Wales — Cymru in Welsh — occupies the western peninsula of Great Britain. It is small, mountainous, and holds onto a language and identity that survived a thousand years of pressure to give them up.
The language
Welsh is a Celtic language, older in Britain than English, and it is not a dialect of anything. Around 850,000 people speak it, and it is an official language: road signs are bilingual, the Senedd operates in both, and Welsh-medium education is growing fast.
It very nearly died. The 1847 education report — remembered as the Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, the Treason of the Blue Books — condemned the language as a barrier to progress and morality, and children caught speaking it in school were made to wear the “Welsh Not”, a wooden board passed to the next offender, with the last wearer beaten. The revival since the 1960s is one of the more successful minority-language recoveries anywhere.
The castles
Over 600, more per square mile than anywhere on earth, and the reason is conquest. Edward I built a ring of enormous fortresses — Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech, Beaumaris — after subduing Wales in the 1280s, specifically to make rebellion impossible. Four of them are jointly a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and they are magnificent and slightly uncomfortable to admire.
Coal
The South Wales valleys were among the most intensively mined places in the world, and coal shaped the country’s politics, chapels, choirs and rugby clubs. At its peak the industry employed over 250,000 Welshmen.
The pit closures of the 1980s, and the bitterness of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, left communities without the industry they were built around, and the effects are still visible. The Aberfan disaster of 1966 — when a colliery spoil tip collapsed onto a primary school, killing 116 children and 28 adults — remains the deepest wound in modern Welsh memory.
Landscape
Eryri (Snowdonia) in the north holds the highest peaks in Britain south of Scotland. The Brecon Beacons sit in the middle, and the Pembrokeshire Coast in the south-west is the only coastal national park in Britain, with a 186-mile path along the whole of it. Wales also has more sheep than people, by a factor of roughly three.
Singing and rugby
The two are related. Wales is called the land of song for good reason — the male voice choir tradition grew directly out of chapel and colliery — and the sound of a full Principality Stadium singing Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau or Cwm Rhondda before a rugby international is one of the great experiences in sport.
Rugby union is the closest thing Wales has to a national religion, and a victory over England is worth considerably more than the two points it earns.