal, and Wales is rich in minerals. Last year, two years of negotiation came to fruition when Rhiannon bought the final cache of Welsh gold from the last licensed prospector. She could have sold it all “for silly money - I even had anonymous calls” but she wanted it to be within reach and available, affordable, to all her customers. The Victorians, searching for copper, found gold, and by the late 1800’s there were seventeen working gold mines. Over the years they have all closed as they became increasingly and impossibly expensive and dangerous to work. Three types of gold mining were employed: seam, nugget and dust (alluvial), in the last, the very fine gold dust is traditionally harvested by running the gold-bearing water over fleeces of sheeps’ wool where it is caught by the fibres, hence the Golden Fleece. As the last mines closed, Rhiannon pragmatically invested in their reserve stock when launching her Welsh gold line. Welsh Gold has brought enormously helpful publicity to the brand. Several years ago Rhiannon was commissioned to make a pure Welsh Gold Medal for the National Eisteddfod; another followed, and the news achieved wide coverage in the international press. While the highly traditional Welsh town of Tregaron may not have changed very much over the years, Rhiannon’s Welsh Gold Centre has, the shop has expanded to become an Aladdin’s cave of gifts, with the jewellery shop leading through to the modernistic and elegantly designed atrium, a naturally lit, gallery of pale, polished wood, leading on to the cosy, welcoming cafe, with its wooden tables, pepper grinders and phials of balsamic vinegar, good coffee clearly demonstrating that this is a place where quality - and Welshness - reign supreme. HERITAGE AND TRADITION: RHIANNON’S CLASSICAL DESIGNS

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Twm Siôn Cati (alias Thomas Jones) A MAN FOR HIS TIME MARGARET ISAAC

egendary heroes engender apocryphal tales which bear little resemblance to the original person. The hot-blooded magical hero, Arthur of the Mabinogion, who hunted the Twrch Trwyth across the length and breadth of the British Isles, was a far cry from the emasculated medieval king of the Age of Chivalry. The legend of Robin Hood began with a few simple tales sung by the rhymer, Alana-Dale. The Sheriff of Nottingham,

Maid Marian and Robin, Earl of Loxley were all later additions to the legend. Similarly, the Welsh folk hero, Twm Siôn Cati, described by T. J. Llewellyn Prichard as an eighteenth century highwayman, immortalised by T. Llew Jones as an endearing rogue and presented by early Western Mail booklets as an irresistible caricature in many guises. These later stories of a witty and comical opportunist, a mimic with a gift for changing his appearance in the twinkling of an eye, flouting authority at every turn with scant respect for the law had universal appeal. The man behind the legend was Thomas Jones born in 1530 to a fairly well to do and well connected family. He was outlawed from 1545 – 1559

Poster for the unveiling of a new woodcarved statue of Twm Siôn Cati in Tregaron

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during the reign of Henry V111, when illegal gatherings of any description were banned and the King’s appointed spy, Bishop Rowland Lee, imposed a reign of terror on Wales in his zealous pursuit to stamp out the Welsh language and local customs. In 1559, Thomas Jones was pardoned under the general amnesty of Elizabeth 1. Thomas Jones could now resume his life at his home in Fountain Gate. Under the new dispensation, the anglicised Welsh gentry wished to establish their credentials in their bid to claim land and respectability. Ever the opportunist, Thomas Jones created for them elaborate genealogies and became a respected heraldic bard. In his own pedigree, he claimed that he was descended to the thirteenth generation from Gwaethfod Fawr, Lord of Cardigan. His father’s name was John and his mother’s name was Catrin, so Twm Sion Cati was an appropriate alias. Although Thomas Jones was now held in some esteem by society, he continued to have enemies, one of the most violent being the local vicar, Morgan Davyd. The vicar had tried to force the villagers to pay the tithes due to him, and Thomas defended them successfully in a court case. For this, Thomas earned the vicar’s undying hatred. Subsequently, the vicar and his family assaulted Thomas’s servants and vandalised his lands and cattle. The feud lasted from 1598 to 1601, culminating in a dramatic attempt by Morgan Davyd to murder his enemy in open court. Luckily for Thomas, he was apprehended before he could perpetrate the deed! Thomas was not however averse to bending the law himself. He helped his future wife to alter her late husband’s will, for this they were both taken to court. As late as his 77th year, Thomas

was again the defendant in a law suit and he petitioned Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury for the action to be transferred to the local court on account of his age. Thomas Jones died in 1609, his death just added to the myth, there were those who thought his wife had murdered him, and even his burial place remains a mystery. In the climate of the time, the aristocracy were often immoral opportunists, who acted much like Thomas Jones. Elizabeth herself had rewarded the pirate Walter Raleigh with a knighthood, and his plunder helped to enrich the royal coffers!

So the activities of Thomas Jones before and after his pardon, were those of a man for his time, and demonstrated a great aptitude for survival in an extremely dangerous period of history. Twm Siôn Cati, as is the nature of a folk hero, attracts more attention today than his historical alter ego. Readers respond to his outrageous antics, his sense of fun, his strong instinct for survival, and above all, his knack of flouting authority with an enviable panache. We admire him for being able to do those things which we would like to do if only we had the courage!

The legend of Twm Siôn Cati is being celebrated throughout 2009 to mark the 400th anniversary of his death. Dafydd Wyn Morgan of The Twm Siôn Cati Society has organised a series of events: races, concerts, tea parties, talks and a carnifal on July 25th. On 25th May a wooden statue will be unveiled in front of Rhiannon’s Welsh Gold Centre. This has been carved by Grace Young Monaghan of Pontrhydfendigaid. There is also a wide selection of memorabilia including a silver brooch made by Rhiannon.

www.twmsioncati.co.uk

St David’s School, Ashford: AN ENCLAVE OF WALES IN MIDDLESEX RHODRI PUGH

nly a few miles from London and twenty minutes from Waterloo is a school where Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau rings out on all special occasions and an annual Eisteddfod is held on St David’s Day. Until the late ’60s, special trains ran from Wales at the beginning and end of term. In 1716 the Honourable and Loyal Society of Antient Britons, a group of Welshmen based in the City of London, decided that the money collected at their Annual St David’s Day Dinner should be used

to set up a Charity School. It was founded under the direct patronage of the ‘Prince and Princess’ of Wales and began in a single room with 10 boys and a school master in Clerkenwell. Lord Lisburne, the President of the Society in 1717 began fundraising from the Welshmen in London, and by 1737 a purpose-built Schoolhouse was opened in Clerkenwell Green for thirty-five boys. This house still exists today and is the Karl Marx Memorial Library. The school continued to grow

and thrive throughout the eighteenth century and was pioneering in its day as it started to accept girls as pupils in 1758. Ten years later a wooden extension was built to

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house boarders at the request of parents who perceived that the living conditions provided by the school were better than those at home. The main theme of the education given was to train the pupils for apprenticeships and much of the surviving correspondence is about the placement and supervision of these apprentices. In 1772, a new larger school house was erected in Gray’s Inn Lane which featured a water tap in the boys’ playground for them to wash at. This building is no longer but some of the furniture survives in the present school building in Ashford. The school had several famous patrons at this time. David Garrick put on a charity performances in aid of the School at Drury Lane, one of them was The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay, whose portrait still hangs in the Boardroom. Mrs Sarah Siddons, the tragic actress, born in Brecon in 1775, was also a patron and her portrait hangs in the Head’s office.

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The school continued to thrive throughout the 1800’s, further expansion was financed by a Memorial Fund to Princess Charlotte, the ‘Princess of Wales’, who had died in 1717. Academic improvements were made, with an enlarged curriculum from the ‘three Rs’ and the introduction of the Pupil-teaching method. By this time the Welsh School’s choir was held in great esteem, as were the teaching methods. Trainee teachers were sent to learn ‘how to teach girls’. By the 1850’s the site had become cramped and the Society’s President, Lord Powis, authorised the purchase of a 30 acre plot of land adjacent to the new railway line to Windsor, at Ashford, Middlesex. The new school building was designed by the architect Henry Clutton, cost £14000, and a grant of £1400 was made to the rebuilding of St Matthew’s Church in Ashford. It was opened by the ‘Prince of Wales’, as Patron, in 1857 and is still in use today. The school retains much of the historic

furniture and portraiture from those times. Originally built as a co-educational Boarding School, the school changed its status after the Education Act of 1870, when free elementary education became universal and in 1882, became a girlsonly school, known as The Welsh Girls School, widening its catchment area and intake, but still retaining the Welsh traditions. A Chapel was added in the 1880’s and a Gym and Science Lab in the 1930’s, the Foundation Stone of the gym being laid by the then ‘Prince of Wales’, later the Duke of Windsor. The School continued steadily along these lines until 1939, when the girls were evacuated to Powis Castle and the building was requisitioned by the Army. Many Old Girls remember this time vividly, this year they are celebrating the 70th anniversary of their move. They returned in 1946, to a rather dilapidated building and the school began to take day girls. From 1985, the school was called St David’s School and it continues to take day girls and boarders, there are scholarships for girls of Welsh descent. The building is much restored and a modern school is run in historic surroundings. The Welsh tradition is still strong, pupils have always been required to entertain at the annual St David's dinner, and the choir has always been popular at Welsh events. Harp playing was a speciality; Old Girls can remember upwards of 15 harps at concerts and it is still taught in the school today. Recently, numbers have fallen, the Governors have received a number of approaches from individuals and organisations interested in acquiring the site for other purposes but they and the Head will continue to seek as a first preference the retention of girls’ education on the site if that is possible.

The ‘Wizard’ unveiled RUFUS ADAMS on the unveiling of David Lloyd George’s statue in Parliament Square, London, October 25th 2007

t was an historic event, one that, seemingly, would never occur. After decades of discussions and arguments, approval had been given for Lloyd George’s statue to be erected outside the Houses of Parliament. The late John Grigg, the late Lord Cledwyn, Lord Morris, Professor K. O. Morgan and Michael Heseltine deserve special mention for presenting persuasive arguments on behalf of the ‘Founder of the welfare state’ and ‘The man who won the war’. In his address Prince Charles acknowledged that the honour was long overdue. Possibly, he suggested, Lloyd George had died at the wrong time: 26th March, 1945, the day the Allies crossed the Rhine, was not well chosen. Harold Macmillan had made the same point in Past Masters. Lloyd George’s death he observed, ‘was merely a new item, not an event. Only those who knew of his towering achievements realised that his death was akin to the crashing of a great oak in the forest.’’ Possibly, there were other reasons for the delay. He was always the outsider who showed indifference if not contempt for the English mores and traditions. He hated Balmoral - ‘It reeks of Toryism.’ - he did not see the need to go to Buckingham Palace for his commission when appointed Minister of Munitions - ‘Couldn’t the King send a letter?’ and he was the first Prime Minister not to attend the Derby. It was only when I saw the many VIPs did I realise why the invitation stipulated that I must bring my passport. The occasion would have been a suicide bomber’s dream mission. Never again do I expect to be in such close proximity to the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall, the Prime Minister, the Speakers of both Houses and Leaders of the Opposition, Lady Thatcher, Ken Livingston, Geoffrey Howe, Lord Roberts of Conwy, Lord Roberts of Llandudno and many others from both Houses of Parliament. At the actual unveiling, the collective response and spontaneous applause showed clearly that Professor Glynn Williams had captured Lloyd George’s drive and energy. The outstretched left hand - pointing towards the House of Commons - and the flowing cape - give the statue life and movement. It’s a wonderful work and the decision to place him on a plinth of Welsh slate,

At the reception I was alongside Lady Thatcher when she curtsied to the Duchess of Cornwall. It was so low I thought that Lady Thatcher would disappear and in that second, I understood as never before, Lloyd George’s contempt for the English class system. rather than marble, is appropriate and effective. Have I reservations? Regretfully, yes. It was, of course, a very British occasion and, therefore, the statue was covered by the Union flag, however, I think the Red Dragon should have been there too. There wasn’t a word of Welsh, although Lloyd George is the only Welshman to have been Prime Minister, and the only Prime Minister for whom English was the second language. There were, also, many references to Winston Churchill. When both were alive Churchill was in Lloyd George’s shadow, since his death Lloyd George has been in Churchill’s. An example of history replacing the truth. At the reception I was alongside Lady Thatcher when she curtsied to the Duchess of Cornwall. It was so low I thought that Lady Thatcher would disappear and in that second, I understood as never before, Lloyd George’s contempt for the English class system. I’d assumed that an unveiling in Parliament Square would have been covered extensively by the media. I was wrong. National newspapers hardly mentioned it and the BBC, as so often, failed to live up to its name. Megan and I watched the 6 pm news but were disappointed. The final two items were the McCann story yet again - and a trailer for a Panorama programme. Not to worry, I said, Huw Edwards will ensure that it is on the 10 pm news. Again, disappointment. The unveiling of a statue of a great Prime Minister did not merit inclusion in the British news. However, the statue is there in Parliament Square. The challenge for historians and educationalists is to tell people why. Rufus Adams is the author of DAVID LLOYD GEORGE: THE FORMATIVE YEARS, 1863-1890

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Mendelssohn in Wales DAVID JONES

erman born Felix Mendelssohn was one of the most celebrated classical composers of the nineteenth century. Nowadays, he is best remembered for his compositions, such as the instantly recognisable Wedding March. He was however, also a hugely talented pianist, musical conductor and teacher and an enthusiastic traveller, who made journeys throughout Europe. Included in his extensive travel itinerary was a visit to Wales when he was just twenty years old. Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was born in Hamburg in 1809. From an early age he was recognised as an extremely gifted individual. Indeed, such was the talent of precocious youngster that he gave his first public recital at the age of nine and began writing music when he was just 10 years old. When he was seventeen years-old, he astonished the musical world with his overture to William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His musical inspiration was drawn from Classical models and practices with key aspects of

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He also expressed his contempt for Welsh folk music: “Anything but national music! May ten thousand devils take all folklore! dreadful, vulgar, out-of-tune trash and simultaneously a hurdy-gurdy tootling of melodies, it’s enough to drive one crazy...”

