It was all Hitler’s fault really. He invaded Poland in September 1939, the month of my conception. (Bet Hitler did not expect that!) A few months later, after my birth, my Dad packed Mum, Marylyn and Christine, my two sisters, […]
Swoosh. He would have counted himself lucky he was executed by the axe and not that torturous, laboured execution that awaited some traitors, the hanging, drawing and quartering Henry VIII sometimes reserved for those he’d taken a dislike to. On […]
“You never know quite where you’re halfway to,” asserts my companion as we drive past the Ebenezer Apostolic Church at ‘Halfway’. The village name sign corroborates this, and the curved B4302 road from Llandeilo amplifies it by persistently preventing my […]
I arrived in Tywyn by bus. Lloyds Bus Route #30 from Dolgellau on the A473. I had newly acquired friends to visit and I was being drawn by The Talyllyn Railway – Rheilffordd Talyllyn. From Tywyn came the inspiration of […]
At first, I didn’t like it. The Lower School was a tall, forbidding stone building on Meyrick St. in Pembroke Dock. The playground, too, had high prisonlike walls surrounding us and a covered area where we could huddle together in […]
They’ve closed the bridge! By ‘they’ I mean, of course, the local council, and by ‘the bridge’, I don’t mean a bridge, or any bridge; I mean the bridge. It still surprises me how so many people, myself included, can […]
Rugby writer Huw S Thomas reports on the 15 Welsh sportsmen to have had statues erected in their memory Statues are in the news – and for the wrong reason. Sadly there is more discussion on their destruction rather than […]
Stepping off the bus, I watch the couple and their dog go along the Welsh Coastal Path. I can see that the dog has been here before. He whimpered excitedly as the bus rolled down the quiet road, long before […]
“Dr Livingstone, I presume?” These famous words were uttered by Henry Morton Stanley, on finding David Livingstone, on 10th November 1871. As far as posterity was concerned, Stanley became more famous for these four words than anything else in his […]
The last time I wrote for ‘Welsh Country’ I made a self-acknowledged mistake, one of those senior moments that we become accustomed to as we get a tad older in the incisor. The subject of my latest bio, Sarah Siddons, […]
When he passed away on 6th July 1960, there was ‘an outpouring of national mourning’. Over 40 years later, in 2004, he was voted top of the poll in a clarion call of 100 Welsh Heroes, his role in the […]
There’s a road from Aberdyfi, which winds its way through the Dyfi Valley overseen by the Plynlimon and the Tarren Hills somewhat parallel, sometimes not – to the Aberdyfi River. The road jogs its way a little through a quiet […]
