Wales E-Book

Sarah Curtius

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 96

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

A book about Wales, a land rich with history. Find out what is so special about this small nation and meet some of the people who formed it and changed the world in doing so. The book is written for English learners at level CEFR B1

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Introduction

Prehistoric Wales

1. The Red Lady of Paviland

2. Copper Monopoly

3. The Welsh Language I

The Arrival of the Celts

4. Visit Wales I

The Gower Peninsula

Myths and Legends

5. The Red Dragon

6. Beddgelert

7. Saint Dwynwen

8. The Welsh Language II

Place Names

9. Visit Wales II

Snowdonia / Eryri

The Age of Saints

10. Christianity in Wales

11. Saint David

Wales’s Patron Saint

12. The Welsh Language III

Foreign Influences

13. Visit Wales III

Pembrokeshire

Wales in the Middle Ages

14. Hywel Dda (890-950)

15. The Marcher Lords

16. Medieval Welsh women

Gwenllian and Nest

17. Llywelyn the Great and Llywelyn the Last Prince of Wales

18. Prince Edward, Prince of Wales

The First English Prince of Wales

19. Welsh Language IV

The Mabinogion

20. Visit Wales IV

The Great Castles

The Renaissance

22. Owain Glynd<w>r (1349-1416)

23. Henry VII (1457-1509)

The Tudors - a Welsh Dynasty

24. Robert Recorde (1512-1558)

25. Welsh Language V

The Welsh Bible

26. Visit Wales V

Back to Pembrokeshire

Industrialisation and Social Reform

28. Dic Penderyn

The Merthyr Rising 1808-1831

29. Robert Owen (1771-1858)

Entrepreneur and Social Reformer

30. “Rebecca!”

31. John Frost (1784-1877) & George Shell (1820-1839)

The Newport Uprising

32. Bartholomew Roberts (1682-1722)

The most successful Pirate

33. lolo Morganwg (1747-1826)

Creator of Welsh legend

34. Welsh Language VI

The National Anthem

35. Visit Wales VI

The South Wales Valleys

Modern Wales

37. David Lloyd George (1863-1945)

Prime Minister (1916-1922)

38. Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960)

Father of the NHS

39. Charles, Prince of Wales

Investiture and protests in 1969

40. Betty Campbell (1934-2017)

41. The Road to Devolution

42. Welsh language VII

Survival of the language

43. Visit Wales VII

Cardiff

44. Welsh Language - Bonus

Solutions

Extras

About the author

Also by Sarah Curtius

Coming soon

Acknowledgements

Photo Credits

INTRODUCTION

What do people think of when they think of Wales?

Maybe you think about rugby, or about male voice choirs, or about sheep on the rolling green hills, or about a strange language on the road signs. Maybe you think of famous Welsh people like the singer Tom Jones or the actress Catherine Zeta Jones or the footballer Gareth Bale.

Maybe you don’t think of anything at all. Maybe you don’t know anything about Wales. Or maybe you think such a small country cannot be very important.

Wales is a small country. It is just over 20,000 km2 which is 17 times smaller than Germany. And just over 3.2 million people live in Wales.

The story of Wales has sometimes been told as the story of a land invaded by other nations who took the resources to make themselves rich but treated the Welsh badly. As you will see in the stories in the book, this was sometimes true. Especially in the period of industrialisation, a few families came to Wales and became very rich. The Marquis of Bute came from Scotland and became the richest man in the world in the 19th century by transporting coal through the docks in Cardiff. The Crayshaw family came from Yorkshire in England and became rich from the iron industry. The Vivian family from Cornwall made their wealth in Swansea’s copper industry.

However, this is only part of the story. As you will soon see, Wales has always been at the centre of world history, trading with neighbours and shaping the world we live in.

In this book you will not read stories about the rich and famous foreigners who made their money in Wales. Instead, you will read about Welsh people who changed the world in some way. Some of them are famous. Some of them, you will probably never have heard of. I hope you find them interesting.

In addition, I want to give you some idea of what to expect if you decide to visit this beautiful country. You will find mountains, hills, valleys and rivers, a long coastline and lots of activities to do outdoors. You will also find a country full of history, with hundreds of castles, ancient churches and museums.

Also, as we have already mentioned, you will find out about a country which has its own ancient language and that is what I would like to begin with! We are going to start by learning some Welsh! Below are some phrases you can use on a trip to Wales. The language may look unusual but I have given you some help with the pronunciation. Have a try and enjoy learning about this wonderful country!

Bore da (Pronounced: Boh-reh dah) Good morning

Prynhawn da (Prin-hawn dah) Good afternoon

Nos da (nohs dah) Good night

Croeso i Cymru (Croesoh ee Gum-reeh) Welcome to Wales

Iechyd da! (Yeh-chid dah) Good health! (Cheers!)

