Welsh Landscape Research Articles

Feasting on the land: Haunted political space in recent Welsh language films

This article will focus on spectrality in the cinematic spaces of two Welsh language films, Yr Ymadawiad (The Passing) (2015) and Gwledd (The Feast) (2021). Both films envision spectral happenings as a means of exploring and re-exploring past and present debates about the endlessly contested nature of the Welsh landscape and the resulting hauntological traces within the national psyche. The films suggest contradictory versions of the Welsh landscape. Often described as empty and barren, Wales has simultaneously been seen as a rich resource for extensive extraction of its natural resources. With located hauntings by ghosts that are specific and placed, Yr Ymadawiad’s temporal indeterminacy imagines ghostly presences beneath the waters of a drowned village, while Gwledd depicts the horrific revenge of an earth at the mercy of humans, characterizing human use of rural space as monstrous and destructive. Both films are highly located and rooted within specific Welsh landscapes, depicting both the uniqueness of the Welsh experience and its intimate connection with global issues relating to the loss of land.

Experiments in Aural Attention: Listening Away & Lingering Longer

This exposition puts forward ‘lingering longer’ and ‘listening away’ as potential means to remain with non-semantic possibilities, resisting the tendency to know immediately or to classify — to get lost, albeit momentarily in a more messy moment of being. At stake in this investigation is the recognition that our experience of the world, characterized through a depth of engagement, is not limited to how relations operate on the surface. The direction or orientation of our attention, the intensity with which it is applied, and how it weighs on and shapes our experience implies choice and agency. Experiment I: Aural + Orientation = Aurientation emulates the experience of a fictional gallery-goer who encounters the sound installation, This is for You (Don’t Treat it like a Telephone) (2012). This piece was developed at the advanced centre for performance and scenography studies (a.pass) in Brussels and aims to consider how sound and the voice shape our orientation, when mediated through objects. Experiment in Aural Attention II: Vibrant Practice details the process undergone for creating Listening to Water (2013), a site-specific investigation into ancient well sites located in Powys and Ceredigion, two counties in Mid West Wales. The work, made in collaboration with Jane Lloyd-Francis and Naomi Heath, considers how a turn towards site, via a process of tuning in to the Welsh landscape, can bring attention to overlooked aspects of our environment.

An evidence‐based assessment of the past distribution of Golden and White‐tailed Eagles across Wales

AbstractTwo species of eagles (Golden and White‐tailed) bred in Wales during prehistoric and historic times and became regionally extinct as breeding species in the mid‐1800s. They are iconic and charismatic, and discussions about reintroducing them back into the Welsh landscape have been ongoing for years. Reintroductions, however, can be risky, costly and/or contentious. To address these concerns, and to judge whether it is appropriate to reintroduce a regionally extinct species; the “International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)” have produced criteria by which a proposed reintroduction can be assessed. A key criterion is that the potential reintroduction location lies within the former range of the species. In this study, we addressed this criterion by assessing the past distributions of Golden and White‐tailed Eagles within Wales. Using historic observational data, fossil/archaeological records and evidence from place‐names in the Welsh language, we demonstrated strong evidence for the presence of both of these eagle species in Wales in pre‐historic and historic times. We used kernel density functions to model the likely core distributions of each species within Wales. The resulting core distributions encompassed much of central and west‐north Wales for both species, with the White‐tailed Eagle exhibiting a wider core distribution extending into south Wales. Our results fill knowledge gaps regarding the historic ranges of both species in Britain, and support the future restoration of either or both species to Wales.

David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet, by Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: A Christian Modernist?, ed. by Jamie Callison, Paul S. Fiddes, Anna Johnson, and Erik Tonning

David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet, by Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: A Christian Modernist?, ed. by Jamie Callison, Paul S. Fiddes, Anna Johnson, and Erik Tonning

Can computer game landscapes target new audiences for landscape quality assessment?

