Excellent. Right. But actually, my talk follows on very well from Lee says, honestly, we didn't.
Didn't get in cahoots about this to start with. But but it does because I'm looking at narrative as a mechanism for creating a sense of space.
And I would like to look at three Welsch, three particular Welsch sites.
Matthai and its surroundings, Strata, Florida and Antaeus and the area which encompasses Dangote Qur'anic.
Now, these are all sites where legend has been important.
Let me do something a little more interesting than that. This is the this is the mother vice motherlode site.
And this the Mervi Community Centre. It's one of the famous sites in Wales because of the links to the fairy bride.
The fairy bride who comes out of thinner than dark returns eventually because her
husband violates a taboo but returns again to give her sons the information,
which becomes the is called the mother grandmother by the material, which makes them sort of great physicians.
Now, there are a lot of interesting things that are happening happening here.
One of them is the way in which the mother material is viewed.
It's seen as it's an example how to how to express this sort of nicely, really, of romantic creation.
The material was edited in the 19th century for the first time and translated into English.
And the people involved in it were very involved in presenting Wales as a romantic place.
John Q was a doctor, but a doctor who was interested in what we would now probably consider alternative medicine.
So who edited this was very interested in Welsh Druidry and creating Welsh Druidry.
And the third and really, really dangerous one involved in this, although he's not credited in the book,
is Yolla Monarch, who supposedly copied a work of medicine by someone we can't really identify.
And it's really full of sort of druid names for plants and things.
So what one has is a very romantic view of the Welsh past.
Immediately you start. The other thing about this, which impinges, I think,
a great deal on the way the community has approached this, is that it's actually a re or realised folk tale.
In other words, you can't really see the continuity. You can see kind of where it drops off and where it comes back again.
When John Reese visited the area looking for these fairy bride stories and the fairy bride story is is actually quite a well-known one in Wales.
Now, about two dozen examples, all associated with legs or bodies of water.
But when Reese went to collect this, he didn't find anything in the thigh yet.
Now it's become very, very popular. It's the most popular, anthologised Welsh folktale, certainly that I've come across.
I haven't done a numbers count, but I'm quite sure this one would would would be the most important one.
Even above the authoress and stuff, I suspect the realisation came after the First World War.
And the reason why I suspect this is that the tail was included in a book of material
given to Welsh speaking soldiers to kind of remind them of their Welsh ness.
So you get this notion that this particular tale and this particular body of material is somehow essentially Welsh.
I've never been able to get any one number of times.
I've asked above English speakers and real speakers to tell me why exactly it's essentially Welsh.
Mostly they talk about, ah, well, the antiquity, the idea that the Welsh were Celts and very close to the soil,
all of which are, you know, sort of generic romantic notions at the moment.
The Mithai Community Centre. And this is a picture that was dedicated in, I think, 2011 by Prince Charles.
So there's a royal link there. And of course, Prince Charles is very interested in alternative medicine.
It is used extensively. There is a shop which sells craft goods, very high classed craft goods.
There is a bookshop. The things that are sold in the bookshop.
Some of them are much more towards the romantic notion of herbalism.
But there also has every year a conference in which academics are invited.
Some of the lectures, I think, again, go more towards the healing wells, but they have published a book with a collection of academic essays.
So there's a consciousness of an academic world as well as a popular world.
In addition to the mother of a story in the church is and I have a picture of it here, the tombstone for the last physician of Mother VI.
The last one. Now, there are references to mother and Mervi in early in earlier earlier sources, not very, very early sources.
And there's a suggestion that they have been linked to the court position of the Lord Reece.
So, again, you have it worked into Welsh history, but they're not they're only ever called doctors.
Whereas what you have operating in maths VI much more recently, it's really what Lisa was talking about is the Dannion hospice tradition,
the conjuror tradition and the actual documents which are recorded in the Red Book of her guest are not particularly Welsh.
They belong to the kind of medical documents.
Find in the Middle Ages the sorts of things which, as medicine became professionalised and therefore more expensive,
turns into the kind of popular medicine which was practised by Indian hazardous.
So you have this very interesting bifurcation that here is this collection of documents which are not anciently welsch, but very mediaeval,
giving way towards modern professional medicine and yet being retained and given this sort of new identity as ancient Welsh medicine,
ancient Welsh herbalism. And of course, Mervi is very much connected to that.
It's a small town, obviously no industry, and it's remote from other other places.
So you can see why this particular thing is very important.
