The Edge of Cymru

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The Flow is a work of contemplative beauty. But it is also a call to action. Even as I write this review my news feed is telling me that UK water companies released untreated sewage, tens of thousands of litres of human waste, into our rivers 825 times a day last year. She tries to converse in Cymraeg with some of the people she meets. Discouragingly, many respond in English. Others though are patient and courteous, seemingly pleased at her efforts to learn their native tongue. One of the most striking things about the book results from the author’s decision to do away with English place-names altogether when it comes to describing settlements and topographical features currently in Cymru.

The Edge of Cymru is an absorbingly interesting hybrid, a cross between the conventional travelogue, eco-concern and Welsh history textbook, all made eminently readable by the jauntiness and clarity of the prose and the honesty of the book’s author as she walks the land’s edge. The Edge of Cymruis an absorbingly interesting hybrid, a cross between the conventional travelogue, eco-concern and Welsh history textbook, all made eminently readable by the jauntiness and clarity of the prose and the honesty of the book’s author as she walks the land’s edge.” Jon Gower, Nation Cymru Most especially she explores and ponders the environment, beset as it is by all the challenges of living in the Anthropocene, the only geological era to be named after humanity. From Unofficial Britain: Journeys Through Unexpected Places by Gareth E. Rees (Elliott & Thompson, 2020): Kate’s death was a shattering blow to Beer and caused her to fall out of love with rivers and paddling. Several years later, while visiting the scene of her friend’s death, Beer has a sense of Kate’s presence, but not the catharsis she had hoped for. She was inspired, however, to embark on the travels and research that led to this book.The Edge of Cymru is the result of that lengthy walk, and a fantastic travelogue it is too. Funny, moving, idiosyncratic and occasionally dark, it’s a wonderful portrait of contemporary Wales and for those reasons alone it makes for a pleasurable and insightful read. Lionel Thomas Caswall Rolt was born in Chester in 1910. A prolific writer, he specialised in biographies of some of the major figures in British civil engineering, most notably Brunel and Telford. He is also regarded as one of the pioneers of the leisure cruising industry on Britain’s inland waterways, and was an enthusiast for vintage cars and heritage railways. He played a pioneering role in both the canal and railway preservation movements. Rolt died in Gloucestershire in 1974. You thus get a sense of how different things used to be. A picture of the variety of biodiversity here around 6000 BC shows the land to be teeming with life, with ‘mountain hare, brown bear, wolf, beaver, pine marten, red squirrel, corncrake, golden oriole, hazel hen, osprey, white-tailed eagle, eagle owl, grey partridge and crested lark’ all to be found in its woodlands, grasslands, moorland, fens and mountains.

The most extensive industrial intervention on the Alun is the Victorian-era Milwr Tunnel. This runs some 10 miles from the upper Alun at Cadole to join the Dee estuary at Bagillt. It was built to help drain Flintshire’s lead and zinc mines and still discharges an average 23 million gallons of water a day.In 1894, the British Medical Journal set up a commission to investigate conditions in provincial workhouses and their infirmaries. Following a visit to Wrexham, the commission’s report revealed that ‘the tone and management of this house impressed us very favourably; the officers seemed to regard their charges as human beings to be cared and planned for.’ Nevertheless, some improvements were recommended. I’ve really got to blame Thatcher for all of this, because how did a town like Maerdy, a hard-working heavy industry place, turn into a hard drugs kind of community almost overnight? ( Dewi ‘Mav’ Bowen) Her journeys take her to Dartmoor, Wales, Scottish salmon rivers, the Fens, the chalk streams of southern England and rivers closer to her home in Yorkshire. Beer writes in a style that is discursive, but which is at the same time engaging and easy to follow. Join Julie for an evening of journeying with particular relevance to Y Gelli – Hay, and its place on the edge of Cymru. Socially engaged, ecologically informed and politically aware, this is an invaluable guide to understanding Wales past, present and future and you can only hope that this is not the last we’ll be hearing from her.” Steven Andrew, Morning Star

The Alun is a river of tranquillity, of droughts, floods and trade; fortunes made and lost. At times it doesn’t exist at all and yet at the same time it is two rivers!

Nobody else writes this beautifully in quite this way…” Steven Lovatt (Birdsong in a Time of Silence) Caught by the River The result is a fascinating alternative travelogue, which merges topography, history, environmentalism and observation of nature, to produce the 'long view' of Wales, discovering the roots of the present in the past, sometimes the distant past.