This paper investigates and reflects upon the use of digital game landscapes as tools for visual quality assessment. It explores three distinct but related questions. First, can game landscapes engage the missing “young-voice” in landscape evaluations? Second, is it possible to represent the reality of typical landscape vistas? Third, does familiarity with such virtual reality environments impact on overall landscape ratings? This research draws on empirical work undertaken for the Welsh Government to evaluate the impact of their agri-environmental scheme Glastir on the rural landscapes of Wales. This project employed a new, GIS-enabled method to evaluate visual landscape quality, tested using an online photographic preference survey. Whilst the survey was successful, receiving over 2200 responses, young people (<25 years) were significantly underrepresented in the self-selecting sample.To address this gap, we stepped out of the real-world landscapes that most geographers are comfortable with, into the virtual landscapes of gaming. Our response was to create a virtual Welsh landscape which could be navigated in games software and manipulated to mimic landscape changes. A second survey incorporating images of this virtual landscape was first targeted at computer games design students and then secondly to the wider public, with both groups undertaking the same assessment. Overall >70% of respondents were highly satisfied with the quality of the landscape visualisations. Of those who had visited rural Wales before, 64% gave a rating of at least 7 out of 10 for its representativeness. No significant differences in overall landscape ratings were observed between the two groups which is helpful as it indicates that gaming familiarity would not preclude the use of such landscape visualisations in public consultation exercises. This paper considers results from this pilot study and discusses the visual accuracy of the Welsh landscape created. Wider methodological issues are outlined alongside some of the interdisciplinary challenges involved in the construction of the landscape visualisation.

Scenario-led modelling of broadleaf forest expansion in Wales.

Significant changes in the composition and extent of the UK forest cover are likely to take place in the coming decades. Current policy targets an increase in forest area, for example, the Welsh Government aims for forest expansion by 2030, and a purposeful shift from non-native conifers to broadleaved tree species, as identified by the UK Forestry Standard Guidelines on Biodiversity. Using the example of Wales, we aim to generate an evidence-based projection of the impact of contrasting policy scenarios on the state of forests in the near future, with the view of stimulating debate and aiding decisions concerning plausible outcomes of different policies. We quantified changes in different land use and land cover (LULC) classes in Wales between 2007 and 2015 and used a multi-layer perceptron–Markov chain ensemble modelling approach to project the state of Welsh forests in 2030 under the current and an alternative policy scenario. The current level of expansion and restoration of broadleaf forest in Wales is sufficient to deliver on existing policy goals. We also show effects of a more ambitious afforestation policy on the Welsh landscape. In a key finding, the highest intensity of broadleaf expansion is likely to shift from southeastern to more central areas of Wales. The study identifies the key predictors of LULC change in Wales. High-resolution future land cover simulation maps using these predictors offer an evidence-based tool for forest managers and government officials to test the effects of existing and alternative policy scenarios.

Searching for the Perfect Welsh Mountain

Why do we feel compelled to recount our experiences of mountains through narratives of majestic views and personal epiphanies? Why does so much get left out of conventional representations? Searching for the Welsh Landscape was a solo exhibition at Aberystwyth Arts Centre exploring the problematic notion that national identity subsists within the landscape. Focussing on the artworks’ “tactically absurd” means of engaging with a given context of mountain culture, this article sketches out a position defined in opposition to a “seriousness” understood to be the normative mode of engagement with mountains and landscape. Central to the project was a knowingly futile, two-year search for a “perfect Welsh mountain”, which is positioned here within a lineage of irrational instruction-based conceptual art. Unfolding through a performative process of walking, the search simultaneously inhabits and violates conventional forms of engagement with mountains. The influence of existing cultural representations of the Welsh landscape leads to a conflicted experience, manifested in the artworks’ absurd juxtapositions of the serious and the non-serious. Although the absurd is encountered as “insufficient” (due to a lack of established structures of understanding necessary to account for its sense), it is in fact doubly productive: firstly, as a form of critique that draws attention to the codes and conventions underpinning clichéd forms of representation; and secondly, liberated from narratives of meaning and coherence, as able to account for a broader spectrum of experience, bearing closer witness to actual lived encounters with mountains. Absurdity reveals mountain culture to be unnecessarily one-dimensional, its relentlessly weighty seriousness all-too-often clinging to a romantic mystique, with little regard for the trivial, the incidental or the funny. Mountains, it is argued, sometimes display their own sense of the ridiculous.

The time-travelling antiquarian: Illustrated tourist guides to North Wales from Pennant to Piper

