Two dragons crawled out of the deep, and one was red as blood. There came a boy along the way, a child with magic powers.Īnd he said: “You’ll build nothing here you can dig away for hours”.īeneath this mountain you will find two dragons sleep at night.ĭig down deep, and let them wake, and let those dragons fight. The castle’s stones have crumbled and lay scattered on the ground. The summit bows with morning, but those walls have tumbled down. Stone by stone, through sweat and toil, the walls they touch the sky. The king Ivorus sought to build this castle upon high. Calan - A Tale of Two Dragons/Chwedly Ddwy Ddraig They'll be wizards of rugby, singers and bardsĪnd they'll speak the language of heaven itself'Īnd there is something of the John Cowper Powys, the English-born but Welsh loving writer and philosopher who moved to Edeyrnion, once part of the Kingdom of Powys in 1934, and who wrote the novels Owen Glendower (1941) and Porius (1951), about Calan’s song a tale of Two Dragons: 'Her people I have blessed with laverbread and cockles To her golden coast with its prosperous farms 'She's the finest, ' said God, 'of all my creationsįrom her alpine peaks and salmon-packed streams Pass the language on and we'll be 'yma o hyd!' Words become our actions, actions then our deeds Our poets and our culture still rise above the flood There's music in our talking, fire in our blood Have you really done enough or are you leaving it to luck? We have not gone gentle in to our iaith's goodnight We'll write it out in Welsh and then translate it in to Saes If they can't hear our voice, we'll just recite it twice It hangs around our necks, the language we are notįrom living as a people in a land that time forgot

A place, nevertheless, where the socio-economic apocalypse of Thatcher’s ‘managed decline’ is still felt in the back to back housing and the unemployment lines.Ī culture that defiantly gives birth to musical talents like Calan, a band offering a fresh brand of high energy folk sets and who were voted the ‘Best Band’ at the inaugural Wales Folk Awards (2019) and ‘Best International Band’ at France’s gigantic Lorient Festival, which is considered by many to be the World Cup of folk music.Ī patriotic song about the future of the Welsh language and culture, with a chorus based on the traditional psalm chanting popular in the west of Wales and samples of the voice of Nigel Jenkins, the poet and the lead singer Angharad’s father, reading an extract of his poem, ‘The Creation.’ A work that appears in Ambush, a collection of his poems published by the Gomer Press (1998). And yet I am eternally grateful to originate from a land made up of deeply carved river valleys, thickly wooded mountains, silver waterfalls and Iron Age hill forts.Ī nation where the scarring left by coal mines, tinplate and gunpowder factories is slowly healing and flowers blossom on the burial mounds of our ancient ancestors. Linguistic experts at the former University of Wales, Lampeter, founded in 1822, likened it to a form of homesickness tinged with grief and sadness over the lost or departed, especially in the context of Wales and Welsh culture.Ī condition, I am glad to say I never consciously suffered from in my various sojourns throughout England, France, Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia and the Middle East. Hiraeth is a Welsh word that has no direct English translation.

Blossoming love fenek