Romanticism, the artistic movement that exalted feeling and the imagination above rigid forms and traditions. The young musical genius made his first visit to Britain in 1829 and prior to arriving in Wales spent some time in Scotland where he was provided with the inspiration to compose his Scottish Symphony and the Hebrides Overture, which is more commonly known as ‘Fingal’s Cave’. In September of that year, en route to North Wales he made a brief visit to Chester and described the border town in a letter to his father: “A bright scene presented itself; the broad town walls made a promenade round the town and there I saw a girl’s school marching along which I followed with my sketch book. The girls looked very pretty, the distance very blue, the houses and towers in the foreground dark grey.” The main reason for his trip to Wales appears to have been to visit his friend, renowned mining engineer John Taylor, who lived at Coed Ddu House at Rhydymwyn, near Mold. Taylor, who constructed the Leete at Loggerhead that conveyed water from the River Alyn to power water wheels for the local lead mines. Mendelssohn apparently accepted an invitation to officially open a new installation during his stay. Prior to his arrival at the Taylor family home though, he did take time to visit the recently opened suspension bridge that spanned the Menai Straits. He considered the bridge as a modern masterpiece of engineering skill and spent some time making drawings of it. He also visited Snowdonia and enthusiastically scaled its heights to obtain the best perspectives for his sketches.

The daughters of the Taylor household clearly became enchanted by the young German. They describe how: “Mr. Mendelssohn though full of fire sentiment was entirely free from sentimentality, his laugh was the most joyous thing ever heard, he would go off into fits of laughter himself, and it was so infectious that he kept us all in peals of merriment.” They speak of his energy at picnics, and describe how he took a “keen interest in everything, setting himself seriously to understand the conditions of the Welsh miners.” One of the daughters, Susan Taylor later described his visit in a letter that read: “Sometimes he would go sketching with us, sitting down very seriously to draw but making the greatest fun at attempts which he considered to be unsuccessful… although Mr. Mendelssohn’s sketches were of real artistic value, far excelling those of the best of us, he would yet make such fun of them himself that we were forced to join in the joke too.” She revealed: “One figure of a Welsh girl he imagined to be like a camel and was called ‘the camel’ accordingly. Though he scorned his own drawings, he had genuine artistic feeling and great love for pictures. I need not say how deeply he entered into the beauty of our hills and woods. “ Despite his love of the Welsh landscape and companionship of the Taylor daughters Mendelssohn did find a few things in the principality not to his liking. Inevitably perhaps, his trip was plagued by spells of bad weather, which he grumbled about in his letters home to Germany. And he also expressed his contempt for Welsh folk music. Whilst staying at an inn at Llangollen he heard the strains of Welsh harp music and later commented: “Anything but national music! May ten thousand devils take all folklore! Here I am in Wales, and oh how lovely, a harpist sits in the lobby of every inn of repute playing so-called folk melodies at you, that is to say, dreadful, vulgar, out-of-tune trash and simultaneously a hurdy-gurdy tootling of melodies, it’s enough to drive one crazy...” And he added: “Scottish bagpipes, Swiss cow horns, Welsh harps all playing the Huntsmen Chorus with ghastly variations or improvisations...anyone who like myself, can’t abide Beethoven’s Nationallieder ought to come to Wales and hear them howled by shrill nasal voices accompanied by doltish bumbling and then try to hold his tongue.” Although having such an aversion to local music, he often expressed delight at other things he encountered in the country. On one occasion for instance, he was thrilled by a species of flower new to him, the blossoms of which were shaped like a trumpet. He suggested that the delicate instruments must be what the fairies played

at night and was inspired to write the composition Capriccio in E minor. Inspiration too was provided by a small woodland stream which became Andante in E Major (‘The Rivulet’). After his return to Germany, Mendelssohn’s played this to the artist Schirmer at Düsseldorf, who inspired by it, painted a landscape and presented it to the composer. After his Welsh sojourn, he continued to enhance his career and came to be held in high regard throughout Europe, particularly in Victorian Britain. He was acclaimed for his impressive body of work including his five symphonies, particularly the Scottish and Italian pieces, his concertos, especially his violin concerto, his overtures, especially The Hebrides and his incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which includes the famous Wedding March. Although he generally had a happy life, Mendelssohn did suffer from occasional bouts of depression, particularly following deaths of members of his family. And, after the death of his sister Fanny, the immensely talented musician, now regarded as the nineteenth century equivalent of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, died at Leipzig on 4 November, 1847, aged just 38 years-old.

Pen-blwyddi cyfansoddwyr yng Nghymru a’r Gororau | Composer anniversaries in Wales and the Marches 12 June 7.30pm The Dufay Collective 13 June 2pm Gregynog Press Discovery Day 7.30pm Kungsbacka Piano Trio 9.30pm It’s Alec Templeton Time! 14 June 2pm Mendelssohn in Wales 3pm The Aronowitz Ensemble 17 June 7.30pm O Duo, percussion 19 June 7.30pm Iestyn Davies, countertenor & Gary Cooper, harpsichord 20 June 2pm Haydn Discovery Day 7.30pm Elin Manahan Thomas, soprano & Haydn Trio Eisenstadt 21 June 3pm The Sixteen SOLD OUT

01743 281281

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Touring France GWYN GRIFFITHS

ith relief we left the rain of the Cardiff National Eisteddfod and set off for France and Provence. A night crossing and a good night’s sleep on Brittany Ferries and by nightfall we had got to Clermont Ferrand, or rather Riom, which is about 10

kilometres short of the town where Stephen Jones once played his rugby. Riom is a sober little town, famous for lawyers and its stubborn resistance in past times to Clermont’s claim to be the administrative capital of the BasseAuvergne. It is a little town proud of its historical past and not unduly concerned to reveal itself to strangers. We had booked at the Le Pacifique Hôtel where we have stayed often enough for Madame to recognise my voice when I telephoned. “Oui, le gallois!” We get the best room, the biggest and more importantly - the longest bed

“We worked in the harvest together at Bonnelly’s farm in Roussillion. ” So speaks Vladimir in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in the hotel. Monsieur and Madame are from Picardy and there is a tradition of hotel keeping in the family. Monsieur’s grandfather kept a hotel in Picardy and there’s a picture of it above the reception desk. It looks like a wild-west log cabin but it advertised clean and comfortable lodgings and a banquet room for weddings &c. Riom, in the 1940-41 winter of deep snow, was the scene of an infamous “trial” of three French politicians, put in the dock by the Vichy regime, Edouard Daladier, Paul Reynard and Léon Blum. By a remarkable coincidence I taken with me for holiday reading Daladier’s Journal de captivité 194045. Daladier was the French Prime Minister who signed the Munich Agreement in 1938 and next year led France to war against Germany. After the fall of France he was imprisoned by the Vichy Regime and indicted, first for declaring war on Germany, and secondly for failing to rearm the nation for war. With the emergence of facts embarrassing to the Vichy regime Pétain suspended the trial and Daladier was deported to prison in Germany. As a former French Prime Minister he was a sort of VIP prisoner, thus managing to keep a secret diary

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parliament for the Vaucluse and as mayor of Avignon in 1946 serving concurrently in both until he retired from politics in 1958. A SCARY RIDE

found by his son in 1990, twenty years after his death and subsequently published. The diary entries, remarkably well-informed, are by turn sorrowful, enraged, humorous and philosophical, his praise and exasperation with the Allies giving a new perspective on France and the Second World War. Above all, he wrote of his hopes and fears for France and lamenting the fate of Europe when the victory he never doubted would eventually come. He frequently refers back, putting past events such as the Treaty of Versailles, and the occasional reference to Lloyd George. After the war he returned to the town of his birth, Carpentras, Provence, went back into politics, and re-elected both to

“You must visit the Canyon du Verdon,” a friend told us. So, having left Riom and Clermont we headed south and east to Sisteron, close to the French Alps where we stayed at a less comfortable hotel and a bed that had us itching a bit. The following day we drove through this land of fantastic gorges and stomachchurning precipices. “Nothing more romantic than the contrast of rock and abyss, of green waters and crimson shade, than this sky which resembles the Homeric sea and this wind speaks with the voices of gods long dead …” wrote Jean Giono, the great writer from Manosque the town at the bottom end of the gorge. We drove on and it was Apt that we found a place to stay the night before settling in the following day at Danielle

Pommier’s vineyard three kilometres from Bonnieux. Bonnieux is home. Over the years we have got to know many people, Henri Tomas the baker and the randonneurs who go off into the hills and among the vineyards every Monday and Wednesday, 7.30 in the car park in summer, afternoons in the cooler months. All are retired with occasional holidaymakers like myself made welcome, as long as they keep up. They are a fit lot and make no allowances for occasional ramblers like myself. One holiday-

maker had to excuse himself on one Wednesday - his feet were too sore following the Monday walk, which had lasted five and a half hours. WHERE BECKETT PICKED GRAPES

“But we were in the Vaucluse together, I’d swear it. We worked in the harvest together at Bonnelly’s farm in Roussillion … Everything is red down there.” So speaks Vladimir in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Beckett spent the years from 1942 to 1945 in Roussillion, where he had a nervous breakdown apparently induced by

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boredom. Together with other exiles, he stayed at a hotel run by the widow of the chef Escoffier - is that where the word “scoff ” comes

from? I have been told that Beckett got the idea for the play while waiting for a bus to Apt on the RN100 near the 2000 year old Pont Julian,

named after Julius Caesar, below Roussillion. Roussillion’s lurid surreal ochre landscape is a noted tourist trap, but I wanted to know if Bonnelly’s vineyard was real. I had been buying wine from the Girod Domaine, run by relatives of a friend, when I saw the sign. Bonnelly père et fils have produced wine there since 1937 and Bonnelly fils was delighted to confirm that, yes, Beckett had been grape picking there. We tasted a red wine which had won a gold medal three years running, mellow, fruity and expensive tasting without being expensive which I approve. This was no posh tasting room, a bar in the corner surrounded by boxes of wine and bottles, barrels and tanks. We bought lots of wine and some bottles of the wine that tasted - but wasn’t very expensive to celebrate the arrival of another granddaughter. I took pictures, and Bonnelly fils insisted that I take one of him with Gwen. He spoke with a strong Provencal accent, pronouncing matin as mateng and bien as beng. I wished him “bono journado” as we left and he responded

enthusiastically to my few, but growing, number of Provencal phrases. The name of his domaine is Coulet Rouge - Coulet is the Provencal word for a small hill. “Did you know,” said Gwen, “that Provencal ceased to be the official administrative language of Provence in1539? Just three years after the Act of Union prohibited the use of Welsh for legal purposes?” Alphonse Daudet, describing in 1866 a visit he made to the home of Frédéric Mistral, said to be the only writer in a language with no official status to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote of “… that lovely Provencal language that is more than three parts Latin, that queens once spoke and that now is only understood by our shepherds.” But it is still spoken and can be heard in the fields and streets of the villages. Colette, a friend who was born in Roussillion, tells me her mother was a monoglot Provencal speaker. “I never spoke anything but Provencal to her - even on the telephone,” she said. The language enjoys a reasonable status in the Universities of the south, even if the French Government stubbornly refuses to allow it to be taught in state schools. Victor Doumas, now 90, is a retired farmer and for 50 years deputy mayor of Bonnieux, told me the language is so close to Catalan that he can use it all the way down to Barcelona. It is absurd that the language of the troubadours, Europe’s first lyrical poets whose influence spread across Europe from Portugal and Galicia to the German Minnesingers and Dafydd ap Gwilym, the first of the languages to evolve from Latin to have established its own code of grammar, the inspiration for Dante and Petrarch and hence the Renaissance should be so trampled under foot.

