Shaping tommows landscape: Landscape, identifies, and the Welsh past

Shaping Tomorrow’s Landscape: Landscape, identities and the Welsh past

This chapter will consider the role of landscape in shaping identities in Wales, spanning from prehistory to the present. Landscapes are never inert: people engage with them, re-work them, appropriate and contest them. They are part of the way in which identities are created and disputed.

Criss-crossing between history and politics, social relations and cultural perceptions, this chapter will demonstrate how landscape is ‘a concept of high tension’ and an area of study that blows apart the conventional boundaries between disciplines. The aim of the chapter is therefore to try and understand, and analyse, some of the ways in which people experience and engage with their material world in different times, different places and different contexts.

Although place and spatiality often crop-up in historical writing about Wales, this is frequently done in a symbolic manner, one that is detached from a consideration of the topography and setting. For example, the placename ‘Tryweryn’ habitually (and understandably) appears in both academic and popular narratives of 20th-century Welsh nationalism, conveying the national cultural outrage of a small rural Welsh-speaking village being submerged by a reservoir. However, studies examining the actual site’s locale and role in the fashioning of memory are rarer. Additionally, whilst certain elements of the landscape have become rather stereotypical, if occasionally contested, symbols of Wales -such as the castles of Edward I, the mountains of ‘Wild Wales’ or the coal-mining valleys - others have been neglected, and not seen as so ‘Welsh’, such as the nuclear landscape of north Wales. Along with an overview of landscape history and the Welsh past, this chapter will explore key themes through a series of case studies including Ynys Môn and the construction of a mythical druidic past; the cairn at the summit of Snowdon, tourism and the perception of wilderness; and, finally, the landscape setting design of Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power station.

These examples demonstrate the changing perception and functions of landscape, and where ‘natural’ topography has been fused with more constructed elements. This highlights the blurriness between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ notions of landscape, and has the potential to transform and expand notions of Welsh identity and the Welsh past.