Tag: Chapel culture
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Voices from the Uplands, why I wrote it, and why it matters now
Voices from the Uplands: The Davies Family and the Soul of Rural Wales is, in the simplest sense, a book about my own ancestors, the Davies family of Caeadda, Llanwrin. But I did not write it to produce another neatly ordered pedigree, nor to add one more family tree to the growing pile of genealogical summaries…
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The Treachery of 1847: How the “Blue Books” Colonised the Welsh Mind
In 1847 three substantial parliamentary reports were laid before Westminster under the unromantic title Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales. Their blue covers gave them their enduring popular name, the “Blue Books”, and their conclusions, or at least the spirit in which those conclusions were delivered, detonated across…
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William Williams Pantycelyn (1717–1791), The Voice of the Welsh Revival and the Making of a Singing Nation
In my earlier essays on Daniel Rowland, the great evangelist of the Welsh Methodist Revival, and Howell Harris, the organiser and engine who turned revival into a disciplined movement, I explored two forms of power that shaped modern Wales. The first was the power of the pulpit, preaching as national event, the sermon as moral…
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My Political Heritage, Wales in My Blood, and the Quiet Lessons of Ancestry
Most people assume political identity is something you acquire, a set of opinions shaped by the news cycle, social media, and the dominant arguments of the moment. In Wales, that assumption rarely survives contact with the deeper story. Because Welsh political culture is not merely contemporary. It is historical. It is inherited. It is shaped…