PHOTOGRAPHS: PAUL BLANC, GWYN GRIFFITHS, GWEN GRIFFITHS

Literature Spirit of Place

A great heart and hinterland GWYN GRIFFITHS

regaron, patternless yet compact, intrigues students of urban settlement. A Royal Charter granted in 1292 is testament to its antiquity. In pre-history a glacier scooped out the top end of the Teifi valley before retreating leaving the mound of earth on which Tregaron sits and damming

the river to form a lake. This lake filled to give us Cors Caron, a much nicer word than the miserable ‘bog’. I was born on the edge of Y Gors and spent my first eighteen years there. The late Cliff Whittingham, a fine Geography teacher at the County School, ensured that we understood our geological heritage. The town and Y Gors shaped the people. Y Gors attracts scientists and naturalists. The school produced a stream of scientists, although it is debatable whether the inspiration might have been Y Gors or an excellent physics master, Robert Thomas of Doldre. It also inspired writers and poets. James Kitchener Davies described the struggle to tame Y Gors in his play Meini Gwagedd (The Empty Stones) and his radio ode Swˆn y Gwynt sy’n Chwythu (The Sound of the Wind that Blows). Ambrose Bebb, the most interesting Welsh-language writer of the first half of the twentieth century, described its battered and wretched winter features and his love of the unearthly sounds of its painful spring rebirth. I never lived in the town, the town for me was the County School - a school with a literary heritage we MARI STERLING

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“Gwyn eu byd y Tregaroniaid” (Blessed are the Tregaronites) was a rueful comment common at one time among people from other parts. were never allowed to forget. The headmaster, Dai (never David) Lloyd Jenkins, was from Llanddewi Brefi, and a prifardd - winner of the Chair at the Llandybïe National Eisteddfod, 1944. Tom Hughes Jones, principal of Cartrefle College Wrexham, was the author of Amser i Ryfel (A Time for War), one of the few Welsh novels about either World War. Griffith John Williams was Professor of Welsh at Cardiff. Ambrose Bebb lectured at the Normal College Bangor. My Welsh teacher, John Roderick Rees, was a former pupil, and eventual twice winner of the National Eisteddfod Crown. We took pride in their achievements. The present headmaster is another National Eisteddfod Chair winner. On St David’s Day we marched down to the square to pay homage at the statue of another famous son of the town, Henry Richard, his back firmly turned to the Talbot Hotel. He was elected Secretary of the International Peace Society in 1848 and shared platforms with the likes of Victor Hugo. In 1868, he was elected Liberal MP for Merthyr and Aberdare. Read the parliamen-

CARL RYAN

tary attacks of this pugnacious and belligerent Apostle of Peace on the Tory landowners, and feel the blood race through your veins. Twm Sion Cati, the highwayman, was pardoned by Elizabeth I. He is sometimes referred to as the Welsh Robin Hood but Twm was no figment of imagination. His favourite inn is now home to Tregaron Rugby Club. Tregaron is a confident little town, proud and adventurous. It is outward looking, a legacy of the drovers who walked cattle, sheep and geese to the London markets. Their descendants established milk rounds and corner shops all over London, but they never forgot “y wlad”. Many, like my parents, returned to their hills and ploughs when they were bombed out of their businesses by Hitler. Another son of Tregaron, Joseph Jenkins (1818-98), left his family one morning for Australia to make his fortune. He didn’t, and spent 25

years scraping a miserable existence as a swagman. He did gain fame, posthumously, when his diaries were discovered by a descendant, the cardiologist William Evans, who edited and published them in Australia. The book was a best-seller. Evans, also of Tregaron, went to London and treated kings and prime ministers but never received a knighthood, probably because, after performing an operation on Stanley Baldwin, he refused to agree that Baldwin was medically unfit to continue as Prime Minister. He told the Tories to find another excuse to get rid of him! Going away to work or higher education was a step taken for granted by many youngsters from Tregaron. And somehow there were always people from home to help them settle down. “Gwyn eu byd y Tregaroniaid” (Blessed are the Tregaronites) was a rueful comment common at one time among people from other parts. Sir John Rowland,

Chairman of the Welsh Board of Health from 1930 to 1940, was noted for his fondness of employing young people from his home town. Evan Evans of Llangeitho went to London to make his fortune and was the first to organise coach tours for American tourists. One of my uncles drove his coaches! His son Dafydd Gwyn returned to run the Red Lion - sorry, Llew Coch. Once, when asked to review The Welsh in London (editor: Emrys Jones) I suggested the headline From Evan Evans Poet to Evan Evans Tours. I can’t remember whether it was used. Ieuan Brydydd Hir, poet and antiquarian, friend of Thomas Gray and Bishop Percy, was born and buried in Lledrod; Evan Evans the buses, mayor of St Pancras and secretary of Jewin (the Welsh church in London), was from Llangeitho. That’s Tregaron, a small town with a great heart and hinterland where cash and culture are never far removed.

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P rofile

Christopher Meredith PAUL GROVES

ow many Brecon residents count a first-class poet and novelist one of their number, if not by birth then by adoption? More might realise Deep Purple guitarist Roger Glover or the eighteenthcentury’s best-known tragedienne Sarah Siddons hail from their town. Two centuries later, Christopher Meredith could never follow in her footsteps, being no glossy extrovert, eager to impress an audience through impersonation. His writing goes beyond dissimulation into raw, edgy areas of human endeavour which have nothing to do with greasepaint. Born in Tredegar in 1954, he has risen to the rank of professor at the University of Glamorgan, not through old-school-tie connections (as might once have been the case on traditional English campuses) but by sharp-eyed, single-minded intelligence. Indeed, having read his penetrating novel Sidereal Time (1998) I was apprehensive about meeting him as my own auctorial skills are hardly on a par with his. Having taught in a comprehensive for over a decade, he has been well-placed to depict such an institution with disconcerting honesty. I, too, have been a secondary teacher; and the book, with its pinpoint accuracy of observation, reminded me all too vividly of the pressure, overcrowding, and dubious standards of similar establishments. Whether or not his neighbours are aware of the gifted author in their midst, the wider public (or, at least, its better-read members) certainly are, regarding him as the leading novelist of post-industrial Englishspeaking Wales. Robert Minhinnick has said: “His fascination lies with how people create strategies to cope with changes in which the social is inextricable from the private. Or fail to adapt.” His reputation rests primarily on his first novel Shifts (1986), generally considered his best. Meredith’s father went down the pit in 1934, aged fourteen. Six uncles did likewise at various times. During the war he fought with No. 44 Royal Marine Commando in Burma, and was demobbed in 1946. Virtually broke, he commuted to Hereford, where he found work in Bulmer’s cider factory. Thereafter he laboured on the railways, and in the steel industry. Christopher, too, was employed as a steelworker for a while (which he quite enjoyed) and on an assembly line (which he disliked). His achievements are all the more remarkable for humble origins; though he did get through to University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, to read English and Philosophy. Having learnt Welsh, he has translated Melog, a novel by his contemporary Mihangel

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Morgan who lives in Ceredigion. The first of three poetry collections - This - appeared in 1984; his most recent The Meaning of Flight - in 2005. Despite tutorial and administrative tasks, he brought out a children’s story Nadolig Bob Dydd - at around the same time. Although Meredith’s grandfather was a Methodist lay preacher, he regards himself as an atheist. Speaking with him, you do not encounter a doctrinaire firebrand, a rabid denouncer of all things religious, but a sensitive (maybe hypersensitive) humanist who is buzzing with ideas and is probably more open to new ones than he likes to admit. I hope he can win time to express as many of these as possible on paper, for if his next book is as solid an achievement as his last we are in for a treat. I playfully suggested he should set it in the bourgeois Home Counties, but he would have none of it. His strengths and weaknesses are those of a Welshman, and he will continue to mine veins of consequence concerned with national and personal identity. Even so, he is keen to travel. To date he has visited the Baltic, Czech Republic, and USA. Much of this was paid for by the British Council, Literature Across Frontiers, or Welsh Literature Abroad. At fifty-four he considers he has one short and one long novel (or perhaps a factual book set overseas) left in him. He also fancies more translating. I trust time and circumstance will be kind to him because I feel he has even better material to produce. Already his poetry is noteworthy for its clarity and ‘nowness’. It does not spring from a prior set of beliefs, a knowing stance he insists the reader share. Rather, it explores unflinchingly, and in some ways replicates the ‘mindfulness’ of Buddhism, a sine qua non along the road to enlightenment and liberation. Most of our lives are flux. It can be the poet’s job to arrest the flow for a while, to build a poem much as a beaver constructs a dam. We are in a hurry, at someone’s beck and call; we sell ourselves, necessarily, for money. There is a simple, sturdy, arresting quality in Meredith’s poetry, though this isn’t to offer unqualified praise. He is not against the occasional diversion into puzzling experimentation. This mightn’t be to the taste of the average reader, if there is such a beast, though it does show his willingness to ‘think outside the box’ as contemporary marketspeak has it. If a country might best be glimpsed through its artists’ interaction with landscape and history, then knowledge of its topographical byways is more important than hurtling along its highways, and a study of its more critically receptive inhabitants can yield insights it would take ages to stumble upon by chance. Writers like Meredith provide a shortcut to sympathetic understanding by the immediacy of their prose and the acuity of their vision.

The National Pageant of Wales Hywel Teifi Edwards (Gomer, £14.99) MEIC STEPHENS

or ten days in the summer of 1909, a hundred years ago, Cardiff was host to a spectacle the like of which had never before been seen in Wales. Some 5,000 people took part, many from the upper classes, all dressed in what was thought to be national costume and all with the most patriotic of motives. A grandstand was put up in Sophia Gardens for 7,500 spectators and a further 17,000 were provided with seats by Cardiff RFC. From all parts of south Wales, and beyond, thousands poured into Cardiff, then enjoying its heyday as the greatest coal-exporting port in the world, and there was excellent newspaper coverage of the event. Among the participants were Lord Tredegar as Owain Glyndwˆr, the Lord Mayor of Cardiff as Hywel Dda, the City Librarian as Merlin, the Marchioness of Bute as Dame Wales and the Chief Constable of Glamorgan as ‘Chief Ruffian’. The cast of this extravaganza also included scores of rugby-players, townspeople, teachers, and schoolchildren who joined in the action with infectious enthusiasm. The time-scale began with Caradoc’s defiance of imperial Rome and ended with the ‘Act of Union’ of 1536. One of the highlights was the storming of the Castle by the insurgent Welsh led by Ifor Bach. The show’s script was written by Owen Rhoscomyl (Robert Scourfield Mills or Arthur Vaughan, 1863-1919), professional soldier and flamboyant author of the highly influential book Flamebearers of

Welsh History (1905), a deliberate attempt to instill patriotic pride in the schoolchildren of Wales. Rhoscomyl had a ‘warrior spirit’ and was at pains to show that the Welsh had always been fighters and were ‘unconquerable’. For all its absurdities, the Pageant was a rip-roaring success in popular terms. Inevitably, it ended in recrimination and financial loss. But for ten days it had cheered the hearts of all Welsh patriots and, after the Cymru Fydd débâcle of 1896, served to raise the hopes of those who looked forward to a new deal for Wales in administrative and cultural terms - hopes that were to be dashed with the outbreak of war in 1914 for which the Welsh were conscripted in droves. Owen Rhoscomyl, royalist, romantic nationalist and imperialist, whose ambition was to see Wales taking its place as part of the British Empire, died a disappointed man and his Pageant has been largely forgotten until now. Hywel Teifi Edwards, who has dedicated his book to Henry and Frances Jones-Davies, is our foremost historian of Victorian and Edwardian Wales. He writes brilliantly about Owen Rhoscomyl for whom he obviously feels great admiration, and even praises the motives of the Pageant’s promoters, ending on an upbeat note: ‘If only the same spirit could be rekindled when the Welsh, facing nothing more terrible than a referendum to determine their own future, their own standing in the world, are

called upon to vote . . . The battlefield, as it has been over the centuries, is the Welsh mind. We are long overdue a decisive victory.’