Abstract This article seeks to examine the visual tropes of a specific genre of illustrated guidebook, originating in Thomas Pennant’s ‘extra-illustrated’ copy of his work A Tour in Wales published in stages between 1771–1776, and its legacy within twentieth-century depictions of the region. I would like to argue that illustration has contributed to a set of scopic practices and a social imaginary of the Welsh landscape, which are established with Pennant’s work and which endure into the twentieth century with the work of John Piper and the Shell Guides. There is an entanglement of time and space, of real and imaginary landscapes within these images, and I argue they represent a form of imaginative time travel. In addition to positioning the traveller in a particular place, the images also refer to particular spots of historical time. The practice of ‘extra illustration’ (sometimes called ‘Grangerisation’) through which the reader customizes their copy of a book also braids multiple temporalities into the reader/viewer experience of landscape. This is mediated by the nature of these extra illustrations, which are from disparate sources and historical contexts, appearing contiguously within the text. The depiction of the traveller in these images constructs and encourages the performance of a particular kind of touristic persona. The tourist is cast in the role of an eighteenth-century antiquarian – the amateur scholar seeking out archaeological remains, ruined buildings or ‘picturesque’ views, equally interested in collecting folklore as they are in historical fact, and engagingly non-specialist in their interest in a diverse range of subjects and approaches.

Cambrian Bards and Antiquarian Romantics: Anglophone Women Poets from Eighteenth-Century Wales

ABSTRACTDespite the fact that the recuperation of the ancient Welsh past at the hands of eighteenth-century “Celticists” was primarily a masculine endeavour, women poets of the time nevertheless engaged with this phenomenon on a number of intriguing levels. This essay explores a range of anglophone Welsh women poets, from the seventeenth-century Cardigan-based Katherine Philips to the Romantic writer Mary Robinson, in order to demonstrate women's engagement with antiquarian and national concerns in their own poetic productions. Through an analysis of their Wales-related poetry, which takes in a number of influences—from local knowledge of the Welsh landscape, of ancient British bardic verse, classical precedent and Welsh music, as well as the eighteenth-century “vogue” for imitating (or forging) the poetry of ancient cultures—the essay argues that it is possible to trace an identifiably female response to the period's literary interest in the ancient Celtic world.

‘All Impetuous Rage’: The Cult of Waterfalls in Eighteenth-century Wales

Waterfalls became places of tourism and recreation in eighteenth-century Wales and by the heyday of the Celtic Tour at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth they had achieved a special status as one of the iconic features of the Welsh landscape. The article begins its discussion of waterfalls with the developing interest in natural scenery in Wales earlier in the eighteenth century, and demonstrates how waterfall scenery was incorporated into private parks. It then examines how waterfalls were sought out by travellers through North and South Wales, the consequence of which was that the waterfall became one of the chief aesthetic thrills of the period. Interest waned in the nineteenth century when waterfalls could no longer be relished as undiscovered and tourists were drawn further afield. Aesthetic attitudes also changed. The waterfall was no longer part of a social scene, nor was it viewed as a part of a harmonious landscape that contrasted rural with urban life. The waterfall became a work of nature in its own right.

Water under the bridge? Nature, memory and hydropolitics

Memories are not confined to those who experience them firsthand. Rather, they can be transmitted and repeated by subsequent generations as prosthetic and moral memories, not linked solely to specific geographic locations but extending to affect and inform contemporary political debates. This paper investigates how and why the 1965 flooding of the village of Capel Celyn in the Tryweryn valley, north Wales is remembered through textual analysis of Welsh literature and popular music. It also highlights the profound impact that struggles over resources can have on social, cultural and political landscapes. The flooding, arguably the most dramatic hydropolitical event in the history of the United Kingdom, created tension between the need to protect cultural identity on the one hand and on the other, the need to provide essential natural resources for industry and urban development. The memory of this event has been sustained in Wales in a number of ways. Visually, graffiti calling on the public to ‘remember Tryweryn’ has become a tangible symbol of Welsh nationalism, and a potent part of the Welsh landscape. In Welsh literature (poems and songs) the memory of Tryweryn has been expressed in terms of loss and shame and the defilement of nature. Politically, Tryweryn provided the context for the rise of Welsh nationalism and devolution and has become a regularly used symbol of a culture under threat. Crucially, the memories now influence and inform contemporary debates around precipitation, drought and any forced removal justified in the name of progress.

‘It might not be a nuisance in a country cottage’: Sanitary Conditions and Images of Health in Victorian Rural Wales

AbstractAlthough historians have become increasingly sensitive to the contested nature of public health and the limitations of sanitary reform, studies have concentrated on the urban. In focusing on rural Wales in the period from the creation of rural sanitary authorities in 1872 to the end of the nineteenth century, the essay shifts the focus to ask questions about what the rural means in the context of public health. By making connections between ideas about the Welsh landscape, nationhood and health, and the nature of sanitary problems facing rural communities and how rural sanitary practices came to be viewed, the essay shows how enduring representations of rural healthiness masked a ‘long tale of filth, neglect, carelessness and disease’ in rural Wales. The essay demonstrates how a bifurcated view of rural Wales as healthy and unhealthy reflected ideas about nationhood and the nature of rural conditions that rendered sanitary problems less visible when they occurred in a rural environment.

