Castell Aberteifi / Carnifal of Carnivals
In March 2013 on the evening of passing the viva for my PhD (subject to minor corrections) I drove from Aberystwyth to Ferwig to give a short presentation to a local history society. I was hoping to generate interest in a digital project I was involved with at the time which centred around the idea of creating an augmented reality storytelling app for use on the Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire Coast paths. At the start of the meeting I chose to introduce myself in Welsh - I was immediately heckled from the audience by one of my late Grandmother’s closest friends, ‘are you going to speak English?’ she complained. In his autobiography, Mab Y Pregethwr, Cynog Dafis recounts a similar incident during his election campaign of 1992 when he stood on a joint ticket for Plaid Cymru and the Green Party. At a meeting at the Guild Hall in Cardigan someone shouted from the back of the room, ‘Siaradwch Saesneg!’ to which he responded, “Gwnaf debyg iawn, ond mi siaradaf i yn Gymraeg gyntaf”. [1]
In March 2016 I returned to the same group to give a fuller presentation about my work on the coast path and how it related to my research on the Cliff McLucas archive and the practice of deep mapping. During the presentation I referenced another kind of map and another kind of book, an atlas published in 1955 presenting the history and geography of Ceredigion to the county’s school pupils in a series of maps and articles. I referred in particular to the last page of the atlas which offered a discussion of the contemporary prospects for the county with concern for a falling population remedied by the call for promoting industry in the area and in particular tourism. The final paragraph of the atlas relates to the state of theWelsh language in the county:
“Yn olaf, ond yn bennaf, yr iaith Gymraeg. Yr ardaloedd gwledig ydw ei hamddiffynfa hi, ac am hynny ni all symudiad y boblogaeth ohonynt i’r trefi ac i’r ardaloedd gweithfaol ond ei niweidio. Bydd popeth sydd a’i duedd o blaid y bywyd gwledig, yng Ngheredigion ac yng Nghymru yn gyffredinol, yn gymorth hefyd i gadw’r iaith.” [2]
I concluded my talk with the following quote from a different path walker:
“A feature of the Path is its onwardness. Unlike the criss-crossing walks through which one might come to know a given region, and view the same scenes from a variety of perspectives, the Coast Path is a continual passing-through. Between an unknown country ahead and an already-forgotten country behind, the walk moves at best within provisional parcels of space…passing-through is at once both passing-into and emerging-from.” [3]
Having walked the Ceredigion coastal path south to north and north to south during the time of my PhD study I had arrived back on the quayside in Cardigan in 2013 emerging into the town of my birth armed with the new found knowledge of my recent studies. At this time Cardigan was facing its latest invasion as an army of yellow vested Scotts workers laid siege to the castle ruins, now a building site. The Cadwgan Building Preservation Trust had secured both European and Lottery funding to restore a minor Georgian house and gardens to a major heritage and tourist attraction. The ostensible justification for this transformation was the cultural capital accorded to the site by its association with the first recorded Eisteddfod in 1176 as the project banners proclaimed, ‘Castell Aberteifi - man geni’r Eisteddfod’.
It was during this transition from a community led project to the opening of a commercial enterprise that I become involved in the Cardigan Castle restoration project. This involvement coincided with my working on a piece of writing exploring the cultural significance of the Eisteddfod for a volume of essays inspired by the work of the Welsh cultural historian, Hywel Teifi Edwards. My essay was inspired by a lecture delivered by Edwards at the Llanelli and District National Eisteddfod in the year 2000 titled, ‘Yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol a Delwedd y Cymry’ ('The National Eisteddfod and the image of the Welsh'). Edwards’ lecture was a powerful statement about the significance of the Eisteddfod to the psyche of Wales at the turn of the millennium and presented a vision for the Eisteddfod as a driving force behind the continuation of national life in modern Wales. [4] My essay considered the significance he placed on the Eisteddfod in the context of his concerns about the status of the Welsh language presenting an argument that the Eisteddfod's continued importance to the development of Welsh national life was that it enabled a visual expression of the Welsh language both nationally and internationally.
