Tir – The history of Carwyn Graves's Welsh landscape

Last week the shortlist was announced for 2025 in Wales Book of the Year.

In the coming weeks we will check the books on the shortlist, starting with Tir: The history of Carwyn Graves's Welsh landscape.

The girls from Gospirit

This absorbent and constantly illuminated book is about many things, as his author claims: it is about agriculture and preservation, literature and ecology, nature and culture.

It also confirms Graves' committed diligence as a researcher and a curiosity that is used for the presentation of a sustainable future for the Welsh landscape.

It also speaks for its ability to explain complex things with clarity, similar to cutting a path through the blackberry without damaging the Briar patch.

In it he is supported by the many experts he meets while crossing the country and increasing, from shepherds to weavers, from vegetable to committed restorers from hayeisen.

In doing so, he presents “the human and natural ecology of Wales … his sayings, his myths, his references and resonances … look through the eye of a farmer and a forager – and not just through the lens of ecology.”

The whale he sees is now one of the most committed countries of the world in which the degree of destruction and loss is not always clear, since the basic syndrome has shifted, an “condition in which every new generation gives an environment that has deteriorated from the generation before generation and creates expectations for the preservation and relaxation”.

Human landscape

Carwyn Graves examines a landscape that is a cultural creation, a human Landscape in which almost everything is a result of our actions and interactions.

He focuses on eight important features like this Frider And moor. In the latter, it is the landscape component that has gone to the greatest degree in recent centuries and also the least known.

moor The country once covered 40% of the Welsh land mass, which was familiar to travelers in most parts of the country. They were an essential part of the agricultural system and a large habitat for wild animals in the bargain, but now often only in place names.

Released by romantic travelers as a small scenic dramaRhos was overlooked in many other species, not studied in the main level. And yet Graves suggests that these areas could definitely be the lack of a piece of the puzzle if we try to understand what a landscape of the landscape looks like, the wild animals can thrive alongside people with harvesting and animals. '

When compiling the history of the moor Jigsaw piece, Graves, also tells us some of the history of his family.

His grandfather grew in one stain moor On the border of Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire, which led a hard life in poverty and only has the clothing in which he was standing.

Small “War”

Graves also explores some fragile moments in Welsh history when it comes to possession of the moor led not only to local dissatisfaction, but also to a small “war”.

The little English warThe war of the little Englishman revolved around a Lincolnshire -Adligen, Augustus Brackenbury, who acquired a thousand hectares of knitting shire crown land and built a manor house there.

The construction work had hardly begun before someone put the place for a new plan for a wonderful bunch on higher ground.

One night a local man called 1000 men by blewing his horn, and they surrounded the now fortified building and threatened to burn it down, residents and everything.

After Brackenbury fled out of the village, Castell Talwrn was quickly directed to the ground.

When recording the history of the country, the graves attributed us to a time when things were very different. Before the 1282 conquest by the English crown:

The raw material industries underlying by imperialism did not exist; In fact, almost the entire great mega sauna, which has been supported in Wales since the last ice age, has still shared the country with human culture. Wolves, beavers, deer and wild boar were not only present in the landscape, but were strongly in the local mythology next to domesticated animals and plants that are stories about shaping and talking creatures.

Directed forward

But Graves is not a supporter to turn the clock back or try, for example to return the country to the time of the wolves, because he claims that “there is no time within the Welsh landscape history that is a balance that we could return to or even return”.

This is a forward -looking story, an equal representation of how the country was shaped, and in turn supported the people of Wales.

It therefore introduces the possibilities of biochar, a material that mixes from organic substance with a high temperature of burned carbon funding, which can be mixed with slurry in order to create a fertilizer with less drainage risk and more advantages for the soils.

He also tells us about Sida, a multi -year plant that contributes to the potential to make a significant contribution to decarbonization and liability of agriculture in Wales.

It is a freelance book that certainly finds historical evidence in the poetry of Dafydd AP Gwilym or climbing Carn Ingli to research a model for the agricultural resumption of the Welsh context.

Read the country

Graves leads us to orchards and mountains, forests and fields that are always aware of the different ways, how we can read the country and feel its history or stories.

On a farm near Dolgellau, he talks to a farmer about the various walls he can see. He is reminded of the vein of cultural knowledge that runs through the place.

The wall separates it Frider The snow line is often on the mountain. Another, much lower, shares the part Frider From the yard and the infields and “is the line for spring frosts, where cold air descends and then caught in the hollow where the wall runs.”

You can see that this is a book written by an attentive traveler and thoughtful listener.

Carwyn Garves wrote a book that deserves completely to be read and our understanding of the design of Wales, even if it suggests how it suggests opportunities to revive the landscape to ensure that it can shape a home for the people who live there and “an essential part of the living world”.

Tir: The history of the Welsh landscape Carwyn Graves is published by Calon and is available from all good bookstores.

The English -language titles selected for this year's award are:

Poetry Award
Girls etc., Rhian Elizabeth (broken sleeping books)
Small universe, Natalie Ann Holborow (Parthical Books)
Portrait of a young girl falls, Katrina Moinet (Hedgehog Poetry Press)

Fiction Award – supported by the Rhys Davies Trust
Earthly creatures, Stevie Davies (Honno)
Sure, Carys Davies (Granta)
Glashäuser, Francesca Reece (Headline Publishing Group, Tinder Press)

Creative fiction Award sponsors from Hadio
Tir: The history of the Welsh landscape Carwyn Graves (Calon Books)
Nightshade Mother: a degeneration, Gwyneth Lewis (Calon Books)
The spirits of nature: the world we have lost and how to bring them back, Sophie Yeo (Harpernorth)

Children & adolescents award
A story of my strange Chloe Heuch (Firefly Press)
Fallout, Lesley Parr (Bloomsbury)
Why did my brain make me say it ?, Sarah Ziman (Troika)

You can vote for your favorite by clicking here