Landscapes of The Mabinogi

The medieval Welsh prose classic known as The Mabinogi survives complete in two important fourteenth-century manuscripts and in a thirteenth-century fragment. This paper looks at ways in which the four interlaced tales, incorporating elements of much earlier myth and legend, are also recorded and reflected in the Welsh landscape, especially in place names and place name clusters that reference the tales. Using the analogy of Western Apache place tales, it suggests that the place names and the landscape of the tales served (and perhaps still serve) as reminders both of the cultural significance of the tales and of the importance of the themes that they explore. It also looks at the ways in which Anglo-Norman and English regimes overlaid that significance with tangible demonstrations of their own power and authority. Finally, it explores how the geographic reach of The Mabinogi served to reinforce a growing sense of Welsh cultural unity during a period when political unification may have seemed within reach.

Beauty Spot, Blind Spot: Romantic Wales

AbstractRomantic‐period Wales was a fascinating place: part literary construct, part tourist destination, it appears in the work of many writers as a locus of alternative possibilities, both political and personal. Welsh landscape, language and literature attracted poets, artists, antiquarians and historians alike, and an energetic literary cultural revival within Wales produced a rich blend of texts, legends and fabrications which would inspire makers of both fiction and history on either side of the border. The questions of national and cultural allegiance at the heart of this revival are of profound importance to current discussions of ‘British’ identity, particularly in the light of so‐called ‘four nations’ criticism. This article argues that the Welsh contribution to British Romanticism has been seriously neglected by Romantic studies in general. It suggests reasons for this neglect, surveys recent work in the field, and points to future possible directions for research.

Contexts for Historic Landscape Characterisation in Wales

Historic Landscape Characterisation in Wales developed to support the use of the Register of Landscapes of Historic Interest in planning and management, but is intended to be applicable to any part of the Welsh landscape. Its methodology was refined from an early study of the Gwent Levels, which introduced the concept of unique character areas, and a pilot exercise on the Llyn peninsula, which proposed that historic character could be approached via key historical themes expressed in tangible landscape components. Historic character areas are defined through the recognition of dominant patterns, but these do not form a typology. The unique identity of each area may be made up of many historical characteristics which can tell a complex story. The narrative capacity of characterisation in Wales enables it to play a part in the definition and description of local distinctiveness, providing ready access to history in the local landscape.

Developing the untapped wealth of Britain's ‘Celtic Fringe’: Water engineering and the Welsh landscape, 1870 – 1960

This paper focuses on the development of water engineering schemes in Wales in the late 19th and 20th centuries, concentrating mainly on water-supply schemes promoted by large English municipalities such as Birmingham and Liverpool, but also discussing hydro-electricity. It is argued that the first water engineering projects in Wales were informed by certain perceptions of the Welsh landscape and wider discourses regarding Britain's ‘Celtic Fringe’, and that such concepts were used to promote ideas of water purity. Ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ surrounding the changing of the landscape through water works are analysed, and how such notions were challenged in the 20th century is explored, particularly from conservationist and nationalist perspectives. In the second half of the 20th century, it is argued, a paradox emerges, whereby different ways of seeing or perceiving the landscape of Wales led to a divergence in the political dynamics surrounding water-supply projects and hydro-electric schemes.

Tourism in Borrow's Wild Wales, 1854

An analysis of Borrow's classic travel book, Wild Wales, throws light on Welsh tourism in the 1850s, a time when the expansion of the railway made accessible areas formerly remote from major centres of population. The study identifies impacts which early tourism was making on the Welsh landscape and society and provides insights into the relationship between ‘hosts and guests’. Tensions between the Welsh and their mainly English, visitors in the nineteenth century are found to have much in common with those experienced today in areas where foreign tourists come from countries that are relatively rich and powerful. Thus, the article exposes the imperialistic nature of tourism.

