The Edge of Cymru

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But it proves to be impossible as she finds herself discussing the merits and demerits of wind farms or seeing environmental degradation. We’d been causing atmospheric pollution since at least the Bronze Age and had been destroying habitats and wiping out species since the Mesolithic. No wonder it was taking so long for people to understand the crisis.’

This is the point where the interest in the miners started to change and this is the point where the union had to change its attitude to the women, because now people were realising what was keeping the strike going was the women. (Siân James) You thus get a sense of how different things used to be. A picture of the variety of biodiversity here around 6000 BC shows the land to be teeming with life, with ‘mountain hare, brown bear, wolf, beaver, pine marten, red squirrel, corncrake, golden oriole, hazel hen, osprey, white-tailed eagle, eagle owl, grey partridge and crested lark’ all to be found in its woodlands, grasslands, moorland, fens and mountains. This is a fascinating and informative book. It is also, perhaps, a source of inspiration for those of us who feel tempted to try something similar in our own area. Watch Pete Telfer of Culture Colony’s gorgeous film (thanks to his skills and intelligent questions) about the book. Working with Pete really made me appreciate the art and craft of film-making. Light shone through kelp that lifted and fell with the swell. I didn’t know how to appreciate it. The red translucent kelp made me want to cry. It was all so beautiful.I’ve really got to blame Thatcher for all of this, because how did a town like Maerdy, a hard-working heavy industry place, turn into a hard drugs kind of community almost overnight? ( Dewi ‘Mav’ Bowen) The Alun is a river of tranquillity, of droughts, floods and trade; fortunes made and lost. At times it doesn’t exist at all and yet at the same time it is two rivers! Lionel Thomas Caswall Rolt was born in Chester in 1910. A prolific writer, he specialised in biographies of some of the major figures in British civil engineering, most notably Brunel and Telford. He is also regarded as one of the pioneers of the leisure cruising industry on Britain’s inland waterways, and was an enthusiast for vintage cars and heritage railways. He played a pioneering role in both the canal and railway preservation movements. Rolt died in Gloucestershire in 1974.

King highlights how the miners’ strike brought together a variety of campaigners from across Wales – language campaigners, peace activists, LGBT groups, musicians and artists, But central to this movement, he makes clear, were women. The final two decades of the twentieth century witnessed several crucial steps in Wales’s journey towards re-asserting its national identity and for the Welsh to recover their self confidence as a people. This process resulted in the creation of a Welsh National Assembly and Assembly Government in 1999, which later evolved into the nation’s Senedd and Welsh Government. Prior to this, the Welsh Language Act of 1993 put Welsh on an equal footing with English for the first time and , incrementally, began to reverse the decline of the Welsh language. The establishment of a Welsh language television channel, S4C, had already brought Welsh into the daily discourse of both native speakers and learners from 1982 onwards. Dr Amy-Jane Beer is a biologist turned naturalist and writer. She has worked for more than 20 years as a science writer and editor, contributing to more than 40 books on natural history. She is currently a Country Diarist for The Guardian, a columnist for British Wildlife and a feature writer for BBC Wildlife magazine, among others. She campaigns for the equality of access to nature and collaboration between farming and conservation sectors.The short stories presented vary in style and length and, it has to be said, they are of variable quality too. But I think the whole point was to present a representative picture of Welsh crime fiction in the twentieth century, some of the work good and some necessarily not quite so good. In fulfilling this objective Martin Edwards has fully succeeded and has produced a very entertaining collection with an extremely helpful introduction and notes on each author. There are indubitably the big global problems, deepened by the climate emergency and others which are more local and occasioned by a range of factors. There’s a shimmering lode of poetry in these descriptions, sometimes extruded in a line that recalls the strange beauty Les Murray’s verse: In 1894, the British Medical Journal set up a commission to investigate conditions in provincial workhouses and their infirmaries. Following a visit to Wrexham, the commission’s report revealed that ‘the tone and management of this house impressed us very favourably; the officers seemed to regard their charges as human beings to be cared and planned for.’ Nevertheless, some improvements were recommended. Like other collections in the British Library Crime Classics series, Crimes of Cymru gives the reader an insight into a world that is now lost. I’m not so much thinking of the content of the stories and the past times they are set in, though that would be true in almost all cases. I’m referring to the circumstances in which these stories were first published. Most found their way to a readership through monthly magazines with titles such as Crime Mysteries, Pall Mall Magazine, The Strand Magazine and The London Mystery Magazine. Publications such as these may not have paid particurarly well, but they had a voracious appetite for short stories and provided a reliable route to publication for jobbing writers. This is a route, unfortunately that is no longer available to twenty-first century authors.

Join Julie for an evening of journeying with particular relevance to Y Gelli – Hay, and its place on the edge of Cymru. The long history of the campaign for language equality in Wales started in 1962 with the founding of Cymdeithas yr Iaith, the Welsh Language Society. Taking inspiration from the civil rights movement in the United States, Cymdeithas yr Iaith launched and sustained a long campaign of non-violent direct action demanding that Welsh be accepted on an equal footing to English. Their targets were always property, such as road signs, and not people and the activists always made a point of taking responsibility for their actions, often waiting to surrrender themselves to the police. As a result, hundreds of Welsh language campaigners served time in prison during the 1960s and 1970s. One of the most striking things about the book results from the author’s decision to do away with English place-names altogether when it comes to describing settlements and topographical features currently in Cymru.This period also saw the winding down and removal of heavy industry in Wales. Jobs in coal, steel, quarrying and manufacturing all disappeared. But this was not just about the loss of jobs, it was about communities; vibrant, confident and self-reliant communities were destroyed: But, notwithstanding the decline and disasters of the period of the 1960s through to the 1990s that Brittle With Relics portrays, this is ultimately an uplifting book. Despite the narrow referendum victory for devolution in 1997, support for the Senedd is now solid throughout Wales, as indicated by the overwhelming 2011 vote on increasing the Welsh Government’s powers. And according to the language app, Duolingo, Welsh is the fastest growing language in the UK. (Full disclosure here – I’m a Welsh learner with Duolingo myself!) Interest in independence for Wales is growing. But, to know where we’re going, we need to know where we’ve come from. Which is why Richard King’s book is such a valuable contribution to this debate. The Flow is a work of contemplative beauty. But it is also a call to action. Even as I write this review my news feed is telling me that UK water companies released untreated sewage, tens of thousands of litres of human waste, into our rivers 825 times a day last year. The Edge of Cymru is an absorbingly interesting hybrid, a cross between the conventional travelogue, eco-concern and Welsh history textbook, all made eminently readable by the jauntiness and clarity of the prose and the honesty of the book’s author as she walks the land’s edge.