Cofiwch Dryweryn

It’s 60 years today (21/10/65) since the village of Capel Celyn was flooded, forcibly displacing one of the few surviving Welsh-speaking communities at the time, for the purposes of supplying Liverpool and the Wirral (England) with water.

I stopped off at the Cofiwch Dryweryn mural outside Llanrhystud in Ceredigion on a trip to Lampeter a few weeks back, conscious this anniversary was approaching.

Cofiwch Dryweryn means ‘Remember Tryweryn’. The lost village of Capel Celyn was in the Tryweryn Valley.

I have lived more than two thirds of my life in Wales. There’s a generous definition of Welshness that includes me, and I embrace that with gratitude.

That said, I also feel the challenge laid down by the Cofiwch Dryweryn mural (and all its offspring). It’s not comfortable. But it’s only asking that I remember. So I remember that I come from somewhere with a history of exploitation, here and elsewhere in the world. That I extract something. That I submerge something.

I’ve been on an international committee for the last few years in which the North American and Canadian participants state the names of the indigenous communities whose land they’re on before they start to speak. In my first meeting, the chair invited me to speak and said, “Feel free to give your land acknowledgements first. Oh, sorry, do you actually do that in England?” “Errr, well,” I said, “Funny you should say that, but I’m not in England, I’m in Wales. Therein lies an irony. And, no, we don’t have that practice. Maybe we should.”

Cofiwch Dryweryn.

Cofiwch Aberfan hefyd. Today is also the anniversary of the collapse of a coal tip in Aberfan, that killed 144 people, mostly children.