At the Source: a Writer’s Year Gillian Clarke (Carcanet, £12.95) CATRIN ROGERS

illian Clarke’s first collection of prose writings is one of those books that ripen in the mind long after you’ve read them. It starts with six chapters reflecting on her home in near Talgarreg in Ceredigion, the landscape around it, herself, the stones she collects while out walking her poetry, and the language with which she sometimes writes it Welsh. Quoting frequently from her own poetry (‘Nothing is until it has a word’), and from others’ Shakespeare’s King Lear is a particular favourite - the poet unravels the patterns that led to her living in a farmhouse in Ceredigion. The sea creates pebbles, the weather creates a landscape. Houses are built on that landscape, and the ghosts of previous occupants feed the writer’s imagination. Childhood memories (real and imagined), a wartime upbringing in Cardiff and west Wales, the helping hand of farm-

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ing neighbours, and of nature churning around her flow into each chapter. Finally, she describes how she uses language - which has evolved over many centuries, creating myths and whispers as it went - to write poetry, the ultimate expression of her identity. The fact that versions of the six chapters have been published in the past has left some degree of repetition - her mother’s disdain for the Welsh language and the sad story of Marged, who lived in Blaen-cwrt until her suicide in 1930, are picked over too often. But this is a small distraction in an otherwise deeply thought-provoking sequence of reflections. The second part of the book is a journal, a fascinating year in a rural life that gives her thoughts on sources the perfect form. Less capricious and more engaging than the first part, here the poet chronicles the changing seasons and the corresponding farming duties beautifully. “This is theatre,” she says. Birds, cats, foxes and sheep become a part of the family, while the shifting weather is described with very dramatic language. There is humour too the lambing season reminds her of “one first-timer giving birth in the stream. We had to dry the lamb with a hairdryer.” This is a richly textured and timely book. “We must live with nature if we are to live at all,” she says - the threat of climate change hovers over her surroundings. Equally, she reminds us of the value of our linguistic heritage “A lost language represents the obliteration of a culture, a monument rubbed clean of words.” Everything that has been described is under threat from someone or something, leaving the reader with much to contemplate.

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Bro a Bywyd Kyffin Williams, His Life, His Land David Meredith (ed.) (Cyhoeddiadau Barddas, £15.95) PAUL JOYNER

his is an essential sourcebook for anyone who loves Kyffin or who wishes to study his life. David Meredith has taken us inside Kyffin’s family albums and gives us a dazzling array of images, covering every aspect of the artist’s life and career. Just some of the highlights in this delightful volume are the photograph of Kyffin at Highgate school teaching art, one window open as if to emphasise the importance of bringing the real world into a learning situation. The author rightly points out that T.S.Eliot was also a teacher at Highgate and of course Eliot’s home at Kensington Court Gardens was just around the corner from the Thackeray Gallery in Thackeray Street, where Kyffin had so many of his memorable and extraordinarily successful annual exhibitions. In fact this volume is all about connections: we find here how Kyffin was a man of Ynys Môn with generations of his family having lived and worked on the island. Kyffin’s connections with poetry are also nicely illustrated with the inclusion of works by Professor Derec Llwyd Morgan, Gwyn Thomas and the artist’s own humorous rhyme. It is no accident that Barddas thought Kyffin a subject worthy of the first non-literary Bro a Bywyd. Connections were part of the reason for Kyffin’s success as an artist

and as a national and international Welshman. His early experiences with the landscape and the local people of his beloved island, the understanding of his fellow Royal Welch Fusiliers, the comradeship of his student days and later meetings with the members of the Royal Cambrian Academy all helped to form his unique ability to relate and communicate with a diverse and ever- changing society. We are treated in this volume to many pages of the sheer pleasure of a Kyffin laugh, a Kyffin story, a Kyffin chat, a Kyffin event. It is David Meredith’s own connection with Kyffin which adds a depth and real value to this work, throughout the book we see how David has followed the artist and thus recorded some beautiful if poignant memories. The volume brings together all the important aspects of the framework of Kyffin’s art, providing a very helpful list of his exhibitions, it publishes what must surely be the earliest photograph of the artist and has a series of images from his funeral, of great value historically. In all this there is a careful intent to show but not explain, to tell but not to interpret. This volume will have a place on the shelf alongside Kyffin’s own writings and the editors are to be congratulated for producing something new, which fills a gap in our knowledge of one of our greatest artists.

Wales - Churches, Houses, Castles Simon Jenkins (Allen Lane £25) JOHN IDRIS JONES

imon Jenkins is a connoisseur of buildings, especially churches. The present volume has over fifty of them, from the grandeur of cathedrals to the bare beauty of lonely country churches. The author talks of the difficulties of gaining access but the inclusion of only a few Nonconformist chapels seems more a question of will rather than of failure in finding a key. Perhaps the faux-Classical facades of our typical chapels have something of the pastiche and naïve, sometimes a monument to the generosity of a local trader who wished to secure thereby a better route to heaven. But there are gems, such as Pendref in Well Street, Ruthin, a tube-like structure on a narrow site, its interior pressing upon the individual reminiscent of a small Elizabethan theatre. “The preservation of these buildings is the more urgent given their declining congregations and the loss of the industrial monuments that gave them birth.” the author writes with reference to the chapels of Glamorgan. Lleweni, Denbigh, is not here, despite a rump remaining of that huge sixteenth-century three-wing house which impressed Dr Johnson in 1774. And the great man’s friend Hester

Thrayle’s Brynbella is not here either. And Bachegraig, reputedly the first brick-built house in Wales. Surely some of the same-style churches could have made way for some interesting domestic structures? The author writes: “I have known Wales all my life but never as a native or permanent resident. The son of a Welsh father and an English mother, I have always lived in England but spent virtually every holiday in Wales, where my parents are buried in the village of Pennal in Merioneth, now Gwynedd.” His book is dedicated to his father, Daniel Jenkins. We learn from the main text that part of his childhood was spent in Pennal, that most dynamic of Welsh locations.. The child is father of the man. If we call him Welsh, who would argue? He writes looking eastwards, his back to Cardigan Bay: “The English are starkly ignorant of Wales. They are taught about their own country and, to an extent, about Scotland and Ireland. Yet to them the story of Wales is a closed book.” Jenkins has opened the book, his book. This is his tribute to the Land of our Fathers. And it is of the very best quality. His knowledge of architectural forms and periods is second to none, as is his grasp of British history. The book’s photographs are astonishing in their visual quality and illustrative purpose. And throughout this substantial text, the writer in him talks to the reader in a style which engages, teaches and never bores. Jenkins writes: “..the new Assembly building in Cardiff Bay is insipid and the adjacent Wales Millennium Centre an extraordinary beached monster..” This tells you something of his aesthetic. When a building has an important function, he wants it to stand up and say so; he doesn’t mind decora-

tion as long as it is of good quality; and he doesn’t mind size, as long as it has symmetry. A building should make a statement: in MacLeish’s words, it should mean, not be.

Byd Go Iawn Un Nos Ola Leuad J. Elwyn Hughes (Cyhoeddiadau Barddas, £11.95) RHODRI LL. EVANS

here is no denying that Un Nos Ola Leuad is a masterpiece. Still a firm favourite with readers and critics almost fifty years after its release, Caradog Prichard’s novel appears to sail timeless waters. Its nameless protagonist - wandering the streets of his native village after a half a century of exile and re-living his povertystricken and tragic childhood there - is one of Welsh literature’s most memorable characters. But even a partial biographical knowledge of Caradog Prichard will tell you that UNOL is a work deeply rooted in the author’s real personal life. One might call it a fictionalised autobiography, as the real and the fictional rarely walk apart. This being the case, there has always been a substantial interest in the man and his novel; both being two faces of the same coin, but it was only around the centenary-mark of the author’s birth in 1904 that this interest evolved into hard-copy volumes of research. This book by J. Elwyn Hughes (who published Bro a Bywyd Caradog Prichard 1904-1980: Bywgraffiad Darluniadol in 2005) is a quest into the real world behind the novel’s fictional ‘Pentra’

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(Bethesda by another name) and with a Poirotesque ability to find clues and track down elusive characters camouflaged by the novel’s author, Hughes reveals to us the real people, places and events that Caradog Prichard used as templates for UNOL. Characters such as Now Bach Glo, Harri Bach Clocsia and Wil Elis Portar are given reallife counterparts, roads and landmarks such as Lôn Bost and Allt Bryn are drawn on contemporary maps and some of the novel’s events are recalled in the newspapers of the 1910s, such as the parade honouring a decorated local soldier and the novel’s infamous football match. Some might ask whether this volume has any relevance (and appeal) to anyone unfamiliar with Bethesda, seeing as so much of the novel’s content is rooted in this quarrying village on the A5. The answer lies with UNOL itself. It is an extraordinary novel and Pentra is an extraordinary place. It is the stage for one of Welsh literature’s finest, most mature works and albeit on a much smaller scale, is on a par with Joyce’s Dublin and Balzac’s Paris. It is the topography of a classic, and as such, is worthy of interest. A remarkable book; full of lucidly-written research, and an invaluable addition to the world of Caradog Prichard and Un Nos Ola Leuad.

Out of the Fire of Hell Welsh experience of the

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Great War 1914-1918 in prose and verse ed. Alan Llwyd. (Gomer, £14.99) SAM ADAMS

his is one of the finest anthologies of writing from the Great War that I have seen, and all the better for focusing on the Welsh experience, which is almost always neglected in books about the conflict published in London and elsewhere. Also, it carries a message, undiluted and clear in every page, a passionate argument for pacifism that is often deeply moving. Lighter, even hopeful, moments are recorded, like the extraordinary Christmas truce and exchange of gifts between the opposed front lines, but they are all too brief, and there is nothing glorious or celebratory, unless it be in the merest chance of survival. Some of the justly renowned poetry of the Great War has become familiar in our ears, notably that of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas, both, with their Welsh associations, represented here. Extracts from David Jones’s In Parenthesis overtop the lot, but the work of lesser poets, steeped in the conventions of Georgian prosody, in general does not have the same resonance. The verses of Cynan (who served first as stretcher-bearer and later as chaplain) are an exception. Translated by Alan Llwyd with skill and tact, they deserve to be more widely known and valued, perhaps in Welsh as much as in English.. Powerful as many of the poems are, it is the prose, from books, journals, magazine articles and letters home, that has the greater impact, partly because it is far less frequently anthologised and nowadays less well known, but above all because it brings us, by

the accumulation of harrowing detail, forcibly to face the squalor, the misery, the terror of warfare. The book includes several haunting extracts from Llewelyn Wyn Griffith’s Up to Mametz, last published in Wales in 1981. Why isn’t it read in secondary schools, where ‘War’ is often a theme in English lessons? Leaves from an Officer’s Notebook by Eliot Crawshay-Williams, new to me, is equally striking in its description of fighting in Egypt. He is more of a polemicist than Griffith. War, he writes ‘ … is a barbaric and useless folly due [ … ] chiefly to the incompetent statesmanship of mankind at large. If the members of all the Foreign Offices and Chancelleries were made to fight in the forefront of the first battle in every war, there would almost certainly be no war’. He provides an emblem of desert warfare in the fly, ‘the camp follower of filth’, to match the ubiquitous, fat rats in the trenches of the Western Front, which seemed to Saunders Lewis ‘the very incarnation of war’. I have strong memories of World War II, from Dunkirk to the horror of Buchenwald, but when I think of war now, it is usually images of the Great War that rise up first. Its hold on the collective imagination is as strong as ever, and perhaps stronger than ever in 2008, the ninetieth year since the signing of the Armistice, with the very few remaining old soldiers still tearfully remembering fallen comrades at cenotaphs, and testifying again to the appalling, pointless waste of it all. This book is a worthy contribution to the act of remembrance.

