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Mae’n anodd astudio bywyd cymdeithasol yng Nghymru yn ystod ail hanner y bedwaredd ganrif ar bymtheg heb droi at y drysorfa fawr o luniau, dros 3,000 ohonynt, a dynnwyd gan John Thomas, Lerpwl rhwng y 1860au a’i farwolaeth yn 1905. …
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‘A Gentleman had just arrived, with – a black servant!’
The gentry of eighteenth-century Wales, like most rich people in any country at any time, longed to be fashionable. One of the rarer badges of fashion for them was to be seen as enjoying the services of a black servant.…
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The soul of a blackbird
The other day, as I was coming home from an evening walk, a strange thing happened. I was nearing a place where the road narrows and the pavement gives out and you need to take care before crossing to the…
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Remembering Camille Claudel
The Auguste Rodin exhibition now at Tate Modern takes you beyond easy assumptions about the artist, based on the best-known works and a few fragments of biography. Rodin’s escape from the conventional beauties of classicism into reconstructing real human bodies…
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Cwm Cadlan
At the centre of Penderyn is the Lamb Inn, with its blue plaque commemorating ‘Lewsyn yr Heliwr’, one of the leaders of the 1831 Merthyr Rising. Almost opposite, there’s an ancient signpost labelled ‘Cwm Cadlan, Brecon County’. It points to…
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Four quarters
If you move to live on the coast it doesn’t take long to discover that your world, enriched as it might be by the presence of the sea, has been reduced. You can no longer travel in all directions, but…
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Erasmus Lewis: spad, spy, friend of Gulliver
This small corner of Carmarthenshire is new to me – the point where the Cothi flows into the Tywi, just west of Llanegwad. A track leaves the village, passes a cottage, Penygoilan, and a farm, Llwchgwyn, and then turns into…
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Cwm Ysgiach
Yma ar y groesffordd yn y bryniau, ymddengys fod pob peth yn bosib. Gallwch chi gymryd unrhyw ffordd o’ch dewis: nôl i Bontlliw, ymlaen i Felindre, i’r gorllewin i Bontarddulais, dros y mynydd i Garnswllt yn Sir Gâr, neu lawr…
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Eagle
In summer 1972 I made two happy discoveries within the Roman fortress that had occupied the centre of Exeter. One of them was human. That encounter changed my life for good. The other was inanimate. Its impact on me wasn’t…
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Yr hen lwybr i eglwys Llangelynnin
Roedd yr haul yn dechrau disgyn wrth imi gychwyn, ar ôl swper, o hen dafarn Y Groes. Cerddais ar hyd y lôn sy’n troelli ar draws gwastadeddau Dyffryn Conwy tuag at bentref Rowen. Cymylau sirws uchel yn unig yn yr…