This is littered, Anvar. And there is one of the many illustrations of the story of Lynn of Vannevar.
It's in the centre of an important sort of walking area.
So you get a lot of hill walkers.
You get a lot of climbers climbing the mound and using Mervi really as a centre from which to set out or come or come back.
So, again, there is this this interesting problem that the narrative provides a context.
It provides depth that provides interest is an exciting and fascinating narrative.
But it's a narrative which really comes in in the in in the romantic period.
As I say, and I can't stress this often enough, it's a re or realised narrative rather than a narrative of continuity.
And the reason I'm going on and on about this is because the last site ideal with has a much more continuous narrative.
So the traditions are there. The mother gun were collected to the Lord Reese, an important thing, important ruler in Wales.
The community centre has now a modern royal heritage.
They have commissioned a stained glass window, also dedicated by Prince Charles, called the legend of Linda van Duff and Healing Waters.
Lots of activities occur there. Now, of course, in abeyance.
But one can understand,
given where they are and given the sort of reputation of the stories of the mother and why there is this emphasis on the natural.
The story has been in an uproar. It's been in a ballet.
It's been a children's sort of thing. There is a novel written on it by Hilda Vaughn.
And this is one of the posters which again goes back to this notion of antiquity, a notion which it is it is largely constructed, it has to be said.
So an interesting place, a place which is sort of up and running as a going concern will undoubtedly be up and running once Kofod stops again.
The lectures will start again. People will come back. And indeed, the site sort of says, yes, finally, we are about to open and I hope it stays open.
But one which kind of draws on romanticism as well as history.
The second site I want to look at is nontax in Stratton, Florida.
And particularly that UNTAET US cut. I've done a lot of collecting here over a number of years and only recently the
Capan 90 US has been given to the National Library where it is now on display.
It starts off in just after the Reformation, when the startling family bought the site of the state of Florida Abbey and built a house.
They are house which is still there. Enough like him, enough. Flug became a farm house.
Originally, it was a house that the family lived in when the family married the Powles.
They moved to the much posher mansion of ninety US, which I think is the next one.
There it is. That's what they moved to. And this is Manocha blog about what happened.
Menar Flag, the building that was there, built largely out of stone from the abbey at some point in the 19th century,
a maser bowl, a broken me ysabel was found and brought back to the house.
And is this May a bowl which has become known as the coupon run to us from which people would drink,
particularly favoured by women who had had children and were suffering some kind of postpartum fever?
People would drink from this and it was a curative cup and it stayed there.
There are records of it, of coming of things coming back and marking cured.
And it's it's there at the beginning of the 20th century.
Mrs. Margaret Powell linked it to the Holy Grail.
She was very interested in this kind of of spirituality.
There are lots of Holy Grail candidates at the beginning of the 19th century, and this was her particular one for the first part of the 20th century.
It remained very local. You would have stories in newspapers, mostly by people who visited during the summer and were not Welsh.
They were visitors to Aberystwyth. The people I've spoken to, many of them, are very affectionate towards this subject.
Very, very few of the locals think it's the grail. They all know perfectly well that it is associated with this house.
But there is a sense that there is a kind of unity here which encompass the the old estates of Truscott go get and out pretty well.
Cover Cardigan. Sure. And modern and some come on that show as well.
And it's a very affectionately nostalgic view, but it's also a very ironic view.
Very aware that these Gendry folk were very improvident with money, didn't necessarily run the estates particularly well.
And from the point of view of the kind of Yeoman Greven and city dwellers, nice to think about, but also nice to have passed.
Now, the reason I stress this is because in the second half of the 20th century or the later 20th century,
the Holy Grail aspect of this object becomes very, very popular and it's largely due to the Internet.
And there is when you get people sort of linking it to the Templars and various various things and in the 21st century now.
Let me move on slightly. There is a reinterpretation of the whole of the strata Florida area.
You see, if I have a picture which which helps. I will come back to that.
That's the strata of strata Florida runes interpreting it as a sec grid landscape.
Now, this, too, has gone into a because of Kofod. But there's a sense that somehow strata Florida can be linked to all of the monuments in the area.
All of the monuments that profess to. Hutton was talking about all of the early monuments.
And in many ways it kind of pivots not so much here on the Grail as on this structure, which is a stone line structure in the middle of the room.
And the question really is here, is this an ancient druid?
Well, or is it part of a drainage system brought in by the Cistercians to make this area more
suitable for farming and sheep farming and the things that the state Cistercians did well.