Books In praise of the englyn MEIC STEPHENS on books that reflect the variety and vitality of Welsh literature.

omeone once quipped, ‘If you’ve got nothing to say, say it in cynghanedd.’ Others, such as the writers Alun LlywelynWilliams and Pennar Davies, have been even more unkind. They were referring, of course, to the ancient art of writing alliterative verse which the English poet Hopkins called ‘consonantal chiming’. Much of the sonorous charm of traditional Welsh poetry depends on it and it has held many of the best Welsh poets in thrall since about the sixth century. The danger, I suppose, is that a poet using cynghanedd, as many still do, is likely to write a verse that is musically pleasing but lacking in any meaning except the platitudinous. The meaning may be commonplace but, boy! it’s well-said. Nowhere is this more apparent in the englyn - the fourline verse that conforms to a strict pattern of stress, assonance, syllable-count and rhyme that makes English verse-forms such as the limerick look like child’s play. Fortunately, in the hands of a master-practitioner - who rises above its constrictions - it often happens that cynghanedd enhances the meaning, making it all the more memorable. For this reason, the englyn often serves an occasional purpose, at weddings, for example, or on gravestones where

its lapidary quality reflects the gravity of the thought it contains. Most literate Welsh-speakers have a stock of them which lodge in the memory because they seem so apt and beautifully-expressed. Many are repositories of wit and wisdom. This is true of the 300+ verses in Englynion Barddas 3 (Barddas, £5) which Elwyn Edwards has compiled for the delectation of aficionados of the form. Dafydd Islwyn, another stalwart, has done something similar in 100 o Englynion (Barddas, £5), except he has written a page or two explaining why he has chosen each englyn and sometimes told an amusing anecdote about it. The latter is an exemplary handbook for students of the form and I learned a good deal from it. Gillian Clarke, too, has done her bit to demonstrate the beauties of our literature but for the sake of those readers who know no Welsh. She has translated two books by Kate Roberts (1891-1985), generally regarded as the greatest Welsh prose-writer of the twentieth century. The first is Tegwch y Bore, published in 1957, which Gillian renders as One Bright Morning (Gomer, £8.99). Set during the First World War, and in Denbigh, it describes a love affair that is overcast by the shadows of the conflict, though it ends on a more optimistic note. In The White Lane (Gomer, £12.99) we have the original Welsh text as well as the English translation of Y Lôn Wen, the writer’s autobiography which is more the history of her native patch in north-west Wales than an intimate account of her own life. Like Tegwch y Bore, it was prompted by her brother’s death during the War. Both books are among the classics of Welsh literature and

now they are available for the world to read. It is a relief after so much suffering and introspective gloom to turn to a poet who is full of mischief and with an iconoclastic attitude to things Welsh. Robat Gruffudd, always a stormy petrel and bon viveur, delights in plucking a hair from the nostrils of the pompous and respectable. In A Gymri di Gymru? (Y Lolfa, £5.95) there are poems that will make you smirk as he deflates some of our more pinstriped compatriots and others that will make you laugh out loud. Although some are very serious, such as the poem about his grandmother who died in Ravensbrück concentration camp, Robat has a light touch and there’s nothing very subtle about his wit but he turns it expertly against shibboleths in our country’s life that need to be examined. Among his targets are Plaid Cymru, Cardiff Bay, S4C, the Welsh Language Board, and anyone who strikes him as a poseur or aesthete. The result is a breath of fresh air in the stuffy parlours of our nation’s culture. There have been twenty-three volumes of Cof Cenedl edited by Geraint H. Jenkins and the last, number XXIV (Gomer, £8.99), brings the series to a close with a flourish. Among the topics featured this time are the Welsh Bible, the Great Strike at the Penrhyn Quarries, and the Labour Party’s shameful attitude to Devolution between 1966 and 1979. Like all its predecessors, this volume is written in an accessible style by authorities in their field. We are indebted to Geraint for his industry over the years and for the lively and informative essays he has commissioned from his contributors.

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POETRY COINS Stalled in Kingsway traffic, engine idle, watching for peacocks and the grey friar's ghost, I remember the diving boys, the water-course lost under the hum and cumber, the old canal

GONE AWAY My sister's free and open house had two New lambs the ewe was careless of. They would come in from the garden The piglet had turned over, to settle

scuttling in its culvert, covert, echoing slaps of rat-shadow and the shout of marble boys, or boys as brown as trout, their skinny shoulder blades like broken wings.

By the fire, blinking amber eyes. Horses, cats, an orphaned guard dog, Poultry and peafowl, a brace of hounds On holiday, all had roof and food assured.

They dived for pennies from the parapet a life ago, falling through green light with a gasp, to surface, blowing water, shaking their otter heads, coins bright

The lambs have grown and found the moor, But snow will bring them back into the yard, As creatures sense their safest home, Not knowing she has gone away.

on their palms. Down there in the filth and cold lies, dated like a journal, my lost gold.

SAM ADAMS

GILLIAN CLARKE

from A RECIPE FOR WATER (Carcanet, £9.95)

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 • Brenda Chamberlain, A Rope of Vines (Parthian, £7.99) • Ioan Williams, Y Mudiad Drama yng Nghymru 1880-1940 (UWP, £14.99)

• Damian Walford Davies, Suit of Lights (Seren, £7.99)

Hiwmor Clive (Lolfa, £4.95)

• Jane Aaron and Ursula Masson (ed.), The Very Salt of Life: Welsh Women’s

Political Writings from Chartism to Suffrage (Honno, £8.99) £7.99)

• Aled Lloyd Davies, Pwyso ar y Giât (Bwthyn,

• Geraint Goodwin, The Heyday in the Blood (Parthian, £8.99)

Hanes Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru 1900-1918 (Barddas, £10.95) Not in these Shoes (Picador, £8.99)

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• Clive Rowlands,

• Alan Llwyd, Prifysgol y Werin: • Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch,

• Alun John Richards, Tinplate in Wales (Carreg Gwalch, £7.50)

Music Trojan Hearse The Hepburns BDG 001

n part due to overproduction, I can’t help feeling that most of this album should be split back into the constituent parts: The poetry is astonishing poetry, and the backing would make very successful lift-music, but together they clash distractingly and raise my blood pressure for entirely the wrong reasons. Of course this may be the intention, but the feeling induced is hardly going to make me listen again. Only in the tracks ‘Celandine’ and ‘Luckless’ do this Llanelli-based band’s ingredients of melancholic melody , smooth backing and dark lyrics, expressed at the best range of Matt Jones’ resonant voice, cohere creatively as a classic recipe of repeated-playing quality. Fans will love it, and if you were fond of The Smiths, give it a go, but the only other reason I can think of for having it would be as a nostalgic reminder of the more engaging and exciting live experience. AD

Yn y Gwaed Rhes Ganol TANT 002

hes Ganol’ translates to ‘middle row’, referring to the fact that the Welsh triple harp has three rows, as opposed to the usual two of the classical instrument. Surprisingly, for the harp is such a well-known cultural symbol, this group of five is the first such ‘choir’ to exist since before the First World War and until recent decades even a solo performance was a rarity. I feel emphatically that this recording does justice to the group’s aim of re-popularising the triple harp. By keeping it simple – the five harps are all we hear – and by plying their masterly playing to beautiful arrangements of some of the most loved traditional Welsh melodies, they have bestowed upon us a purity of sound truly evocative of our landscape and culture at its best, which neither seems old nor out of date. AD

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O Fortuna Ysgol Glanaethwy SAIN 2008

fter all the excitement of the Ysgol Glanaethwy’s Youth Choir’s success in Last Choir Standing, and the televised, 18th anniversary concert, it is hard to say anything new about this CD. Yes, it showcases the very polished performance of the Youth Choir, and shows that the future of the School is secure in the voices of the Juniors. There is a good range of genres in the songs chosen, although I could do without You raise Me up, in any language, which seems to creep into so many vocal collections at present. Indeed it has to be said that both choirs burst into to life in the "greats" such as the title track, And All that Jazz, Dansi na Kumba and Adiemus, and I regret the absence of Bohemian Rhapsody, which I think one of the Youth Choir’s best. Some of the other material, despite almost frighteningly expert performance, I feel, falls short. There is much superb solo work from young singers of whom I am sure we shall hear more as they grow up, and the accompaniment on this disc is exemplary. Annette Bryn-Parry leads a band of well-chosen and nicely varied instruments, giving much support to the choirs with no hint of the sometimes, elsewhere, all-tooevident competition for attention. I had to listen to remark thus: in my book a matter for congratulation to Musical Director Einion Dafydd and all concerned. I do hope this CD sells well and widely, not only as a reward to eighteen years of visionary slog on the part of Rhian and Cefin Roberts and their students, but as an encouragement to those in places where ysgolion berfformio are unknown, to consider creating new ones. We need more performance schools both in Wales and in the rest of Britain. NL

101Welsh and Breton Tunes for the Highland Bagpipe by

Bob Roser and Bill Reese ORDER FROM

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Chris Kinsey

Nature Diary

hat Dylan Thomas felt as “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower…” is so powerful and fast throughout March, April and May. I can’t keep up with the speed of growth, the sheer excitement of first re-appearances, or the rapid rate of succession from one plant species to the next, so I’ll start with some continuities. Snowdrops have set. Wild daffodils have flowered and finished, but celandines are still out, though not the same clumps as set the fuse running in February. These late ones struggle to stay starry eyed as the leaves of trees and bigger plants accelerate and hijack their light. The emerging leaves of trees change fast too. As chlorophyll gets to work, pigments reflecting blue-green light rapidly eclipse the reds, yellows and oranges we tend not to see again until autumn. Resident birds are more songful. The wrens which survived the St. Stephen’s Day freeze whir from brambles and burst into loud baroque trills and robins which spend much of the year in territorial hostilities consent to pair. The hen flutters her wings and the cock feeds her. Our hedge is a twitter of sparrows flying in nesting materials; long quills of pampas grass. Tits raid gutters for moss. Many of us mark the in-coming migrations of hirundines: martins and swallows. On the 23rd March, sand martins were surveying the honeycombed banks at Pwll Penarth. A week later, house martins skimmed the edge of town, unperturbed by buzzard circles and cries. On the 8th April I saw a solitary swallow swoop a farm yard at Abermule. On the last night of March, there was a scrabbling and scratching in the lane at a place where people leave their bins. I froze, fearing rats, but tuning into the snuffling and snorting I tracked two hedgehogs. They’d probably not long emerged from hibernation but, I guessed, a male had found a female on an early hunting trip. He

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I froze, fearing rats, but tuning into the snuffling and snorting I tracked two hedgehogs.

was shuffling and circling round her, but she was immune to the charms of his ever-louder snortings and snufflings. Hedgehog courtship can last for hours. I didn’t linger for more than a few minutes as voyeur, but I suspect the sow wasn’t going to give in. Unless the female flattens her back completely, the boar gets severely needled by spines if he tries to mount her. I felt ambushed and overtaken by the first bluebells. On Easter Sunday in the Gaer Fawr Woods, near Welshpool, I saw a few fuses unfurling blue and almost had to touch them to reassure myself it wasn’t just the super-blue sky levering the oaks apart. The next morning, the bluebells in Dolerw Woods gave me a, ‘Some of us have been out for days’, look. It just shows at this point in my habitual walk, I’m usually waltzering round the sky with the woodpeckers, staring along the river for a tease of kingfisher or checking on the greyhounds, though I did see the early blaze of wood anemones. Fortunately, bluebells are generous with their opening times. I returned to Gaer Fawr woods on 3rd May where the mass were pointing upwards in prime blue, just starting to cascade into silent peals. I was also thinking about the poet, UA Fanthorpe, who died at the end of April and who loved bluebell woods. She saw them as a: “Rack of blue like sky growing A foot above ground.” 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

Honey Isle KARL SHOWLER

eekeepers as a group have only come together in the last two hundred years, although in Wales laws governing beekeeping and beekeepers’ behaviour go back to post-Roman times. In 1942 under the stimulus of the war-time drive for local food production, the Cymdeithas Gwenynwyr Cymru (Welsh Beekeeper’s Association) as we know it today was founded to promote the keeping of bees in our country. The CGC now has affiliated associations covering the whole of Wales and publishes the bilingual quarterly Gwenynwyr Cymru (The Welsh Beekeeper). It is easy to think of beekeeping as a rural activity, with the farmer or smallholder having just three or four colonies of bees. However, the beekeeper in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was much more likely to be a member of the professional classes or an industrial worker who had flexible hours, and beekeepers in cities often made use of unusual sites for their hives. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was much debate as to whether bees should be kept in wooden, wicker or straw receptacles: skeps. Some beekeepers who kept their bees in straw or wicker skeps not only sheltered them in sheds or barns but placed them in niches, ‘Cilfachwenyn’ or bee boles, in stone or brick walls. There are some 1444 of these in the British Isles, of which 93 are located in Wales. A list of these can be found on the Internet. The wealthy also installed their skeps in elaborate buildings: one like a castle with turreted towers was built at Berthddu,

The laws begin with a religious preamble explaining the importance in Holy Communion of bees’ wax candles. The bee originated in Paradise, and because of the sin of man they came thence; and God conferred his grace on them, therefore Mass cannot be sung without their wax. LLandinam to house six or seven colonies. This building is illustrated by Eva Crane in her Archaeology of Beekeeping, (London, Duckworth, 1983) p. 168. In The Practical Bee-master published in 1780, John Keys of Bee Hall, near Pembroke advocated the use of wooden hives and improved methods of taking honey from them without killing the bees - as was general practice at the time. The urge to improve agriculture was deep-seated in the more prosperous Welsh rural classes, and lead to the creation of what are known today as agricultural societies. The oldest of these in the United Kingdom “The Brecknockshire Society for the encouragement of Agriculture and for promoting the general good of the same” was founded in 1755. This tradition is carried on by Cymdeithas Amaethyddol Frenhinol Cymru (Royal Welsh Agricultural Society) which now provides a substantial space at their show for beekeeping, in addition to competitive classes for honey, beeswax and mead. Eva Crane in her World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, (Duckworth, London, 1999), explored traditional beekeeping in Ireland and Wales. The ancient laws of these two countries show that hive beekeeping - rather than sim-

ple honey hunting - was practised in both, which involved looking for, and robbing bee nests, in hollow trees. There is strong evidence that by the 1200 the Welsh people had recorded the ancient bee laws formerly handed down by word of mouth. These were probably laid down by Hywel Dda. One set covering South Wales and two smaller versions covering North Wales. To understand a transcription of a set of these laws one needs to know that the word “hive” refers not to a wooden box but to a colony of bees, with its combs and cells containing eggs, larvae, pupae and honey. The laws recite the relative value of the main colony, the “mother-hive”, against that of its offspring “the swarms”. In the concluding paragraph the reference to finding a hive infers the finding of a complete colony in a bush or tree, so that the finder could request a share of its waxen combs - if not its honey - from the land owner. These laws begin with a religious preamble explaining the importance in Holy Communion of bees’ wax candles. The bee originated in Paradise, and because of the sin of man they came thence; and God conferred his grace on them, therefore Mass cannot be sung without their wax.

