Tag: Wales
The sore feet of Ursula Martin
When I first heard about what Ursula Martin had done I found it hard to believe. Over a period of seventeen months she set out to walk 3,300 miles around Wales – in the end she walked 3,700 – including all the recognized long distance paths and other, river-long walks, she devised herself. Now she’s […]
The Powysland Club: its origin and early development
1 Foundation The first county archaeological society in Wales was the Caerleon Antiquarian Association, founded in 1847 and renamed the Monmouthshire and Caerleon Antiquarian Association in 1857. It was twenty years before a second local archaeological society in Wales was founded, in 1867. The gap is puzzling, especially when one considers that this period […]
Wales and Brexit, by Emyr Lewis
In this guest blog the lawyer and poet Emyr Lewis considers some of the complex questions, constitutional and legal, economic and cultural, that arise for Wales from the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. The text was originally given on 8 March 2018 in Swansea University as the Royal Institution of South Wales’s St […]
Dr Thurley crosses the border
Last year Ken Skates AM, then the Cabinet member responsibility for culture, commissioned a museum director from London, Dr Simon Thurley, to make recommendations on the running of the National Museum of Wales. (Technically the Museum’s latest English title is Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, a clumsy formulation which shows what trouble you get […]
Sitting for Bernard
For over forty years, and with increased energy since 1990, Bernard Mitchell has been collecting people. The people are artists and writers working in Wales, and his means of collecting them is the camera lens. Many people have seen parts of his great project, the Wales Arts Archive, over the years. In the 1990s the […]
Dillad dychmygol Brexit
Yn y stori draddodiadol a addaswyd gan Hans Christian Andersen yn 1837, mae pawb yn y ddinas yn llygadrythu ar ddillad newydd yr Ymerawdwr – y gair yw eu bod yn anweledig ond i bobl dwp – nes bod bachgen bach yn dod sy’n ddigon diniwed ac eofn i ebychu, ‘Ond does dim dillad amdano!’ […]
Is it time for a National Trust of Wales?
There was a time when the National Trust was invulnerable and beyond criticism. Its aims are so obviously virtuous, and the experience of visiting its sites so rewarding that anyone bold enough to question its ethos or ways of working would have been seen as eccentric. The Trust is still one of the most popular […]
John Ystumllyn: an African in 18th century Eifionydd
It wasn’t his real name, ‘John Ystumllyn’, but one the locals gave him. Another was ‘Jac Du’ or ‘Jack Black’. How he arrived, unwillingly, in north Wales is obscure. What is certain is that his origins were in Africa, and that he found a home for himself and his family in the Criccieth area […]
R. M. Lockley, coastwalking pioneer
Preparing for a talk about coastwalking in Plas Brondanw in a week or two I’ve been thinking about the origins of the practice of walking around the coast of a country, and specifically Wales. When, I wondered, did coastwalking start to become a conscious mode of walking for travellers and tourists? Rebecca Solnit, in her […]
Magnus Maximus, man and memory
Doing some research recently on the Roman fort and settlement of Segontium I found myself face to face with a Roman emperor, Magnus Maximus. His story is interesting but not unusual. Later memory of him, especially in his guise as Macsen Wledig, is singular. His face stares out of coins he had minted to cement […]