Diolch (Dee-olch) Thanks

Da iawn (Dah ee-aw-n) Very good

PREHISTORIC WALES

Pentre Ifan, in Preseli Hills, Pembrokeshire

Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England

PREHISTORIC WALES

Stonehenge, South England

You may be surprised to see a photograph of Stonehenge at the beginning of a book about Wales. Stonehenge is a stone circle on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, south England. Stonehenge consists of two stone circles. The outer circle is made of stones taken from the local area. However, the inner circle is made of bluestones which came from the Preseli Hills in the south-west corner of Wales.

In 2018, archaeologists discovered that, not only were the stones cut from the Preseli hills, they had, in fact, already stood there as a stone circle. The scientists believe that the people who lived in west Wales moved to Wiltshire around 3,000 BC and took their monument with them. How they managed to transport these enormous stones the 270 kilometres to Stonehenge is still a mystery.

In this chapter we take a look at Wales in the prehistoric period. We’ll find out about a young man mistaken for a woman, an unbelievable Bronze Age industry and who the Celts were and where they came from. The travel tip is the officially named “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty”, the Gower peninsula.

THE RED LADY OF PAVILAND

In December 1822, William Buckland received an interesting parcel from Lady Mary Cole who lived on the Gower Peninsula in south Wales. The parcel contained what seemed to be an elephant’s skull and tusk found in a cave in Paviland, near Lady Mary’s home.

Buckland was the first Professor of Geology at Oxford University and was very interested by the find. In January 1823, he made his way to the cave at Paviland to see what else was there. Buckland found some human bones which had been dyed red with ochre, a natural dye. As well as the bones, he also found lots of shells and ivory which had also been dyed red. Buckland had a number of different ideas about the bones. He decided they must have belonged to a woman, because he believed the shells had been part of a necklace. He thought she must have been a witch or a prostitute who lived about 2,000 years earlier, when the Romans were in Britain. He called the bones the "Red Lady of Paviland".

However, when the bones were studied properly, scientists discovered that they belonged to a young man between 25 and 30 years old. In 2008, modern radiocarbon dating showed that the bones were much older than Buckland thought. In fact, the young man lived 33,000 years ago during a slightly warmer period of the last Ice Age.

The “elephant” skull and the ivory were actually from a mammoth. Many more animal bones and stone tools were found in the cave. The young man and others with him were probably hunting mammoth and other animals in the area where he was buried. Nowadays, the cave is close to the sea and can only be reached in the winter low tides1 . However, when the young man was alive, it was at least 110 kilometres away from the sea and the area was full of bison, reindeer, woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos.

The red bones of the "Red Lady of Paviland" form one of the earliest ritual burials2 ever found in Western Europe.

COPPER MONOPOLY

Pentre Ifan

The last Ice Age drove humans, like the tribe the “Red Lady” belonged to, from Britain. It ended around 10,000 BC and people once again returned from central Europe to live in Britain. Stone Age people left their mark on the landscape in Wales, building small settlements and creating stone monuments like the burial chamber at Pentre Ifan.

As Britain moved from the Stone Age into the Bronze Age (around 2,000 BC), Wales was to play an important role. Bronze is made from copper and tin. Both of those metals could be easily found in Britain at the time and we now know that, for a few hundred years, one mine in the north-west of Wales provided almost all of Britain’s copper.

The Great Orme is part of the headland3 near the Victorian seaside town of Llandudno. At the same time Stonehenge was being moved to Salisbury Plain, people began digging the eight-kilometre-long tunnels on the Great Orme in order to mine copper. Some of the tunnels are so narrow, scientists believe they must have been dug by small children of about five years old.

The workers used stones from the beach and animal bones to dig the copper ore. 3,000 stone hammers and other tools have been found at the site.

When the first tunnels were discovered in 1987, it was thought that this was a small local mine. However, researchers have discovered that between 1600 and 1400 BC, the mine on the Great Orme was the main source of copper in Britain. Copper from the mine was traded throughout Europe and objects made of copper from the Great Orme have been found in France, the Netherlands and Sweden.

In 2005, the Great Orme Copper Mines were named ‘The Largest Prehistoric Copper Mines in the World’ by the Guinness Book of World Records.

3. a high piece of land at the coast

THE WELSH LANGUAGE I

THE ARRIVAL OF THE CELTS

Celtic Village

In the 20th century, people believed that the Celts were a group of tribes from central Europe which invaded the British Isles several times around 500 BC. However, modern researchers suggest that Celtic tribes started to arrive much earlier. It is believed that they were not part of a violent invasion, but Celts who came to trade and then settled with the people already living in the British Isles.

The Celts who settled in what is now Wales and the south of England came from Armorica. Readers of the Asterix comics may recognise this name. It is the home of Asterix and Obelix which we now know as Brittany in the north-west of France. They began coming to Britain and Ireland as early as 5,000 BC.