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A mother-hive of bees is twenty four pence in value. A first swarm is sixteen pence in value. A second swarm twelve pence in value. A third swarm is eight pence in value . A mother-hive , after the first swarm has gone out of it, is twenty pence in value. After the second swarm has gone out of it, it is sixteen pence in value. After the third swarm has gone out of it is twelve pence in value. No swarm is of more value than four pence until it shall be three days on the wing and continually {so}; a day to find a place to move to, and the second to move, and

HIVE ON THE QUAY

the third to rest. [Swarms are extremely volatile and can depart as quickly as they appeared, if their new nest site is unacceptable or they have made up their collective minds on a more distant location] Whoever shall find a swarm on another person’s land upon a bough, receives four pence from the owner of the land if he wills to have the swarm. Whoever shall find a hive on another person’s land , receives a legal penny or the wax at the option of the owner of the land. The ninth day before August every swarm assumes the status of a mother-hive, and then it is twenty-four pence in value, excepting a wing-swarm , for such does not assume the status of a mother-hive until the calends of the following May.

Other questions considered were the ownership of swarms, the stinging of people and animals, the quality of mead and the amount due to the King from those who lived at court having to pay gwestfa an entertainment levy , twice a year. Melfyn Williams in his instructional book on beekeeping, Y Fêl Ynys (the Honey Isle) published in Pontypridd and Liverpool in 1972 reminds us that many poems in Welsh related to bees and beekeeping. These particular englynion were composed as entries for a competition on the subject Y Wenynen (The Bee) at the 1995 Dwyfor Eisteddfod . Er holl oferw’r llafurwaith - a’i rwndi, Er oyr undeb perffaith, Er cynnullo heb streic unwaith Yn niwedd hâf mae’n di waith*

by Geraint Lloyd Owen, Llandwrog, Caernarfon

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O loddest y gweirgloddau yr heliodd Aur hylif i’r diliau A blawd o gist y blodau O’i mela hi daw amlhau**

R. Goodman Jones, Mynytho The (honey) Bee *(Despite all the turmoil of the labour - and its humming Despite the perfect union, Despite a gathering without a single strike, At the end of summer she is unemployed.) **(From the feast of the meadows it gathered Liquid gold to the honeycombs And ‘flour’ from the ‘coffer’ of the flowers. from her honey gathering comes an increase)

ENVIRONMENT

Wood is good RHODRI PUGH

tility bills are a fact of life, a necessary evil, but over the last year they have taken a significant leap and become quite painful. The cost apart, there are all the other considerations and attendant guilt: the frequent mention of our carbon footprint, the legacy we will (or won’t) be leaving our children, the irresponsibility of our wasteful habits. Frankly, the little we can do seems quite pathetic in the grand scheme of things, what with public buildings kept lit around the clock to the growth and desire of some-time third world countries but then, actually, why shouldn’t they have what we have; what right have we to judge and condemn? However, there are other ways of taking the future into one’s own hands: we have all become so dependent perhaps it is time to with the aid of new technology to for some degree of self-sufficiency. One of our neighbours had spent most of the Winter, remember the icy temperatures of January this year, without heating, their boiler had broken down in the autumn and the price of gas had risen to such a level that they felt they couldn’t just repair it and carry on. Jill who had worked for the environment agency for many years had always toyed with finding an alternative method of heating the water and house but everything they had looked at had been very expensive. Now it was time to do some serious research. They decided on a wood gasification boiler (WGB) these are designed to give complete heating and hot water to your house. A WGB is a split log boiler with a large fuel chamber, this is filled on average in a well designed system twice a day. Wood gasification is the process of heating wood and releasing the flammable gases. These gases burn producing a blue jet-like flame though specially designed ceramic jets. After the gases are burnt, the wood becomes charcoal which then falls to the bottom of the burning chamber and, in turn, becomes the heating medium for releasing the gases in the next load of wood. WGB boilers are 84-86% efficient, produce very little ash (Mark says 1/2 bucket per week!) and no smoke during operation. All WGB should be connected to an accumulator tank, in other words a large water cylinder which feeds the heating and domestic hot water systems. WGBs cannot be turned on and off on a timer! They burn 24 hours a day, though the demand can be controlled via a thermostat. Once the tank is at temperature the boiler reduces its air intake

CARL RYAN

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Opera MYFANWY THEATRE, MERTHYR TUDFUL

This is the Day - the Oratorio NORMA LORD

his is the Day is described as an oratorio from Alan Osborne’s new opera, President of the Immortals, and the premiere was given at the Myfanwy Theatre in Merthyr Tydfil on 18th March by Dowlais Male Voice Choir, three soloists, a narrator and an instrumental quartet, because funding for a largerscale performance was not forthcoming. Such a scaling-down at times created problems of balance between the considerable might of the choir and the other musicians, but the result was nevertheless rewarding, both musically and dramatically. The storyline concerns the arrival of itinerant workers in the Welsh valleys in the mid-nineteenth century, and the challenges they face in creating their own settlement there. Interestingly, despite the description of the work as an oratorio, the whole issue of religion is side-stepped and replaced with “green man”, or in this case, woman, pagan mysticism. The men from the North and East are obliged to placate natural spirits, as well as the local authorities before they may build their Tai Unnos and establish their boundaries with hammer-throwing. Eventually, of course, they do these things, and rejoice in home and freedom. Osborne’s music, arranged for this performance by Dowlais MVC’s Musical Director, David Last (who also

ALAN OSBORNE:

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Set design for This is the Day

The storyline concerns the arrival of itinerant workers in the Welsh valleys in the midnineteenth century, and the challenges they face in creating their own settlement there.

sang some tenor recitative), settled on the choir as easily and comfortably as a well-worn cardigan, and the choristers ably expressed the wide range of character, situation and emotion that the piece demands with praiseworthy diction - virtually every word was clear. The general musical style was eclectic, varying from recitative based on plainsong, through celebratory folk rhythms (and how sad that the Twmpath section was so very brief ) and revival-hymn harmonies to almost Handelian splendour in the later choruses. The linking narrative authoritatively spoken, extempore, by David Petersen, was scarcely necessary. Of the soloists, only Gareth Rhys Davies was not always able to demonstrate a recognisable separation of his two characters, but compensated with predictably beautiful singing. Kate Woolveridge created an awesome chill in her vocalisation of the Wild Woman and a pleasingly different effect when singing her human counterpart. Amy Slater’s strong soprano suffered from a constricting tension, but her interpretations were admirable. Raji Mohammadi, Max Charles, Lowri Morgan, playing violin, cello and harp respectively, did their best and made much of the different textures of the music, but were regularly drowned out by Daryah Brill-Williams’s electric piano which was, infuriatingly, kept at choir volume whilst accompanying the soloists and the muted strings. This created an unfortunate impression that a

tribe of itinerant musicians had gate-crashed a choral concert, and tended to divorce the solo and instrumental sections from the main action, and urgently needs sorting before the work is performed again. Apparently Osborne’s full opera contains more music than we were given in the oratorio version, but even so, this version deserves greater musical forces and full staging. The visibly rather feeble screen projections fell well short of the images and scenes generated in the mind’s eye by the music and the words. This is the Day is a universal and eternal tale, commenting on a cycle of history beginning with the first agrarian settlement of Neolithic hunter-gatherers, through the early settlers in America and Australia, to the industrial colonisation happening today in the virgin territories of Asia and Africa. By interesting comparison, neither of two recent, specifically Welsh works which come to mind, Mal Pope and Frank Vickery’s 2005 Amazing Grace and WNO’s specially commissioned Carbon 12, have a great deal of meaning outside their Welsh settings. The opera was destined originally for performance at the Festival Interceltique in Lorient last year, but, in spite of the phenomenal success of a similar collaboration at the Festival’s previous “Year of Wales”, WAG funding was withdrawn six months before the event. This appeared to be the result of a fairly arbitrary change ALAN OSBORNE:

Set design for This is the Day

ALAN OSBORNE:

Set design for This is the Day

of accountability within the Assembly designed to “give someone else a turn” at artistic representation. One is reminded of the famous definition of a camel as a horse designed by a committee! It is deeply regrettable that performance funding is such a bureaucratic lottery, and I have seen far less interesting work performed, at public expense, elsewhere. It often seems that time and creative expertise filling in funding grant forms must exceed that spent on the work itself. Add to this a public perception that “Art” is good for us, so, like medicine, society collectively seems to resent paying for it, and it is scarcely surprising that new initiatives and artistic endeavour are so regularly stifled by lack of performance opportunity. Only when, as a society, we are prepared to accept that “value judgement” is an essential tool, not only in assessing the merits of art and culture, but also in an area as basic as administrative and commercial recruitment, will common sense and rising standards prevail. Few kinds of human value can accurately be assessed by predetermined boxes on a form. Until this happy day arrives, or funding for a fully staged performance is forthcoming by some other route, this work might well find a caring home in the music department of one of Wales’s splendid tertiary educational establishments, where it would provide much scope for the country’s emerging talent. Catch it if you can!

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G ardens Picturesque splendour at Pontypool Park CAROLINE PALMER

ontypool might seem an odd destination for a recreational day out. There is the high unemployment levels endemic in Valleys’ towns, there are lots of decaying churches, empty shops, and pubs for sale. Indeed on a Saturday before Easter almost the only shops optimistic enough to open their doors in the afternoon were outsider chains, the likes of New Look, Wilkinsons, and Tesco. A bustling boutique High Street it wasn’t. The trendy youngsters in Pontypool form single-sex groups of four and drive around the one way THE RECONSTRUCTED FOLLY TOWER

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system in their old Astras with the stereo on full and the windows open. But it is a town with a huge green swathe of public park, 64 hectares of it, running down the sylvan valley of the Nant-y-Gollen to meet the Afon Llwyd which runs through the town. These rivers provided the water power, the nearby hills the coal and ore for the iron smelting which was the town’s foundation, and for the massive wealth of the Hanbury family, ironmasters who came from Staffordshire to exploit it in the late sixteenth century. By the early nineteenth century Capel Hanbury Leigh was enlarging his mansion and sweeping away his old formal garden to create a landscape park, and throughout his life the park and town were embellished with buildings and plantings of the highest quality. On a windswept ridge far above the town is the first clue to the park, a stark tower which you glimpse on the skyline as you drive down the A4042. For an uplifting vista, and a view out over the Severn Estuary it is incomparable. It is said you can see seven counties from the top. The tower was first built by bloodstock enthusiast John Hanbury in 1765, it had a room at the top and enabled him to overlook the best gallops on the estate. Rebuilt in a stout hexagonal form in 1837 it stood until the last war when, deemed a landmark too close to the munitions factory

For an uplifting vista, and a view out over the Severn Estuary it is incomparable. It is said you can see seven counties from the top. below, it was summarily demolished. Long mourned by the community it has been reconstructed on its foundations, largely through local subscription, and opened once more in 1994. At about the same time Cadw was compiling its lists of Historic Parks and Gardens, and Pontypool Park, notwithstanding considerable neglect, was awarded a Grade II* status. This in turn has stoked the programme of Heritage Lottery Funded restoration which for the last eight years has been nursed to fulfilment by Pontypool Park Manager, Alex Andrews. Descending the slope one next encounters the hermitage, an extraordinary circular stone building encrusted internally with shells, spar crystals, tree branches, antlers and stalactites. The brainchild of Molly Mackworth, the spirited wife of Capel Hanbury Leigh, and by Bath architect Stephen Gunstan Tit, it was built in the 1829 and is now returned to its former splendour thanks to an HLF award in 1995. The floor gleams dully, a close packed mosaic of horse vertebrae and teeth, the vaulted ceiling drops with long bosses each terminating in an exotic conch shell. To the west, deep in the woods is the finest cottage ornée to be seen in Wales. A folkloric woodkeeper’s

