Wales

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Wales, known in its own language as Cymru, sits on the western edge of the island of Great Britain, bounded by the Irish Sea, the Bristol Channel, and the Celtic Sea on three sides, with England as its only land neighbour. Three point two million people live here, in a country of just over 21,000 square kilometres. More than 1,680 miles of coastline wrap around that land, and two-thirds of the population is concentrated in the industrialised south. The highest point, Snowdon, rises to 1,085 metres and gives its name to a national park that contains five peaks above 1,000 metres. This is a country that has been inhabited since the end of the last ice age, that briefly had a king who unified all its territories, that was conquered by England, colonised during the Industrial Revolution, and eventually given its own parliament. But the story of Wales is also about something harder to quantify: the survival of a language spoken by over half a million people, a legal tradition that lasted more than six centuries, and a cultural identity that has persisted through every transformation. How does a small, mountainous country on the edge of a major empire maintain a distinct sense of itself? The answers lie in copper mines and coal seams, in medieval manuscripts and male voice choirs, and in a word, Cymry, that was already in use before the seventh century.

• 2. The Name and Its Origins

  ›

  The English words Wales and Welsh share a single Old English root, Wealh in the singular and Welas in the plural, which itself descended from the Proto-Germanic Walhaz. That term originally referred to the Gauls the Romans knew as the Volcae, and was later applied broadly to inhabitants of the Western Roman Empire. Anglo-Saxon settlers brought it with them to Britain, where they used it to describe the Britons they were pushing westward. The plural form Welas evolved into the name for the territory those Britons came to occupy. The word was not always geographically precise: it was used across Britain for anything associated with Britons, including Cornwall and even places within Anglo-Saxon territory such as Walworth in County Durham and Walton in West Yorkshire. The Welsh name for Wales and for themselves tells a very different story. Cymru and Cymry both descend from the Brythonic word combrogi, meaning "fellow-countrymen". The two words are pronounced identically in Welsh. They were probably in use before the seventh century, and appear in literature spelt as Kymry or Cymry, referring sometimes to the people and sometimes to the homeland. Latinised versions, Cambrian and Cambria, survive in place names like the Cambrian Mountains, and in the Cambrian geological period, the earliest of the Palaeozoic era. The Cambrian takes its name from those mountains because geologists first identified the period's characteristic rock formations there. In the mid-19th century, Roderick Murchison and Adam Sedgwick used their work on Welsh geology to establish foundational principles of stratigraphy and palaeontology; they also named the next two Palaeozoic periods, the Ordovician and the Silurian, after ancient Celtic tribes from the same region.

• 3. Kingdoms, Conquest, and Law

  ›

  The Great Orme in North Wales was, during the Bronze Age, Britain's leading producer of copper, drawing wealth from the ground long before any unified Welsh state existed. By the time the Romans arrived, the island was distinctly Celtic in culture, and it was that Iron Age culture that gave the Britons their collective identity. After the Romans withdrew in 383, the concept of a British people crystallised around Magnus Maximus, proclaimed Roman emperor in Britannia and Gaul, though Wales itself remained divided into competing kingdoms. Viking and Norse settlers left their mark on coastal sites like Swansea, Fishguard and Anglesey. Saxons settled inland. The kingdoms fought each other as much as they fought outsiders. In the tenth century, Hywel ap Cadell, later known as Hywel Dda, gained control of Gwynedd and Powys in 942 after building the kingdom of Deheubarth from earlier inheritances. With most of Wales under one rule, he codified Welsh law, a body of legal custom that emphasised compensation to the victim or the victim's kin rather than punishment by rulers. That code outlasted the fracture of his kingdom. A century later, Gruffydd ap Llywelyn subdued all rivals by 1057, becoming the only ruler ever to unite all of Wales plus parts of the English border. A quoted summary of his reign puts it plainly: "Thus, from about 1057 until his death in 1063, the whole of Wales recognised the kingship of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn. For about seven brief years, Wales was one, under one ruler, a feat with neither precedent nor successor." His death came through a surprise attack by Tostig, brother of King Harold of England. The Normans, who followed Harold's defeat at Hastings in 1066, pushed into Wales and created semi-independent marcher territories. Llywelyn the Great forced all other Welsh princes to submit by 1216, and his grandson Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was recognised as Prince of Wales by Henry III in the Treaty of Montgomery in 1267. Conflict with Henry's successor, Edward I, ended with English victory in 1283 and the Statute of Rhuddlan the following year, which ended Welsh independence and replaced Welsh law for criminal cases. Owain Glyndwr led a Welsh revolt from 1400 to 1415, briefly re-establishing a Welsh state with its own national parliament, but English rule held. Welsh law was finally extinguished for all purposes under the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542, when Henry VIII incorporated Wales fully into the English legal system.

