This essay was written by Dr Eurig Salisbury, Department of Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth University, as part of the NICW case for incorporating a Commissioner to represent Nature

Let’s give a Board seat to nature

So, what does it mean, to give nature a seat on the board, here in Wales in 2025? One of the recommendations of the Wales Infrastructure Commission’s report on flood resilience in 2024 was to ensure that there’s room for nature on the management boards of public bodies. In other words, a seat is literally assigned at the table to an individual who advocates for the interests of nature. It’s a progressive and challenging recommendation that also appeals to a poet’s imagination. I began to think seriously, if I came face to face with nature across the table, how in the world would I start a conversation.

I’d feel like a fool to start off with, I’m sure, and wouldn’t know where to start! We all live on nature’s patch, after all, and it’s been here many ages before us. Talking to nature would be almost like talking to the earth itself. What could I say of importance to one who measures time not by hours and years and centuries, but by eons? We’d be at odds, two running on completely different paths.

Pwyll

I thought gloomily about Pwyll, king of Dyfed in the second branch of the Mabinogi, seeing from the top of Gorsedd Arberth the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen riding past on a white horse, and none of his servants coming close to getting her attention. The faster they rode after her, the further she trotted slowly away. Like a nightmare, the wonder they’d seen remained just out of reach.

And yet, come to think of it, Pwyll eventually managed to get that beautiful girl to slow down by going after her himself and, quite simply, by calling her. Sharing language was the key in that story, and Pwyll found out that the girl’s name was Rhiannon, and that she, after all, wished to marry him. Could we today, perhaps, share language with nature, and thereby come to know it better?

Cymraeg

Perhaps indeed. In order to bring two mismatches together, it’s a good idea to focus on what they have in common. No, nature doesn’t have language, as such. In fact, the ability to make intelligent use of language is one of the things that sets humanity apart from the rest of creation. Nature is, in one sense, an unspoken thing. Yet, language and what we create with language can rise above our individual lives. They’re long-living things in a way that individual humans are not. They might not be as long-living as some of nature’s processes, perhaps, and language cannot, so far, be measured in eons. But language can span centuries and millennia, at least, and it brings humanity much closer to nature than any other talent we possess.

All languages ​​are old. It’s sometimes claimed, for various reasons, that the Welsh language is older than other languages, but that’s not really the case. The Welsh language stretches back far into the past like every other living language. However, there is one place on earth where that claim is true, where Welsh is, after all, much, much older than all other languages: its own land.

Here in Wales, Welsh as a minority language is a very recent thing. Until the twentieth century, Welsh was the majority language of Wales from time immemorial. And that word ‘immemorial’ contains a very important element – memory – which is surely key if we really want to have a conversation with nature.

It wasn’t without good reason that the late historian Geraint Jenkins chose Cof Cenedl (a nation’s memory) as the title of an innovative series of books about the history of Wales that he edited for over twenty years. As an individual, I’m able to recall a great many things that happened during my relatively short life, but the memory of a nation is a long-lasting treasure trove that spans generations. It’s a cumulative, growing memory that can bring understanding together in a way that an individual could never do.

The memory of a nation is found in its language, in its wonderful creations, its legends, its poems, its words and its expressions. If we listen to them closely enough, maybe we can start to do that thing we long for: talk to nature on its own terms.

Guto’r Glyn

So, let’s go back in time, and let’s listen closely to a poet called Guto’r Glyn, one of the brilliant young poets of the fifteenth century. He’s busy making a name for himself and has patrons all over the country, but tonight, wearing a red woollen cloak, he sits at the banquet table of Hywel ab Ieuan Fychan in Moeliwrch, a stone’s throw from Llansilin. The hall’s full and the occasion is one to remember: Hywel has just finished rebuilding his splendid home.

Some forty years ago, in 1403, an English army came to the area to catch the great rebel Owain Glyndŵr in his home in Sycharth – but Owain had fled and Sycharth was empty. The English burnt down the grand house, before going on to burn the houses of Owain’s neighbours. One of those houses was Moeliwrch, the home of Ieuan Fychan, but on that day he was also far from home, fighting with Owain for a free Wales.

Some forty years later, Hywel his son decided to build a new house, not on a new site but on the foundations of the old house in Moeliwrch. There was something about that spot on the eastern slopes of Gyrn mountain that drew him back – was it the memory of his father, perhaps, and his adherence to the ideals of the rebellion? Maybe … but listen, Guto’s on his feet and the harpist next to him is plucking the strings. As he chants his poem to the accompaniment of the harp, Guto’s voice is sweetened by the acoustics of the freshly cut oak beams in the fine ceiling. The wood came from Chirk, where sustainable methods are used to care for a forest of native trees. Guto’s work this evening is to praise the new court, and he goes on to describe the beauty of the stone and woodwork.

But the main peculiarity of Moeliwrch, according to Guto, is its location: it stands not at the bottom of the valley nor on the open mountain, but between the two. The brightly whitewashed house can be seen clearly from afar on the hillside: Mawr ei chlod, mor uchel yw ‘Great is its renown, how elevated it is’. The house is like an angel, a star and a candle that lights the way for people in Wales and England alike.

