Tag: Welsh identity
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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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Why Reform UK Will Never Understand Wales
Wales is not a branch office of Westminster politics. It is a nation with its own civic memory, its own institutional landscape, and its own lived experience of what happens when power is exercised at a distance. Reform UK’s problem is not simply that it is provocative, plenty of parties have been provocative, it is…
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The Marcher Lords, the Private Warlords Who Invented Border Brutality
There is a particular kind of violence that flourishes on borders. Not the open violence of battlefield armies, marching under banners and accountable, at least in theory, to a crown or parliament. But the private violence of semi-autonomous men, installed at the edge of a realm, given licence to do what the centre cannot openly…
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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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The Mid Wales Railway, The Lost Spine of a Divided Nation
There are places in Wales where the landscape still feels like an argument. Not in the sense of conflict, but in the way it insists upon its own logic, steep, stubborn, beautiful, and not designed to make life easy for those who live within it. Mid Wales is one of those places. It is a…
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Daniel Rowland (1713–1790), The Great Evangelist of Wales, and the Making of Modern Welsh Nonconformity
There are certain names in Welsh religious history which do not merely belong to their century, they reshape the centuries that follow. Daniel Rowland of Llangeitho is one of those figures. In the eighteenth century, when Wales was still largely rural, linguistically distinct, and socially conservative, Rowland became the most powerful preacher the nation had…
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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…
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The Uncrowned Kings: How the Preacher Ruled Victorian Wales
Imagine a Sunday evening in November 1880. Outside, the valley is pitch black, hammered by rain sweeping down from the mountains. But inside the gas-lit chapel, the air is thick with damp wool, peppermint, and anticipation. Five hundred people sit shoulder to shoulder in a silence so taut it hums. They are not waiting for…
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Why the English and the Welsh Keep Misunderstanding Each Other — And Why It Still Shapes Modern Britain
We talk endlessly about the politics of the Union, the economics of devolution, and the future of the UK. But beneath all of that lies a quieter, deeper truth: The English and the Welsh speak the same language, but not the same culture.And because no one acknowledges this, we constantly misread each other. These aren’t…
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“My Relations Are Part of a Rich Tapestry of Welsh Heritage” — My Feature in Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine
I’m delighted to share that my family history research has been featured in the latest issue of Who Do You Think You Are? magazine. The article, written by Claire Vaughan, explores my decades-long journey tracing my Welsh roots — from hill farmers and Calvinist ministers to a musical icon and a self-taught solicitor — all…