• 4. Industry, Class, and Politics

  ›

  At its production peak in 1913, nearly 233,000 men and women worked in the South Wales coalfield, extracting 56 million tons of coal. Cardiff became the largest coal-exporting port in the world, handling more tonnage than either London or Liverpool in the years before the First World War. In the 1920s, more than 40 per cent of the male Welsh population worked in heavy industry. The population had grown to match: the coalfield county of Glamorganshire grew from 71,000 people in 1801 to 1,122,000 by 1911. The transformation was staggering, but it also created deep vulnerabilities. Phil Williams described the Great Depression as having "devastated Wales" because of its "overwhelming dependence on coal and steel". A comparison published decades later makes the scale of the economic shift stark: in the 1950s, Wales's GDP was twice as large as Ireland's; by the 2020s, Ireland's economy was four times that of Wales. The industrial period also reshaped Welsh politics permanently. The Merthyr Rising of 1831, widespread support for Chartism, and the Newport Rising of 1839 reflected a working class that was politically conscious and combative. Strong liberal traditions formed first, then gave way to socialism. Since 1922, Wales has voted Labour in every general election. Plaid Cymru, a nationalist party, formed in 1925. The Welsh Language Society followed in 1962. Calls for a devolved government built over a century, and the Government of Wales Act 1998 created a Welsh assembly, now known as the Senedd or Welsh Parliament, responsible for agriculture, education, health, housing and a range of other areas. In June 2008, Wales made history by becoming the first nation in the world to be awarded Fairtrade status.

• 5. Language and Identity

  ›

  Welsh is one of the oldest living languages in Europe, and the 2021 census recorded 538,300 Welsh speakers in a country of around 3.1 million people. The language's trajectory over the twentieth century was one of steep decline followed by a partial reversal: from just under 50 per cent of the population in 1901, the proportion who could speak Welsh fell to 18.9 per cent by 1981. The 2001 census recorded a modest recovery to 21 per cent, though by 2021 the figure had settled at 17.8 per cent. Welsh is now a compulsory subject in all state schools for pupils aged 5 to 16, and the Welsh Language Act gave it official status alongside English. Northern and western Wales retain areas where Welsh is spoken as a first language by the majority of residents, with English learned as a second language. The 2021 census recorded that 55.2 per cent of the population identified as Welsh only, down from 57.5 per cent in 2011. A 2022 YouGov poll found that 67 per cent of the population considered themselves Welsh to some degree, whether or not they also identified as British. National identity shows a clear geography: the highest rates of Welsh-only identification come from the South Wales Valleys and West Wales, with Merthyr Tydfil recording 70 per cent. The area near the English border is the most divided: Flintshire recorded the lowest Welsh-only identification at 34.7 per cent. The linguistic landscape has also shifted through immigration. Since Poland joined the European Union, Polish has become the most common main language in Wales after English and Welsh, at 0.7 per cent of the population. In 2024, Vaughan Gething was elected First Minister of Wales, becoming the first black head of government in Europe.

• 6. Landscape, Wildlife, and Weather

  ›

  The wettest spot in the United Kingdom is at Crib Goch in Snowdonia, which receives an average of 4,473 millimetres of rain per year. Wales lies within the north temperate zone, with a maritime climate that is changeable and frequently wet. The highest recorded temperature in Wales was 37.1 degrees Celsius at Hawarden in Flintshire on the 18th of July 2022. The lowest was -23.3 degrees Celsius at Rhayader in Radnorshire on the 21st of January 1940. Over fifty islands lie off the Welsh mainland, the largest being Anglesey in the north-west. The coastline is dangerous as well as extensive: in 1859, more than 110 ships were destroyed off the Welsh coast in a single hurricane that killed more than 800 people across Britain. The greatest single disaster was the sinking of the Royal Charter off Anglesey, in which 459 people died. Throughout the 19th century, an average of 78 sailors per year were lost from vessels wrecked on Welsh shores. The coastal waters of south-west Wales attract basking sharks, Atlantic grey seals, leatherback turtles, dolphins, and porpoises. New Quay holds the only summer residence of bottlenose dolphins in the whole of the United Kingdom. The Gower Peninsula was designated the first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in the United Kingdom in 1956. Inland, the polecat was nearly driven to extinction in Britain but held on in Wales and is now spreading rapidly. In March 2021, Natural Resources Wales issued a licence to release up to six beavers in the Dyfi Valley, the first official beaver release in Wales. The gwyniad, a freshwater fish, is unique to Wales and found only in Llyn Tegid, known in English as Bala Lake.

• 7. Culture, Literature, and the Arts

  ›

  Wales has one of the oldest unbroken literary traditions in Europe, tracing back to the sixth century. The earliest Welsh verse, attributed to the poets Taliesin and Aneirin, survives only in medieval reworkings. A cluster of surviving manuscripts from the 13th and 14th centuries preserves much of what is known: the Black Book of Carmarthen and the Book of Aneirin from the 13th century; the Book of Taliesin and the White Book of Rhydderch from the 14th century; and the Red Book of Hergest dating to around 1400. The prose stories collected from the White and Red Books are known as the Mabinogion. In 1588, William Morgan became the first person to translate the entire Bible into Welsh, a translation that helped anchor the language through centuries of political pressure. The first novel written in the Welsh language, Rhys Lewis by Daniel Owen, appeared in 1885. Dylan Thomas, one of the most widely read Welsh writers of the 20th century, had his play Under Milk Wood first broadcast in 1954. The poet R. S. Thomas (1913-2000) was the most important figure in Welsh-language verse through the second half of the century; he did not learn Welsh until he was 30 and wrote all his poems in English. The National Eisteddfod is the country's main annual performance festival. The Welsh National Opera is based at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay. The National Youth Orchestra of Wales was the first of its type in the world. S4C, the Welsh-language television channel, began broadcasting in 1982 and, since the digital switchover, broadcasts exclusively in Welsh. Wales became the United Kingdom's first digital television nation in 2010. Amgueddfa Cymru, the national museum body founded by royal charter in 1907, now operates seven sites across Wales, and entry to all of them is free.