A FINE WEEPING ASH ADJOINING THE PONDS ON THE NANT-Y-GOLLEN

cottage, built of rugged chunks of the sparkling conglomeratic rock which occurs nearby. Its setting moreover is no ordinary wood, but a lush jungle of exotic North American Conifers, stately wellingtonias, the softer foliage of Sequoia sempervirens, monkey puzzles, Douglas firs, and a rampant undergrowth of ponticum and old hybrid rhododendron. American Gardens were all the rage in the 1850s and this one was planted by redundant iron workers during the slump - a job creation scheme by their employer. The twentieth century saw commercial forestry plantation and serious neglect in the American garden but now volunteers and experts together are excavating the 100 metre woodland lake and its rockwork surrounds from rampant undergrowth. Fine rhododendrons gleam red, cream or pink amongst INSIDE THE SHELL GROTTO

the trees. seems to have room for all, even the Next down the Nant-y-Gollen is 1970s dry ski slope, which might the site of a lake where Jonny seem inappropriate in a historic Weissmuller is said to have swum. landscape, but runs remarkably inconspicuously down the side of It was re-designed in 1975 as two the Nant-y-Gollen valley. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shallow boating lakes for toys, but something for everyone at is planned to be restored to its Pontypool Park - indeed I found it nineteenth century form as a single enlivening rather than incongruous large pool with waterlilies. A very to stand at the stone circle, in a setfine weeping ash frames the naturalistic view up the valley at this ting of ancient parkland oaks, sweet chestnuts and beeches, and glimpse, point. distantly and silently, the ski-ing A contrasting formality is introstick figures gliding effortlessly duced between the Afon Llywd down, and riding back up the slope and Hanbury Road where the portentous nineteenth century buildings of the town line the facing side of the street. Here one can enter the gardens through massive war memorial gates, and descend to the Italian Garden which flanks the river. This garden was created by John Capel Hanbury, the last to reside at Pontypool, in homage to the gardens of Isola Bella, Lake Maggiore, and given to WAR MEMORIAL GATES LEAD FROM TOWN TO THE ITALIAN GARDEN the town in 1924 by Mrs Ruth M. J. Tenison. There is a ciron the opposite bank. A designed cular pool, formerly piled with landscape entirely without people is rockwork and embellished by a not a living landscape. fountain, and it and the box edged The Park is open to all. Entrance formal bedding is now under careis free, although admission charges ful restoration. may apply for major events. With the exception of the The Shell Grotto and Folly Tower American garden, the parkland was are open weekends and bank holitransferred to public ownership in days from May until September, 2 1920 and popular 5pm. The American Garden pleasures have resulted remains part of the Hanbury in a variety of additionTenison estate, but allows public al features, a Gorsedd access on foot along the carriage Circle for the drive. Eisteddfod of 1923, the rugby ground, tennis www.torfaen.gov.uk/LeisureAndCulture courts, bowling green /ParksAndOpenSpaces/PontypoolPark/ and a neat municipal Home.aspx bandstand. But this Photography by Caroline Palmer sloping and sunny site

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MOTORING

Guiding the early motorist JOHN A EDWARDS

he old saying - ‘Fire is a good servant but a bad master’ could well be applied to many modern inventions. The mobile phone, internet and satellitenavigation all spring to mind and in the case of the latter, we have all heard tales of drivers putting blind faith in this space age technology only to end up in a farmyard or teetering on the edge of a cliff. While sat-nav is undoubtedly invaluable for drivers on their own looking for a destination in a builtup area, a lot of pleasure is lost if a map is never studied and the travellers don’t know which interesting topographical features they might be passing. I remember an elderly widow I lodged with when I first started work in Chester who often used to pass lonely winter evenings poring over maps of Europe and re-living touring holidays she had enjoyed in the thirties with her late, much loved husband. Sat-nav could never recall happy memories like that. In those early days of motoring, guide books were also popular giving distances between towns, listing places of interest and carrying advertisements for hotels and garages. A typical example is Throup’s Illustrated North Wales Motorists Guide which I came across recently at an antique fair. Infuriatingly it doesn’t have the date of publication but I reckon it to be the late twenties judging by the car models in garage

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advertisements. Indicative of the low-powered cars of the era, gradients between towns are shown such as “1 in 12”, “Easy” or “Nothing difficult”. Inevitably Anglicised spellings jar on the Celtic nerve AN OLD PICTURE POSTCARD SENT FROM BLACKPOOL IN 1923 Carnarvon, CAPTURES THE SPIRIT OF THE OLD CHARABANC. Dolgelly, Conway etc and Aberdovey which inexcusably welcome in the hillsides” there ! is still used extensively in this corAt that time there was a toll on rupted form. Why this singular aberboth the Conwy and Menai Bridges ration I wonder? and its incredible to think that this And the book doesn’t pull any kind of heinous tax is still imposed punches. For example, poor old Flint today on people who of necessity comes in for stick as usual and is have to cross a stretch of water at described as ‘not an attractive town’ places like Neyland, in and ‘the ruined castle does not appeal Pembrokeshire to say nothing of the to the eye’ but there is the admission Severn crossings. that ‘its story is full of intense interI remember a relative telling me est’. With its Richard II connections that when he was a boy travelling to immortalised by Shakespeare - too school by bus over the Menai Bridge, right! if passengers exceeded a certain numAn advertisement for the newly ber the young and fit had to get off opened Portmeirion Italianate village and walk across because of weight is simply hilarious. After listing the restrictions. I doubt whether they village’s many attractions it carries a received any fare refund! The probstern Special Notice obviously lem was eventually cured by the designed to keep out ‘the wrong kind strengthening of the bridge between of person’. It reads: “Portmeirion 1938-41. addresses itself chiefly to those who Throup’s book also reveals the genvalue serene beauty and quietness eral state of motoring at the time before all else. Those who are satiswith garages offering not only repairs fied by the ordinary seaside resort but also overnight parking under will do well to go where they have cover and sometimes even separate gone before. Portmeirion will not lock-up garages . I wouldn’t have suit them - nor they it. The hotel thought there was that much crime and village are both small and under at the time and perhaps the cars were autocratic control. Charabancs, picmore likely to be threatened by the nic parties and mere sightseers are vagaries of the Welsh weather. The not admitted. In August prices are Ffrancon Automobile Company Ltd, raised and it frequently rains. There Bethesda for example had space for is only one hard tennis court and the an amazing 60 cars. Charabanc hire nearest golf course is over two miles was also offered by many garages but away”. presumably they kept well clear of There’s not much “we’ll keep a Portmeirion!

The term ‘charabanc’ comes from the French - literally ‘a cart with rows of seats’ - and was in use until the early thirties when it was replaced by the more pretentious ‘coach’. A pity, as the charabanc name was redolent of a more hardy, friendly era with passengers all jollily crammed together and only a crude hood and side curtains to offer minimal weather protection. But of course, the summers were much better then!

A Degree of Downsizing

he credit crunch - for want of a more elegant term - has had a traumatic effect on new car sales which are down by around 30 percent and one can safely assume that this will result in more buyers downsizing their cars. Main beneficiary is likely to be the supermini class but of course there are differing degrees of downsizing. These were my thoughts recently when driving the Volvo V50 Sportswagen which is a size down from the V70, latest version of the Swedish company’s traditional large estate famed in the past for carrying such items as longcase clocks for antique dealers. However the V50 (V for Versatile) should still be commodious enough for most owners and is certainly better looking than previ-

ous Volvo estates. Less square than earlier generations, it has curved front and rear ends which gives a certain boat-like appearance perhaps in some way reflecting the company’s involvement in ocean racing. The 2008-09 Volvo Ocean Race is currently in progress with competitors scheduled to finish in St Petersburg, Russia in late June (progress reports are available at www.VolvoOceanRace.org) Back on dry land, the optimum V50 model is probably the 2.0D Rdesign Sport with a 136 bhp diesel engine giving acceleration to 60 mph in 9.2 seconds and a combined consumption of 48.7 mpg manual and 47.1 mpg automatic. This is an excellent performance/economy compromise but buyers seeking greater fuel savings and even greener credentials, can opt for the V50 DRIVe model with 1.6 diesel engine and special aerodynamic improvements which boosts the consumption to an outstanding 62.8 mpg. All V50s boast the usual Volvo safety features - stand by for the inevitable acronyms - WHIPS, SIPS, DSTC etc (Whiplash Protection System, Side Impact Protection System, and Dynamic Stability Traction Control).As a salutary reminder of Volvo’s commitment to safety, every edition of LIV (Swedish for life) the compa-

THE STYLISH VOLVO V50 SPORTSWAGEN: A MEDIUM-SIZED ESTATE DESIGNED TO APPEAL TO THE YOUNGER BUYER.

ny’s in-house magazine, features the picture of a mangled Volvo with the passengers who survived a serious crash thanks to the built-in safety of their car. Volvo claims that the V50 offers the best value in the premium estate sector and while it perhaps lacks the glamour of some other mostly German marques it is a competent car, less sporty despite its name but quiet and refined and is likely to find favour with buyers who require space with grace while avoiding the ungainly high-build SUV models. The V50 is a good companion to have on a long journey when the combination of diesel economy and relaxing auto transmission (a highly recommended option) is very seductive. An old neighbour always used to buy Volvos because he thought they were ‘British’, which is I suppose a compliment to the marque’s middle class virtues of safety, dependability and unostentatious styling. Its interesting to note that while Volvo is usually regarded as being as Swedish as Abba (and in the past has generated a similar income!) the V50 is actually built at Ghent in Belgium with the design shared between studios in Gothenburg, Barcelona and California. With dealers fighting for sales all kinds of prices are bandied around these days but the official list price of the V50 2.0D R-Design Sport is £21,520 - with Powershift automatic transmission a £1,400 option.

LLANDOVERY

MOT MOT MOT 01550 720335

the cambria directory - hotels & restaurants nationwide caerdydd

gwent

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.

ceredigion

morgannwg

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

Llangoed Hall

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

LLANGOED HALL HOTEL LLYSWEN, BRECON, POWYS, LD3 0YP EMAIL: enquiries@llangoedhall.com TEL:

01874 754525

FAX:

01874 754545

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

A bear’s delight: Garlleg gwyllt

ne of the greatest pleasures of early Summer or late Spring must be driving, windows down, along narrow lush lanes vividly verdant against the blue, blue sky and on the gentle breeze the waft of garlic. The shady verges below the woodland canopy are often scattered with the white starry flowers of wild garlic from early May through to June. Wild garlic is not strictly a Welsh culinary ingredient but it is found in profusion right across Wales. It is not a protected flower so, apparently, you can pick it at will Please do so, as it is well worth taking a bag full home for it is delicious, delicate, and versatile. Its broad, long leaves are very similar to those of the beautifully named Liliwen Fach (Lilly of the Valley) which is poisonous, but the distinctive smell will let you know what it is. If cows eat wild garlic the taste will taint the milk, yet, in the nineteenth century, butter made from milk flavoured in this way was very fashionable. The whole plant is edible. The flowers look pretty scattered in a salad and make for rather more pleasant eating than chive flowers which are papery and chewy. If you want to eat the bulb, autumn is the best time for that. The flavour gets stronger as the season goes on. Wild garlic likes deciduous woodland, hedgerow and moist shady areas. It is fairly easy to encourage and straightforward to transplant, in fact, it is difficult to discourage, when it finds a spot it likes. Wild garlic (Allium Ursinum) has many names: for instance Ramsons and Ransomes. It is thought that place-names such as Ramsgate are so called because they are situated in places where this was once found in profusion; ‘stinking nanny’ - in days of yore it was used to mark boundaries; ‘bear’s garlic’ - apparently bears will seek it out after hibernation as it kick starts their metabolism and gives them a good clean out! (Whence, of course, ‘Ursinum’.) The plant is very good at combating cholesterol and high blood pressure, it is anti-septic and anti-bacterial, anti-carcinogenic and good for clearing the skin. Supposedly better for one than the cultivated garlic bulbs most commonly available now, it is also high in iron, and vitamins A, B and C, stimulates the blood, and is apparently an aphrodisiac - all in all a wonderfood. The season is fairly short but luckily it preserves very well. Preserved in oil, it will keep for several months. (Wash and dry 100g wild garlic ALLIUM URSINUM - GARLLEG GWYLLT - WILD GARLIC leaves, blanch by dipping in boiling water for just 2–3 seconds, which preserves the colour. Put in a blender with a cup of either good olive oil or groundnut oil and a teaspoon of salt. Blend and decant into smallish sterile jars; top up with oil so there is at least 1 cm of oil above the paste.

