Seize the Night : Edinburgh, Festival of Beltane
   
Except for a few regions in Ireland, the Welsh stand apart in retaining their old unaccompanied, un-anglicized place names, particularly in the north and west. Here is the best defended outpost of Celtic speech: Nearly 600,000 people, roughly a fifth of the population, can speak Welsh, the beneficiaries of a nationalist movement that has used language as a rallying cry since the 1960s. The old language bubbles up in schools, pubs, grocery stores, and on television. The English name for Wales comes from the Anglo-Saxon word wealas, meaning foreigners, a description many Welsh today would turn on its head and apply to the English themselves.
Besides language, what gives the Celtic Welsh a chest-pounding feel of home is heroic history—and Wales is thick with it: walled towns, roofless churches, spiral-engraved standing stones, holy wells, crumbling hill forts, all proclaiming a past age of Celtic dominance.
The history that stirs the hottest passions among Welsh Celts belongs to medieval times, when Welsh leaders resisted the ultimately successful invasions of the English kings. Those heroic days seemed as fresh as an open wound to David Petersen as he drove me through the Towy River Valley in southwestern Wales. I had met the ponytailed Petersen before at the Festival Interceltique, the pan-Celtic music event in Lorient, Brittany, where he headed the Welsh delegation. When I heard him call the Union Jack a "butcher's apron," I knew I'd found a Celtic troublemaker.
Petersen, a Celtic commentator and sculptor, wanted to show me one of the latest patriotic monuments to the Welsh cause. He was in a pugnacious mood, befitting the son of a former heavyweight champ. Jabbing his finger right and left as we sped through the mellow valley, Petersen bloodied the English face on the landscape. He angrily corrected a few anglicized names of towns; pointed out the ruins of Welsh castles while ignoring the bulkier, fixed-up English ones; and, slowing down beside a modest piece of pastureland, complained that no marker identified this ground as the site of the glorious Battle of Coed Llathen. Here, in 1257, Welsh troops crushed the invading English army of King Henry III. "A new map of this area has left the battlefield out," Petersen said in disbelief. "The effing nerve of the authorities to tell us that this has no historical value."
Wheeling into a car park in the center of Llandovery, an old market town, Petersen reached the point of his harangue: On a rise, sharing space with the broken walls of a castle, stood a warrior's statue. Helmet, spear, flowing cloak, shield, and broadsword—the costume of war gleamed in stainless steel. But where there should have been a face and a body inside the medieval uniform, empty space stared out.
The 16-foot-high (five-meter-high) statue represents Llywelyn ap Gruffydd Fychan, a "brave nobody," Petersen said. When English troops stormed the area in 1401, looking for the army of Welsh rebel Owain Glyndwr, the local Lord Llywelyn led the enemy in the wrong direction, buying time for Glyndwr to escape. As punishment for his subterfuge, Llywelyn was executed in the town square. "The English took his stomach out and cooked it in front of him," Petersen said. The empty cloak symbolizes the horrific form of death.
Petersen knows the full story behind the raising of the statue on the 600th anniversary of Llywelyn's execution. His sons Toby and Gideon designed and built the locally commissioned monument. Back at the car we found a £30 ($50) parking ticket on the windshield. Petersen snatched it up, cursed the authorities, and vowed to fight the ticket. He had no choice: A Ghost of Wales Past was looking over his shoulder. |
