North Wales

We checked Orkney's tourism site and the definitive accounts of the Highland Midge.

Those accounts detail northwest Scotland and the west coast all the way down to North Wales, but they completely omit the Northern Isles.

But here is the crucial inference.

The scientific account states that midges physically stop flying when wind speeds hit six miles an hour.

The other design is the concentric castle.

So if you think about something like Caernarfon Castle in North Wales, one of Edward I, that great ring of castles built in the 13th century by Edward Longshanks, hammer of the Scots, but in this case, conqueror of the Welsh, who went into Snowdonia in an attempt to both stamp English mastery over North Wales and to kind of co-opt Welsh legends about Arthurianism built this ring of extraordinary castles.

Well, somewhere like Caernarfon would have towers built into the walls so you don't have a kind of freestanding separate central keep as you would in Dover or Windsor or indeed the Tower of London.

The walls and the towers are integrated and then you might have two sets of them.

Carnarvon's a good example.

When Edward I builds Carnarvon Castle, where he gets Master James of St George, his great engineer architect, to help him build Carnarvon Castle, there are two things going on simultaneously.

There is the need for a serious defensive structure in this part of North Wales that he's just spent a lot of time, money, effort and blood on conquering.

But Edward I is also optimising for stealing Welsh identities and mythologies.

He'd come back to England to become crowned king.

And then he launched a series of military campaigns into Northern Wales, trying to stamp out the authority of the native Welsh princes.

Now those native Welsh princes associated themselves in their own myth, in their own legends, in their own histories and pseudo histories, among many other things, with an imperial past, a Roman past.

It was told in the Mabinogion and in other sources.

on my tbr that was gonna be my tbr so there we go

so you can leave after this um so this is great very firmly welsh folk horror so it's set in the hills and mountains of north wales uh if you know north wales it is very specifically set in bed gala which um katie maybe been there with me, I can't remember now, near Snowdon, in the foot of the mountains of Snowdonia, you follow Carowyn and Rhiann, who are the last in a long line of Welsh sheep farmers, and they live isolated and off the land as they age, and you're getting the impression throughout the whole thing that Modernisation is coming and it's happening, but they are very removed from that and still sheep farming in the hills.

Carowyn discovers a prehistoric monument in one of his fields.

So that... book that you've got bell on the front cover there's a stone head on the bottom of it that is what he first stumbles across actually somebody walking across his land um yes trips over it and so he starts digging this prehistoric monument up and he becomes more and more obsessed with unveiling what this monument is at the detriment to his livelihood and his farm you know like debt collectors are coming knocking on the door and his wife knows that that's where he is and he's not looking after the sheep he is obsessively trying to dig up this monument basically as their livelihood and their kind of farm life decays around them and It is very, very, very Welsh.

It's also full of Welsh folklore, which obviously I'm aware of.

But I don't think that takes away from the enjoyment of somebody who wouldn't be aware of various folklore in Wales.

Beth Gellert in North Wales is that it's called that because it's based around a folklore about a dog called Gellert who his owner I don't know if he was a knight I don't know let's just say owner his owner went out and he left the dog with the baby as you do and when he came back there was like chaos in the house it had been completely upturned there was blood everywhere and so he kills the dog and then it's revealed that actually he finds the body of a wolf and the baby's fine and the dog had saved the baby that's the folklore around that's the could you remember that story Katie

so

Black bomber is the operation that got going there.

It's a multi award winning extra mature cheddar produced by the Snowdonia Cheese Company in North Wales of the U.K. You probably found it.

I guarantee you, I have seen this cheese at Whole Foods.

And if you like a cheese with a little funk on it, because that's basically what mature means, you can get down to get down.

I've got to stress that point.

It was happening in North Wales, South Wales, Central Wales.

It wasn't Evan Roberts starting his own thing, whereas Azusa Street was just LA.

The Welsh Revival was the whole country, the whole nation, I should say.