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

This paste becomes a good pesto if 100g of pine nuts and a cup of grated parmesan are added to the blender. It should last for 2–3 weeks.) Wild Garlic Butter (very pretty) METHOD

Finely chop a good handful of garlic and mash with butter, dollop it onto cling-film and roll into a log. Either freeze the small logs, or chop into coins and freeze on grease proof paper for use as required. Defrost and put on steak, or in mashed potato; great for garlic bread, in fact anything you might use garlic butter for; why not sauté some prawns in it? Crab & Prawn pasta with Wild Garlic (serves 4-6) INGREDIENTS

Olive oil 1 small finely chopped onion 200g white and brown crab meat, fresh is best, but tinned or frozen are fine too 150 g prawns juice and zest of 1 lemon 2 large ripe tomatoes, skinned and diced 500g dried pasta (Lidl do very good egg spaghetti and tagliatelle) a small splash of Vermouth (this gives an extra edge and depth) or dry white wine a splash of double cream a good handful of both flatleaf parsley and wild garlic leaves, finely chopped salt and pepper. METHOD

To skin tomatoes easily, plunge into boiling water for a few seconds, pour off the water, and peel. In a large frying pan, heat some olive oil, quantity depends slightly on your taste for it, add the onion and fry gently for a few minutes until softened and transparent, add the tomatoes and fry for few more minutes until they start to break down, then tip in the crab meat, add the lemon and a splash of Vermouth and allow to reduce. Meanwhile, cook the pasta for the required time. Just before serving, add the cream to the crab and check for seasoning. Drain the pasta, toss with the crab mixture and wild garlic. Serve with a green salad lightly dressed with lemon and oil, and some ciabatta to mop up any juices. 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

Hotels & Restaurants BWYTY MAWDDACH Maesygarnedd Llanelltyd, Dolgellau Gwynedd LL40 2TA IFAN DUNN T: 01341 424020 E: ymholiadau@mawddach.com W: www.mawddach.com

inner on a farm conjures up all sorts of images, but probably not the surprisingly modern, purposebuilt building with lots of glass which allowed us to see the unparalleled panoramic views over the Mawddach Estuary and Cadair Idris offered by Bwyty Mawddach. Downstairs is a modern-styled seating area with comfy sofas where you can enjoy a pre-dinner drink whilst perusing the luxurious menu, or have an after dinner coffee. Upstairs the restaurant which specialises in fresh, locally sourced produce and the finest seasonal ingredients available, combining simplicity with intensity of flavour. To start I had smooth chicken liver pate with chutney and toast and my partner had a superb vegetarian Welsh rarebit with field mushrooms and slow roasted plum tomatoes. We had a delightful Chilean unoaked Chardonnay to accompany our starters, which is available by the glass. For the main course I had an 8oz rib eye steak with home-cooked chips and field mushrooms. The steak was perfection I could even cut it with the blunt back of my knife! My partner had a char grilled Bala pork chop with black pudding, Granny Smith apple and grain mustard mash, the combination of tastes she proclaimed as magical. To accompany these we had a 2007 Montepulcianno d’Abruzzo which was soft yet full flavoured. As I still had some red to finish, I had a selection of five Welsh cheeses with homemade raisin bread and local honey, a truly wonderful taste experience. After such a grand meal, we decided to share a desert – a home made lemon, ricotta and almond cake which was light and delicate, yet full flavoured. This really is one of Wales’ best restaurants, and the chef, Ifan Dunn, his partner Amelia in front of house, and his brother Will as waiter provide that homely feeling that you would expect in a family run business. It was also good to hear Welsh spoken by other diners. ROBERT JONES

THE PENRALLT Aberporth Aberteifi/Cardigan Ceredigion SA43 2BS T: +44 01239 810227 E: info@thepenrallt.co.uk W: www.thepenrallt.co.uk

he Penrallt hotel sits in well-kept grounds near the tiny hamlet of Aberporth on the Cardigan coast, this old boarding school building has been transformed into a country hotel with a restaurant which produces some of the best food I have tasted in a long time. The welcome guests receive is second to none, and the refreshing tea with warm Welshcakes, jam and cream put my partner and I into a mood where we felt that this place was going to indulge us throughout our stay. After a swim in the indoor pool, we were ready for our meal and had a pre-dinner drink in the cosy bar whilst looking at the short but well-composed menu for the Bay restaurant. I decided on a terrine of ham hock and peppers wrapped in Serrano with a divine home-made piccalilli (something I hadn’t had since childhood). My partner had a trio of laverbread blinis topped with Rhydlewis smoked salmon, spider crab, remoulade and hot cockles which she felt was a fitting dish as we were so close to the sea. To accompany our starters we had a superb Australian McGuigan’s Sauvignon Blanc, which had just the right amount of crispness for both dishes. A marinated fillet of Pembrokeshire venison, succulent and full-flavoured, was served on thyme mash with green beans and juniper jus.. My partner selected pan fried salmon on a crab risotto with battered cockle, leeks and laverbread which was one of the best fish dishes she had tasted in a long while and felt that the ingredients had formed a perfect partnership. To accompany our main courses we drank a light dry Spanish Ruberra 2007. Tart tatin with cinnamon ice cream, Welsh clotted cream, and apple syrup was really superb, and the white chocolate and mint desert in a small martini glass with home-made lavender shortbread was one of the best prepared and most visually exciting deserts I have ever seen. After some freshly made coffee, we retired to our room with a veranda to listen to the woodpeckers and reminisce on what was one of the most thrilling meals we had ever had. ROBERT JONES

SALES HOTLINE: 02088005410 ENQUIRIES: 02088843359 FAX: 02087115096

BIG BOYS GADGETS - Mail Order Specialists Buy where the trade buys! 8 We provide electrical goods at competitive rates. 8 Top brands, low prices. 8 Discount available on bulk purchases with no MOQ. 8 We buy direct from the factory and are major importers from Europe/Asia/Far East. 8 All goods are brand new boxed/sealed. We do not sell any refurbished or B grade goods. 8 As well as manufacture warranty, all goods are covered by our own 16 day unconditional money back guarantee. 8 Full VAT invoice will be provided.

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SALES HOTLINE: 0208 8815964 ENQUIRIES: 07932 705383 FAX: 0208 7113899 EMAIL: electrodirect@easymailorders.com Warehouse address: Sharston Industrial Estate, Bradnor Road, Wythenshawe, Manchester, M22 4TF FREE NEXT DAY DELIVERY AVAILABLE BY DHL/CITY LINK COURIER SERVICE. Compliance of distance selling regulations 2002, and dataprotection registered. Trust UK approved trader.

CIA Caerdydd

O N L O O K E R

CIA Caerdydd

West Wales Food Fair PHOTOGRAPHS

MARI STERLING & CARL RYAN

National Botanic Garden

O N L O O K E R

SUMMER FESTIVALS IN WALES Renowned throughout the world for its music and cultural heritage, Wales is host to many festivals suiting most tastes. Here are just a few.

The Gwyl Gregynog Festival Plas Gregynog 12th - 21st June

The Two River’s Festival Casgwent/Chepstow. July 3rd-5th

eld in the glorious setting of Plas Gregynog near Newtown, an imaginative programme packed with rare talent and originality celebrating historical and musical anniversaries and their links to Wales and the Marches has been assembled. From medieval ‘jam session’ by The Dufay Collective to excerpts of archive recordings of Welsh born Alec Templeton, composer, pianist and radio star of the 1930’s. A repertoire that spans over 500 years promises ‘to be a feast for the ears and eyes like never before’ says Dr. Rhian Davies Gregynog’s Artistic director. A fun concert for percussionists O Duo is free for children. The AngloSwedish Kungsbacka Piano Trio will perform a mix of contemporary, classical and romantic Welsh repertoire. Information: 01743 281281 www.gwylgregynogfestival.org

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he Two Rivers festival named after its location between the mighty rivers Wye and Severn was formed in 2003 when three local, musically-minded friends with past event organisational experience were asked to host an event for a party of Bretons visiting the area. This proved great fun and lead to “Folk on the Riverbank”, the fore-runner of the current Festival. As well as the great folk music sessions that take place both on the Racecourse and in the numerous pubs dotted around Chepstow, there are the Morris dance groups performing around the town. Their colourful dress, leg b e l l s a n d thwacking of sticks captivates visitors and t h e

MARY WYCHERLEY

whole festival atmosphere surges throughout Chepstow over the weekend. www.tworiversfolkfestival.com

The Green Man Crughywel/Crickhowell. 21st-23rd August

f you are into indie-folk then The Green Man Festival is a must. Now in its seventh year, this family event will again be held at the stunning Glanusk Park which has been aptly described as “the best event site in the country,” by The Times. Situated in the Brecon Beacons National Park, it is surrounded by lovely countryside and inspiring mountains, whilst in the estate itself, ancient trees are dotted around the park to offer both shade and wonder to those who attend.

E a c h evening a bonfire is lit from 11pm to 7 a m . Those w h o wish to play longer end up in this area experiencing one of the best things about Green Man, the unscheduled jamming sessions which take place around the fire. Sitting around the fire with friends listening to sometimes odd. and other times amazing. music performed by known and sometimes unknown artists. creates the kind of experiences that will remain with you long after Green Man is over. www.thegreenmanfestival.co.uk

COMPETITION!

THE NATIONAL MAGAZINE

WIN £50 WORTH OF BOOKS FROM THE WELSH BOOKS COUNCIL - OR £50 TOWARDS THE BOOK OF YOUR CHOICE. Simply answer the question below and either send it direct to the Welsh Books Council - or hand it in at their stand at The Royal Welsh Show for your chance to win:

Who wrote the novel Border Country Q featured in the Library of Wales series? Answers on a post card to: Welsh Books Council, Attn. Elwyn Jones, Castell Brychan, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 2JB. Competition leaflets will also be available at The Welsh Books Council stand at The Royal Welsh Show. You may choose how you receive your prize, either in the form of a code which will allow you to order direct from Gwales via the internet, or as a book voucher. The closing date is 31st July and the winner will be announced in CAMBRIA’s September issue and on the gwales.com web site. All correct entries will be entered into the draw. The winner will be the first entry picked at random from the draw on 1st August 2009. The organisers’ decision will be final. No name, address or contact detail of any entrant will be passed on to any third party.

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What’s

hot in Wales

THE WELSH PRINCES KILLED BY EDWARD 1ST are commemorated in the names of summits in Snowdonia, the highest being Carnedd Llywelyn, alongside it Yr Elen named for his wife and Carnedd Dafydd after the younger brother of The Lord of Eryri. In September, thanks to the hard work of Mallt Anderson and the Princess Gwenllian society, their only child Gwenllian will now join them. It was Edward’s intention to obliterate the Royal family and all memory of them, the Society say it is a matter of conscience to ‘bring her back to the Welsh people’. Edward 1 proclaimed that no child should suffer for the sins of its parents but Gwenllian spent her life locked away in a convent and her cousin was confined for some fifty years in a cage within the prison of Bristol Castle. TYDDYN LLAN, NR CORWEN, DENBIGHSHIRE, has been named one of the UK’s top ten restaurants by The Good Food Guide and winner for Wales. 01490 440264

30th May to 19th July, MONNOW VALLEY ARTS

CENTRE, NR ABERGAVENNY, is holding an exhibition of the politically incorrect images of Edward Ardizzone (1900-1979). The works, drawn mainly from the family collection, have seldom been seen. A selection of works will be for sale. In conjunction with this two other exhibitions will take place: photographs by Edward Ardizzone’s son Nicholas Ardizzone in the artist’s studio; and sculptures by his grandson Quentin Clemence in the sculpture gardens. Tel. 01873 860 529 Web: www.monnowvalleyarts.org

RHOS Y GILWEN IN NORTH

PEMBROKESHIRE provides a beautiful setting for a wide variety of events over the summer. Glen Peters is celebrating the publication of his first novel, The Shaitan of Calcutta, on 12th June. 26th June bring your own picnic and enjoy it in the company of Mozart - Opera On the Run - The Perfect Picnic, provides a smorgasbord of beautiful singing, comedy and drama in this unique piece of 'Opera Theatre.'Tickets cost: £16.50. Celebrate an amazing range of products and locally made quality goods at The Lazy Sunday Market on 28 June, it is also an excuse to have a wonderful light Sunday Lunch made from top quality locally sourced ingredients. Entry £1. These are just a small selection of what is on offer over the next few months, for more information ring 01239 841 387 or see www.rhosygilwen.co.uk

THE ANTIQUES ROADSHOW WILL BE VISITING ABERGLASNEY on 16th

July. If you have any large items you would like to find out more about or which you know have an interesting provenance, contact ANTIQUES ROADSHOW, BBC, Whiteladies Road, Bristol BS8 2LR or e-mail them at: antiques.roadshow@bbc.co.uk. It may be possible to arrange to look at the item in advance and organise transportation to the venue. For other events at Aberglasney over the summer call 01558 668998

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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”