Ed. note: This excerpt is taken from the Introduction to Tir The Story of the Welsh Landscape, by Carwyn Graves and published by Calon Press. You can find out more about the book here.
Brodorol
So what is this Welsh cultural attitude and why does it matter so much in a book about the history of the landscape? In summary, it is the deeply held conviction that the land and its people are inextricably intertwined. In Welsh, the term brodorol (the dictionary equivalent of ‘indigenous’, but which carries its own connotations in Welsh) is almost universally used for describing our own culture’s status on its own territory – o Fôn i Fynwy (‘from Anglesey to Monmouth’, as the common saying goes). Within the Welsh-speaking world, the idea that the Welsh are the native inhabitants of this land has in fact been the cornerstone on which much of the rest of the culture and its self-understanding have been built. This is not an understanding that seeks to exclude others: as has been extensively demonstrated, the primary barriers of inclusion and exclusion within this culture lie with language (rather than, for instance, race or ethnicity), a feature that anyone can learn and therefore be included. And this sense of nativeness manifests itself in a tendency to tie almost all parts of culture to place.
People are traditionally – and still today – known by the name of their house, village or farm (Bob Tynddol – ‘Bob of Meadow House’ or Olwen Maesberllan – Olwen of Orchard Field), to the point where surnames may not be known or remembered in conversation. Poets, preachers and popstars are known as sons or daughters of their valley or village, even when they have spent most of their lives elsewhere. And more importantly, this identification with place extends to the natural features of that locality even when this often amounts to no more than a grand poetic fallacy. My grandfather, to pick but one example close to home, spent his childhood and teenage years on a self-sufficient smallholding in the hills of north Pembrokeshire, but spent almost all the rest of his long life in urban south Wales. Nevertheless, in his funeral he was eulogised as being ‘one of the independent-minded people of that stretch of moorland hilltop stretching from Blaenwaun to Tegryn, where the eye sees for miles’.
We can get further under the skin of this attitude and its relevance to nature (and rewilding) by considering two more key words in Welsh. These are cynefin (habitat) and diwylliant (culture). Cynefin is the normal Welsh word for habitat, used of animals and insects as the word habitat is used in English. But it has a wider semantic range and much greater resonance than the English word. Part of the word’s meaning is the stretch of mountain or hillside on which a flock of sheep is settled or to which it is ‘hefted’ (to use a good English word with similar resonance). It is also commonly used in everyday speech to refer to a person’s own native area, where it holds the sense of home town or stomping ground. In other words, the language itself naturally associates wild species’ relationship to their ecological niche with domesticated animals’ home range and people’s own deeply rooted sense of home. And this is no new phenomenon: the fifteenth-century poet Guto’r Glyn talks of ‘fy nghartref, fy nghynefin’ – ‘my home and my habitat/stomping ground/native area/happy place [perhaps]’.
Diwylliant, the Welsh term normally translated as ‘culture’, derives from a common verb, ‘diwyllio’ – which could be translated as ‘to cultivate’, ‘improve’, ‘farm’ or ‘plough’, and is used both to refer to human culture and to agricultural practice. In this, it is not dissimilar to the etymology of the English terms (which derive from the Latin), but in Welsh the word quite transparently is formed of ‘di’ + ‘wyllt’ + ‘io’, with the middle element ‘wyllt’ meaning ‘wild’, and the ‘di-’ more or less equivalent to English ‘un-’.
Welsh culture is also defined within the language as encompassing all the works of human hands, not merely ‘popular’ or ‘high’ culture. The writer, Margaret Davies, in her foreword to a volume of poems by the farmer-poet Isfoel in 1965, offered this inclusive definition:
an artist is someone who makes things, whether he fashions a blade for a scythe, carves a wooden spoon, turns a pair of horseshoes, works wood to make a beautiful cupboard or dresser, or indeed composes verse – englyn and cywydd– or song. Significantly, we speak of ‘carving’ verse. Culture is considered as a collective endeavour to which everyone contributes – whether farrier, carpenter, poet, shepherd or farmer.
So, the collective work of culture, in Welsh, is ‘un-wilding’ and to till land is to ‘unwild’ it. By this measure, the idea of turning over vast tracts of hill country to nature by removing farming and farmers from the picture, as rewilding has often been presented by the media, is the very antithesis of all that rural Welsh culture has stood for. For speakers of a language where the talk is always of defending and upholding a threatened culture, to talk of ‘rewilding’ sounds very much like ‘killing [a] culture’. Little wonder then that projects set upon buying land with the stated aim ‘of restoring land to a wilder state to create a functioning ecosystem where natural processes dominate by carrying out habitat restoration, removing domestic livestock, and introducing missing native species as far as feasible’ have been viewed with little but antipathy in rural Welsh-speaking Wales.
