Tag: Historical memory
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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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When the Last Prince Hid in Our Hills: A Family Legend That Still Haunts Wales
High in the forgotten uplands of Montgomeryshire, where bracken folds over ancient sheep paths and the hills roll unbroken into silence, there stands a farmhouse my family still speaks of in reverent tones. Its name is Esgair Llywelyn — Llywelyn’s Ridge. Even now, the place endures. Weathered, empty, but defiantly upright. Whitewashed stone walls streaked…
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Saving the soul of Wales: why we must act now to preserve our family and chapel records
It is hard to overstate just how close we are to losing the living memory of rural Wales. Across our hills and valleys — from the sheep farms of Montgomeryshire to the slate towns of Gwynedd and the quiet chapels of Ceredigion — traces of family and community life are disappearing at an alarming rate.…