Edwards’ lecture was full of hope for the future of the Eisteddfod given the potential of new digital technologies to reach a world wide audience. However in an article written for Barn magazine in the same month Edwards sounds a note of caution with regards to the current state of the language in Llanelli and the surrounding area. The article, ‘Prifwyl Llanelli a’r Gymraeg’ [5] discusses Llanelli’s strategic importance in winning what he terms the battle for the language. He refers to a new development in the area, the Millennium Coastal Park, which represents the hope of revitalizing the area by re-framing the town within the context of the environment and the development of tourism. While Edwards praises the initiative in its attempt to bring a new and appealing character to the town, he also issues a strong warning lest the development be to the detriment of Llanelli’s personality, that is its Welshness. Such a loss would be huge rendering the town a shell of a place or as he describes it, with a switch to English in the article, 'a kind of Welsh place'. [6] To avoid that possibility he calls on the Town Council and the Rural Council to plan for the establishment of a multi-purpose Welsh language centre in the town - a powerhouse for the creation and promotion of projects and activities to enable the revival of the town's Welsh culture and that of the surrounding villages. Moreover such a centre will be of international significance because the battle for the language is a battle that hundreds of languages around the world will soon face. [7]
Edwards’ millennium lecture also throws out a challenge calling for a splendid university project - ' [g]orchwyl ysblennydd’ - which could give Welsh people great insight into the forces that built their identity on the stage of their oldest popular national institution, the Eisteddfod.[8] The university project that Edwards envisages had already in some respects begun with his own study of the Eisteddfods of the 1860s, the decade when the National Eisteddfod as we know it today was launched at Aberdare in 1861. This National Eisteddfod was born out of an age, according to Edwards, when Wales’ leaders cared greatly for their image in the eyes of England' [9] In such circumstances the Eisteddfod became a test of their willingness to comply - the most prominent aspect of that compliance being a sense of ambivalence if not shame towards the Welsh language. As Edwards wrote in Planet magazine, “Driven by utilitarianism, coated in hwyl it clattered towards its place in the imperial sun sounding aloud its belief in the redemptive power of English, its incomparable loyalty to the Crown, genius for choral singing (strictly oratorio), and its innocent love of home.” [10]
In 1976, the Eisteddfod celebrated its eight hundredth anniversary and the festival itself came home to Aberteifi / Cardigan. Hywel Teifi Edwards wrote a volume celebrating the anniversary, his first full volume about the Eisteddfod in fact, a history that galloped through the centuries from Lord Rhys’ original poetry and music competition held at his ‘court in splendour’ in 1176 through Iolo Morgannwg’s creation of the Gorsedd of the Ancient Bards of Britain to the National Eisteddfod as we understand it today. Reviewing the eight hundredth anniversary edition, Gŵyl y Dathlu in the September 1976 edition of Barn, Edwards asked, ‘I wonder if we did justice to the old festival in Cardigan - in demonstrating the uniqueness of its history to its contemporary admirers? It is a shame that an exhibition was not arranged in a fitting building, with all the materials now available. . . a good sum should have been spent to ensure that the visual impact of this year's Festival would be worthy of its distinctive contribution to the life of the nation. [11]
When I think of the exhibition that resulted from my engagement with the Cardigan Castle restoration project I can’t help but ask the same question. Did we really do the Eisteddfod justice? At the point I joined the project a digitally driven audio visual extravaganza exploring the roots and context of Lord Rhys’ medieval feast had already been relegated to a panel based exhibition in the dining room of the restored Georgian house. Within these constraints whilst a story about the Eisteddfod was told did we have hold of the wrong thread? Simon Brooks asserts that Edwards focuses on the Eisteddfod as a field of struggle 'where different ideas about Welsh identity and British identity; literature, politics and language contend with each other '[12]. In his lecture in Llanelli in 2000 Edwards described the National Eisteddfod as an annual focus for the 'turbulence' of Wales [13]. The restoration and opening of Cardigan Castle reflected a similar period of turbulence as competing narratives as to the site’s importance and function fought for primacy.
After many years of community voluntary activity the Castle finally opened its gates as heritage tourist attraction, leisure and wedding venue and accommodation to a paying public in April 2015. Civic efforts in Cardigan over the previous fifteen years had centered almost exclusively on this drive to take ownership of and restore the Castle site. A pragmatic impulse lay at the root of the project; the seeking of a means by which a substantial area, an unattractive black hole lying fallow at the heart of the town, economically and socially unproductive could be re-vitalised with the promise of bringing future prosperity to a rural economy in decline. In the light of Edwards’ call for a splendid university based Eisteddfod research project it is interesting to note recent findings by Elan Haf In this context who has uncovered a tendency within the history of the Eisteddfod in Cardigan dating back to the Victorian era for iterations of the festival to be used as a means of collecting money for the upkeep and maintenance of the town’s buildings an apparently unusual focus in comparison to her related studies of the Eisteddfods of Anglesey and Aberdare.[14]
In 2017 Cardigan hosted a carnival for the first time in almost two decades. The demise of the carnival in Cardigan had loosely coincided with the demise of manufacturing in the town a small rural town whose main economic interests are currently most aligned with agriculture and tourism. The carnival tradition in Cardigan though a civic affair cannot claim such an ancient lineage as the Eisteddfod. It seems that the first carnival to take place in Cardigan in a guise we would recognize today was 1935. Writing contemporaneously Anglo Welsh writer Caradoc Evans described the Eisteddod as, “a meaningless and purposeless show. A spectacular pageant that may gratify the desires of the curious, whose minds are unable to read into it any meaning above the plane of a carnival parade’. [15] Anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey offers another way of thinking about a carnival, or, given Cardoc Evans’ association, an eisteddfod, giving it an art-political context. In 1991 Bey published an essay introducing the concept of the temporary autonomous zone. The concept describes a socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that by-pass formal structures of control. The temporary autonomous zone is designated as a type of festival, or rebellion, an event that cannot happen every day unless they become commonplace, 'Like festivals, uprisings cannot happen every day – otherwise they would not be “nonordinary”. Carnival is traditionally seen as an event where the norms and hierarchies of daily life are turned on their heads. [16] When a facebook post declared the intention of reviving the carnival in Cardigan I rallied to the call. In the words of Bhaktin, “This carnival spirit offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world.” [17]
I wondered what the meaning of a carnival parade might be for a bilingual community in a small rural town whose cultural identity had seemed to be been defined in recent years by association with a medieval Welsh tradition. I hosted a small exhibition on the carnival field that showcased found images of Cardigan carnivals of the past, including those belonging to my own family, alongside images and footage of carnivals in Sardinia where carnival is an ancient tradition stretching back over 2000 years. Through this collaboration and exchange I hoped to address questions of cultural preservation and community revival whilst seeking to contextualise Cardigan as a rural town in Europe.
