history
In praise of Maesteg
The last deep coal mine in the Llynfi valley, St John’s Colliery, just east of Maesteg, closed in 1985, at the end of Margaret Thatcher’s war against the miners. At its peak it employed nearly 1,500 men. There’s been no other source of work of comparable size in the area since – the local paper […]
Owen Glynne Jones on Cader Idris
Owen Glynne Jones, everyone agreed, was the outstanding rock climber of his age. Born in London in 1867 of Welsh-speaking parents and educated in science and engineering, he made his name by pioneering new routes in the English Lake District, and from 1891 he became internationally famous for his climbs in the Alps. A natural […]
The courage of Thomas Thrush
Less than four miles from Kilburn, my brother’s home in north Yorkshire till his death last November, is the village of Sutton-under-Whitestonecliffe. It sits at the foot of the steep escarpment known as Sutton Bank, on the main road between Thirsk and Scarborough. Sutton was the home in the 1820s of a remarkable but little-known […]
The other Capel-y-ffin
There were two other people, a man and his wife from Caerffili, at St Mary’s church when I visited Capel-y-ffin last week. They stood and shared my wonder at the wonky beauty of the tiny building, with its wooden bellcote, eighteenth-century pews and pulpit, and miniature staircase and gallery. As we left, we took photos […]
The bee boy
On 12 December 1775 Gilbert White, the naturalist of Selborne in Hampshire, wrote a letter to his friend Daines Barrington in which he recalled a remarkable character who had lived in the village ‘more than twenty years ago’. He doesn’t name the lad, and just refers to him as ‘an idiot boy’. What made him […]
How to make an icon
The three of us were talking, as we strolled along the front at Porthcawl the other day, about modern icons. J. had just been for a return visit to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, so the Angel of the North in Gateshead soon came up in the conversation. Antony Gormley’s great weathered steel figure is over twenty-five years old, […]
Cyffro yng Ngholfa, 1912
Pentref bach iawn yw Colfa (Colva), rhyw saith milltir i’r gogledd o Glaerwen (Clyro), cartref Francis Kilvert. Dim rhagor, a dweud y gwir, na hen eglwys, sy’n dyddio o’r drydedd ganrif ar ddeg, a ffermdy, oedd yn arfer bod yn dafarn o’r enw The Sun Inn yn nyddiau Kilvert (‘Mrs Phillips brought me a pint […]
Saving the gannets
The jaunty oil sketch may look charming, but it conceals an ugly story. It was painted by a well-known Cardiff artist, Thomas Henry Thomas, after a visit he and three friends from the Cardiff Naturalists’ Society made to Grassholm (Gwales) on 26 May 1890. They’d come to study the bird colonies, especially northern gannets and […]
Shakers
If you live in Swansea and you’re serious about paint, then Rabart in Gendros is the place for you. Llanelli may be Tinopolis, but Rabart is the metropolis of paint tins. It has thousands of them, stacked high with every type and colour of paint you might feel a desire for. You don’t need to […]
Fathers and sons
In time, they say, sons turn into their fathers. For a while I’ve been aware of this metamorphosis taking place in myself. The most obvious change is physiognomic. Nowadays my head and face seem, to me at least, remarkably close to how my dad looked in his later years, though in my younger days I […]