Exploring Wales

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Mae'r argraffiad newydd hwn yn cadw nodweddion iaith flodeuog Condry ac yn cynnwys deunydd newydd gan Neville Jones am safleoedd nad oedd modd cyrraedd atynt yn 1970. Y canlyniad yw canllaw i Gymru sy'n deyrnged i arloeswyr cynnar cenhedlaeth Condry ac yn alwad am gymdeithas fwy ecolegol.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

This new edition retains Condry's original superlative prose but adds new material by Neville Jones about sites not accessible in 1970. The result is a guidebook to Wales which is both a tribute to the early pioneers of Condry's generation and also a call for a more ecological society.

Dosbarthu

Byddwn yn dosbarthu eitemau sydd mewn stoc o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith, fel arfer drwy Royal Mail Tracked 48. Ar gyfer archebion o flaen llaw, byddwn yn dosbarthu’r eitem o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith ar ôl ei derbyn gan ein cyflenwr.

Dispatch

In-stock items will be dispatched within 3 business days, usually by Royal Mail Tracked 48. For pre-orders, we’ll dispatch within 3 business days of receiving the item from our supplier.

Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

William Condry was born in Birmingham on St David’s Day 1918. His book 'Wildlife – My Life' noted changes and expressed concerns which have become central to public debate about how we humans have plundered our planet. He was the first Warden when the RSPB's Ynys-hir reserve in the Dyfi Estuary opened in 1970, and lived there for 30 years with his wife Penny, until his death in 1998.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

William Condry (1918-98) was one of Wales’s leading naturalists, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Welsh flora and fauna which was embedded in an understanding of the deeper geological structures that shaped the landscape. Beyond this, he had an insatiable curiosity about our human past and the wealth of its relics strewn across the land, from Neolithic settlements to Norman castles, and beyond. This knowledge was put to good use in Exploring Wales , a traveller’s guide first published by Faber & Faber in 1970, and now reissued by Y Lolfa with a brief introduction by Neville Jones. The book is organised county by county, as these were in 1970 before local government reorganisation in 1974. It is, you might say, a three-dimensional guide to Wales through vast layers of geological time. ‘What sort of county is this Monmouthshire,’ he asks, ‘which begins at Chepstow in a ravine cut in Carboniferous Limestone and ends in the north-west in a massif of gritstone uplands?’ — and then proceeds to tell us. In this way, the history and natural history of Monmouthshire are interpreted and exposed for the reader in all their layered complexity. So in Ceredigion/Cardiganshire, William Condry ranges from Bronze and Iron Age burial sites and hill forts, and Roman incursions into the area, to Cors Fochno with its rich variety of aquatic plants and its range of wetland birds and insects. But here, too, there is an historical dimension: pollen, preserved in the peat, he tells us, has enabled scientists to reveal the ways in which the area has evolved over several thousand years. The guide is full of surprises. The chapter on Glamorgan (written of course when the Valleys were still being mined intensively for coal) is one of them. ‘The word has got round,’ he writes, ‘that Glamorgan is nothing but vast coal mines, steelworks and docks.’ Despite this, he argues, ‘there probably remains in Glamorgan a greater variety, though not a greater area, of unspoilt country than in any other.’ More surprising still, ‘there are more species of wild plants in Glamorgan than elsewhere in Wales.’ Inevitably, much has changed in the half century since Exploring Wales was first published. Aberystwyth, we are told, has no museum, but two years after the book’s appearance, the excellent Ceredigion Museum was established in the town. If you ‘stand in the heather on the lark-loud moor’ on top of the Blorenge in Monmouthshire, we are informed, ‘there not half a mile away is the blank, rain-grooved flank of a massive coal tip.’ Not any more, of course. Moreover, the skylark population of Wales has fallen catastrophically since the mid-1970s. Are there any at all now, I wonder, on the Blorenge? It would have been helpful if this edition had been updated, perhaps by a series of footnotes. Exploring Wales is not a book to read from cover to cover. Rather it is one to read prior to a visit to one of the counties, or to take in the car (if you have one) as an indispensable guide en route. It is to be enjoyed, too, for the warmth and elegance of Williams Condry’s prose style.