In 2019 the pomp and ceremony of the National Eisteddfod returned to Cardigan once more as the School playing fields played host to the proclamation ceremony for the 2020 (postponed) Ceredigion Eisteddfod including Gorsedd and fibreglass stones and local music legends Ail Symudiad the first rock and roll band to play as part of the ceremony. In August that year the Gorsedd was renamed to Gorsedd y Cymry dropping any reference to ynys Prydain. Some were critical of this change, "You cannot erase a concept that has sustained the Welsh nation over millennia and more, that they are the natives of the British Isles, and all the radicalism that emanates from this without discussion. It is the Gorsedd of the British Isles of the Welsh”. [18] That September carnival day came to a close in Cardigan on the King George V playing fields when local Elvis impersonator Elvis Desley performed a barn storming medley from Hound-dog to American Trilogy.
In making a presentation as part of the interview process with Addo in order to gain a place on their mentoring scheme I spoke of the oscillation that this period of work had encompassed for me, a practice that is, “…a continuing search for some social positioning that avoids a cruel homogenisation, on the one hand, and an ethnocentric self-immurement, on the other.” [19]. Is there another way? Can two become one?
To read my essay Yr Eisteddfod yng ngweithiau Hywel Teifi Edwards: parth ymreolaethol dros dro? please see: https://www.uwp.co.uk/book/perfformior-genedl/
Footnotes
[1] Cynog Dafis, Mab y Pregethwr: Hunangofiant Cynog Dafis (Talybont: Lolfa, 2005) tr. I surely will, but I will speak in Welsh first.
[2] W. J. Lewis, Ceredigon: Atlas hanesyddol (Aberystwyth, 1955), p. 81
[3] John Wylie, A Single day’s walking: narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path
[4] Hywel Teifi Edwards, ‘Yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol a Delwedd y Cymry’, Darlith Eisteddfodol Prifysgol Cymru, Eisteddfod Gened- laethol Llanelli a’r Cylch, (Caerdydd: Prifysgol Cymru, 2000)
[5] Hywel Teifi Edwards, ‘Prifwyl Llanelli a’r Gymraeg’, Barn 450/51 (2000), 36–9.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid. ‘Fe fyddai creu canolfan o’r fath yn brosiect diwylliannol o arwyddocâd cyffredinol, oherwydd y mae brwydr y Gymraeg yn frwydr y bydd cannoedd o ieithoedd ledled y byd yn ei hwynebu’n fuan’ (p.39)
[8] Hywel Teifi Edwards, Yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol a Delwedd y Cymry, p. 1.
[9] Hywel Teifi Edwards, ‘Gŵyl Gwalia’: Yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Yn Oes Aur Victoria, p. 380.
[10] Hywel Teifi Edwards, ‘Victorian Wales Seeks Reinstatement’, Planet 52 (Awst/Medi 1985), 13.
[11] Hywel Teifi Edwards, ‘Y Dathlu Mawr’, Barn, 164 (1976), 285.
[12] Simon Brooks, O Dan Lygaid y Gestapo (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 2006), p. 116.
[13] Hywel Teifi Edwards, Yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol a Delwedd y Cymry, p. 1.
[14] Elen Haf speaking on Rhaglen Dei Tomos 21 February 2021 https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000sgqp
[15] Caradoc Evans quoted by Hywel Teifi Edwards in, ‘Yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol a Delwedd y Cymry’, Darlith Eisteddfodol Prifysgol Cymru, Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Llanelli a’r Cylch, (Caerdydd: Prifysgol Cymru, 2000) (p. 14).
[16] Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone <www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html>
[17] Michael Bakhtin, Rabelais and his world (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p.
[18] Simon Brooks quoted on the BBC Cymru Fyw website https://www.bbc.co.uk/cymrufyw/49335652
[19] Charles Taylor quoted in John Edwards, Language and Identity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 197