Through the Looking Glass: R. S. Thomas's The Echoes Return Slow as Poetic Autobiography

As of 1993, R. S. Thomas has published 28 collections of poetry, including his 548-page Collected Poems 1945-1990, which has been called greatest publishing event in Anglo-Welsh poetry since Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems came out in 1952 - some would say since Anglo-Welsh poetry was ever published at all (Conran 15). corpus of Thomas's work has commonly been divided into three periods: an early period (1946-55) dominated by explorations of the east Wales hill country and its small-holding farmers; a middle period (1955-72) in which his interest in the Welsh landscape and peasant farmers merges with expressions of his developing nationalist convictions; and a later period (1972 to the present), which turns from Wales as a physical, cultural, and political entity to address metaphysical questions concerning the relationship between God and human beings, and between the self and the spirit, in a materialistic, self-destructive world. While the arrangement of dominant themes into distinct periods provides a means of encapsulating decades of literary production, it also tends to mask the complexities of individual poems and obscure the variety of connections among poems. Poems treating the dominant themes of nature, nationalism, and religion in fact sustain the entirety of Thomas's work, intertwining, transforming, repeating, and merging throughout the collections published to date. Referring to these characteristics of Thomas's poetry, poet and critic Anthony Conran observes that One of the difficulties of talking about R. S. Thomas is the way his work seems to progress in great irregular spirals: each of his books may have pieces that refer back, in style, material or attitude, over several volumes or even to the very beginnings of his poetry. It may also have poems in it which seem totally new, but which have to wait their development two or three volumes in the future. (Cost 234) While Conran does not mention W. B. Yeats in this analysis, a Yeatsian attention to relationships among poems - within a single collection and among collections - clearly informs Thomas's construction of his poetic canon and shapes our understanding of his poetic autobiography.(1) In investigating this poetic autobiography, I will primarily treat Echoes Return Slow, a collection published in 1988, when Thomas was 76 years old. As Thomas's only overtly and wholly autobiographical collection, Echoes Return Slow deliberately draws to itself and revises his previous life and work, looking backward from his present consciousness and knowledge, and forward to his final years of life and productivity. At the same time, the collection is a sustained prose-and-poem sequence with a movement and unity of its own. If Thomas's Collected Poems functions as a looking glass or mirror, presenting a life the life of the poet(2) - distinct from but reflective of Thomas's lived life, then Echoes Return Slow might be described as a mirror reflecting that mirror.(3) I want to explore one facet of the multifaceted Life of the Poet contained in these poems: Thomas's understanding of how and why he writes poetry. Within this area, I want specifically to examine his conception of poetry as the transformation of spiritual wounds, his requirement for brutal honesty in poetry, and his capacity for poetic renewal. Echoes Return Slow is the only volume of Thomas's to combine prose and poetry: 60 prose passages and 60 poems are arranged on facing pages, none is titled, none is longer than a single page. In an interview with Planet, Thomas acknowledges the influence of Geoffrey Hill's semiautobiographical prose sequence, Mercian Hymns, on the form of Echoes Return Slow. I was partially influenced by Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, but did not want to imitate him with a prose sequence. Partly I had in mind Coleridge's gloss on the verses in The Ancient Mariner. It was a kind of counterpointing. (50)(4) While suggestive of entries from a memoir in their visual impact and direct, chronological treatment of life experiences, the prose passages on the left-hand pages are less like memoir entries and more like poetry in being highly wrought; carrying a weight of metaphoric, sometimes disjunctive content; and demonstrating careful attention to sound patterns and rhythm. …

Common Ground: Poets in a Welsh Landscape

Common Ground: Poets in a Welsh Landscape

The pre‐glacial evolution of Wales

AbstractThe classical explanation of the development of the Welsh landscape by the effects of a pulsed ‘eustatic’ uplift during the Cenozoic times is challenged by new data on the geology and geomorphology of Wales and the adjacent regions.The post‐Caledonian surface developed over most of Wales in the upper Westphalian plays a major role in landform development. Since its emergence before mid‐Cretaceous times, the Welsh Massif has suffered a long subaerial evolution which favoured a powerful chemical weathering. In Anglesey and St. David's Land, residual hills were formed by a process of differential weathering, and downwearing in saprolites. The Millstone Grit quartzites have been deeply weathered and dolines or flat‐bottomed basins have been developed.From Cretaceous to Miocene times, a morphotectonic equilibrium has existed between uplift and denudation, so that, in the major part of Wales, the original planation surface was constantly maintained by lowering on itself and in some places it is possible to prove that no more than a few dozen metres of rock thickness disappeared during that period. Several main escarpments were produced by the warping of the planation surface along sharp flexures, during Neogene times. The Cenozoic vertical movements were controlled by the Caledonian or pre‐Caledonian tectonic pattern which has divided the continental crust into major structural units.Welsh tectonic development is related to the opening of the North Atlantic, associated stresses reactivating ancient lines of weakness in the heterogeneous lower crust or upper mantle.