This is the last commissioned piece I wrote for a national newspaper. I completed it before breakfast on March 24th, 2020, the day the first lockdown started. It was never used. Wales has more castles per square mile than anywhere in the world, still magnificent and solid, from the centre of Cardiff to placid West… Continue reading
Posts by Gareth Huw Davies
Victorian age railway tech a signal success
The clank of the semaphore signal is a rare aural hangover from the Victorian age. Yet it’s still an essential, if anachronistic, part of our mainline railway system, for a few short years or even months longer at least. Express trains from Paddington on the main line between Llanelli and Carmarthen. west of Swansea, are… Continue reading →
Slimming down Wales’s scenic railway survivor
Good things are happening on the railways of Wales. New trains, electrified lines, faster journeys, more late trains, more frequent services, extra seats and the promise of new services, such as a competitor to GWR speeding up trains from West Wales to London.(Due in late 2027.) But it’s not all advance and improvement. We… Continue reading →
Salute the two-sport heroes
21 January 1933, Twickenham. England v Wales. It was one of the outstanding sporting crossover occasions. The Wales rugby XV that day (there were no substitutes in those times), beating England, included no fewer than four current or future Glamorgan cricket players. The man who scored all the points in the famous 7-4 victory, raising… Continue reading →
Parade’s End Country – Ford Maddox Ford’s south coast setting
Coming completely fresh to Parade’s End, in the new BBC adaptation, I found concentrating on the plot and characters challenging enough, without giving any regard to the locations. Quite early on there is a scene outside a grand house in the North where the Benedict Cumberbatch character, Christopher Tietjens, grew up. I discovered later this… Continue reading →
How Dylan found poetic inspiration above a Camarthenshire estuary
“Jack Kerouac, all the beat poets, were obsessed by him. When he spoke at 92NY, he was about to finish without reciting a poem of his called Fern Hill, and the audience started to chant ‘Fern Hill! Fern Hill!’ It’s kind of staggering to think that a poet of his time would sell out this enormous… Continue reading →