In 2009, I made my third trip to Wales.
After taking a Welsh language course in Llanbedr (Lampeter), I made my way to Aberystwyth for several days as the guest of Stuart and Prudence Bell at St. Michael's Church's Rectory.
In the course of my stay I had several conversations with Lyn Dafis about Cymru (Wales) and the Welsh language (Cymraeg). Lyn is a Cymro Cymraeg (Welsh-speaking Welshman).
(If you wish, you may read about those conversations here and here and here and here.)
The other day I discovered several postings from Lyn, marking the 50th anniversary of a terrible injustice: the flooding of a valley with a small Welsh community to provide water for a city in England.
The story begins in 1956, when the Liverpool City Council sponsored a private bill to create a reservoir in the Tryweryn Valley.
According to www.parliament.uk: "Private Bills are usually promoted by . . . local authorities or private companies, to give themselves powers beyond, or in conflict with, the general law."
As a private bill, the English city of Liverpool could destroy the Welsh village of Capel Celyn (Holly Chapel) without the consent of its people— who waged an eight-year battle against it— and in spite of the vastly outnumbered 35 Welsh MPs who voted against the bill (the other Welsh MP abstained).
In 1965, the village and the valley were drowned.
Here's a contemporary account, "Sentence on a Valley":
And in this video, "Trywerin: the Road to Capel Celyn," as he tells the story and tours the area, the narrator reads a number of the names on the displaced gravestones: "Roberts . . . Roberts . . . Roberts . . . Jones . . . Roberts . . . Roberts . . . Roberts.
Here's another telling of the story, "Boddi Cwm Tryweryn/Flooding of the Tryweryn valley," in Welsh and English, accompanied by pictures and Enya's song, Dan y Dŵr: Under the Water.
And here's a haunting video of another submerged community, the "Drowned Village of Llanwddyn under Lake Vyrnwy in Wales," accompanied by Enya's Dan y Dŵr:
And finally, set to Barber's Adagio for Strings, a series of contemporary pictures from "Capel Celyn— the drowning of a village":
One of the flooded farms was Hafod Fadog, mentioned in the “Trywerin: the Road to Capel Celyn” video. A Quaker meetinghouse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some of its members emigrated to Pennsylvania for religious freedom.
Although the protests failed, they energized the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, and the movement for Welsh devolution began.
Comments