And, of course, depending on which side of this this question is not really an argument you fall depends really on whether
you see strata Florida as a more sacred area or simply as part of a very layered historical area in Wales.
Let me go back for a minute. It's floating strata.
Florida as a tourist site is nothing new. Stephen Williams, who is rightly called the father of Cistercian archaeology in Wales,
also owned shares in the Manchester and Millford Railway Company, and he organised tours of the area.
CSU station, which is now obsolete, was re named of Florida.
People came and this is one of the advertising things and it's absolutely wonderful.
It comes from the collection of the special collections in Cardiff and it starts off.
And how can one resist something that begins? Much trem and stuff.
And talks about a journey to Straten, Florida.
Although the cup was not called the Grail at the time, it was seen as a relic.
And there are all these wonderful sort of rather wild and sort of speculative stories about why the monks
bought this cup and how they encouraged people and how the surrounding roads led to strata flourish.
I mean, it really, really is a very exciting story. It's highly speculative one.
And a speculation has continued, I think, very much into this notion of turning in an Antaeus cup into the Grail.
It's an interesting belief structure, but one has to sort of say that it is made of which our own it is the shape of the Mesa Bowl.
And no matter how coy one can be about not wanting to test it,
because pilgrims have eaten it and all sorts of things, it really, really does not qualify well as a possible grail.
But, of course, that doesn't stop the stories. This is the bowl in which it was capped by the last of the Powells.
They were actually Powells, but they inherited nontax and left it.
And it was this family of the last of this family who gave it to the National Library.
Nontax is now a posh country hotel.
And this is the memorial in the garden, which, as you can see, references Glastonbury, that St. Michael's at Glastonbury.
So one has this wonderful story, a tourist exploitation of which goes back to the 19th century beliefs,
various beliefs of which also go back to the 19th century. And it provides two things.
One, a network for the people who live in and around Cardigan Sheremet at the Aberystwyth area.
And as I say, I've had no problem with getting people to talk to me.
In fact, I can remember walking up to the librarian sort of people sort of stopping me and say, I understand you're talking about the 90s cup.
My grandmother went to visit it. I saw it as a school job. It's a very popular local object, but as a heritage object,
it's being put on a much broader international plane and a much broader universal plane, the notion of somehow more sacred rather than the local.
The last one I would like to look at is Frangos Lake.
Also a associated with a lake legend with a fairy legend.
This one going back to the 12th century. This one appears in Walter Map and it talks about a girl coming out of the lake.
She marries a mortal's. He goes back into the lake, takes everyone with her except one of her children.
Now, the interesting thing here is in the middle of languorous lake is a prenup,
an artificial island, which we know were still in operation until the 10th century.
So not only do we have folk narratives about this and in Waltin that we have not only the Lake Legends story,
we have a notion of other folklore associated with and from other sources like the Welsh genealogy.
We can get even more information. The site is also associated with the thank you, the monster, the lake monster,
the Welsh Lake Monster associated with another local area in another lake in which there's
a sort of underwater channel map tells us there's there's a beautiful land underneath.
So we have an awful lot of folklore, very little of which is actually referenced at the language site as it is now.
There are excavations, recent excavations, which produced a great deal of information about the Kanuk.
That's what it might have looked like, the material that was found.
And it's quite fabulous material about fabrics, all sorts of things that you don't normally found.
Find is housed in the Brecon Museum. But there's no real attempt to link the narrative with what is there.
There is a small heritage centre. Now, I'm hoping this is going to be a watch this space, basically, because there's such potential here.
The folklore is so much more grounded.
So Morritz authentically grounded than the folklore of an on tales and Mervi, which is essentially 19th and 20th century folklore.
The material here is much more extensive and much older and equally exciting.
So looking at these three heritage sites, the way they use the narratives, the way they construct and reconstruct the narratives,
I think I oughta mention at this point that I'm not suggesting that any of these narrative strains are right or wrong.
Folklore is very dynamic.
And while it is quite useful to be able to recognise the history and the archaeology separate from the narratives that are being told.
It's equally important, and I would like to end on this note to remember that the narratives are powerful.
They draw people in. They give them a better sense of the site.
They provide the local community with a network to relate to, continue to relate to one another, to its past and to its future.
And they provide visitors with a window, sometimes a romantic window, but certainly a very interesting window into into Welsh culture.
So that concludes my survey into mysterious Wales.