In truth, despite how amazing Moeliwrch appears in Guto’s poem, it was built in the same type of location as thousands of other hall houses all across the country, namely in the middle between the treacherous lowland marshes and the rough winds of the highlands, between the winter meadows and the summer heath, between hendre and hafod. It’s a location that shows the deep familiarity of the Welsh with their natural environment, and it turned into a literary convention in the work of the poets. According to Guto, the miser lurks by the stream in the hollow, while the generous man makes his home on the slope. Not that that’s always easy, mind: climbing the steep sweaty road to Moeliwrch, says Guto, can be difficult work! But he’s not one to dodge hard labour. After all, isn’t the road to heaven itself tiresome and steep?

Llafur da pur diapêl
Yw dringo i dai’r angel,
Herwydd nad â dyn hirwallt
I nef ond yn erbyn allt!

Climbing to the angel’s houses
is good, pure and uncomplaining hard work,
for no long-haired [i.e. secular] man can go
to heaven but against the slope!

Another notable centre of patronage that Guto’r Glyn visited was the Cistercian abbey of Ystrad-fflur, or Strata Florida, in Ceredigion. By Guto’s time, the abbey was over two and a half centuries old and had seen long periods of ebb and flow. Recent research into the archaeology of the site shows that the Cistercian monks who founded the abbey were skilled farmers who brought new methods of land management from the continent to the highlands of mid Wales. They diverted the Glasffrwd river to the south of the abbey in order to avoid flooding and to provide water channels for their own use, and they also pioneered methods of grazing large numbers of sheep on the mountain.

The role of religion

However, a newly arrived religious order cannot live on innovation alone. The Cistercians managed to survive and prosper in Ystrad-fflur and in many other places in Wales, not by forcing their new husbandry on the people, but by marrying their customs with what already existed there before them. Although the Cistercians came to Wales on the coattails of the Normans, there was a world of difference between the monks’ peaceful and cooperative worldview and the violent and self-important attitude of their conquering compatriots.

Upon their arrival in Ceredigion, the monks built the administration system for their new style of land management in the image of the native Welsh administration that had been in power there for centuries. In a word, they grafted new ideas onto old wood. Two obvious witnesses to the fact that the establishment of the abbey was a collaborative project is the fact that its most important patron was none other than Lord Rhys of Deheubarth, and the fact that some of the language’s greatest manuscripts – priceless treasures that have protected a large part of the nation’s memory – were in all likelihood created in its scriptorium. The Cistercians settled quite naturally in the Welsh landscape, and many today would do well to emulate them.

Animals in literature

What then about the wild animals? Pity the poor poets! Many of them were terribly lovesick, and they had no one to send as a llatai – a love messenger – to their beloved but the animals of the forest. But persuading a seagull or a roebuck to go on an errand for you is no small feat. First, the animal must be praised, and there’s no chance of doing that properly without observing it closely and getting to know all its peculiarities.

One of the characteristics of the llatai poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym – the greatest of all Welsh poets, some say – is his detailed identification of the animals he addresses. A seagull was not something he’d seen its picture in a book, but rather a living bird he’d scrutinized with a poet’s eye until it transformed in his poem into a shining illuminated letter elegantly written at the top of a sheet of manuscript, perhaps by monks in Ystrad-fflur.

And as for the iwrch ‘roebuck’ … but wait a second – this animal’s name may be unfamiliar to us, as there are very few roebucks in Wales today. It’s a type of small deer that was very common in Dafydd’s time – the same element is found in the name Moeliwrch, ‘roebuck hill’ – but it was hunted mercilessly in later times. In fact, it was so unfamiliar at one point that Dafydd’s first modern editor in the 1950s gave the poem the misleading title Y Carw (the stag). A close reading of the poem, however, shows that Dafydd had in mind not the majestic horned creature seen on Scottish whiskey bottle labels, but the smaller type of deer that could – and this was the key thing for Dafydd – dart skilfully unseen and avoid those who wished to harm him. That picture has a sad irony today, considering the fate of the species in Wales, but the poem is also an impressive record of our knowledge of the natural world at one point in our history. Today that knowledge, and an awareness of the loss that occurred despite it, enriches our understanding of our place in the world, and should be treasured.

My poem below was written with the belief that our language and its literature form a vast, long-lasting treasure that’s full of meaningful engagement with nature here in Wales. I could easily list scores of other examples, such as the moving sixteenth-century poem about Coed Glyn Cynon, the forest where the poet would once go to be with his loved one, cut down by greedy industrialists from England, or eighteenth-century Lewis Morris’s detailed maps that show how our coasts have changed over the centuries … but that’s enough chatting from me.

After all, an important part of every meeting is the ability to listen as well as talk. By using our language, we can be confident that this will be a two-way conversation. Come, let’s give a seat to nature on the board.

Let’s give a seat to Nature on the board …
But I’ve a feeling seeing eye to eye
With Nature may well mean a little more
Than sharing niceties, saying ‘shwmae’,
And small talk just won’t cut it, not with one
Whose schedule works on a different scale
To coffee breaks and tea, perhaps a bun,
Think peat bogs, tree rings, melting-pots of shale.
But let’s not say nothing, for all our sakes,
Across from its two stony eyes, let’s use
The long view of language to give and take
In kind, for our words alone are suffused
With truth and knowledge the ages amassed
In this corner of earth, both small and vast.

Further reading

• 2021 report by National Infrastructure Commission Wales: Building Resilience to Flooding in Wales by 2025
• Guto’r Glyn’s poem of praise for Moeliwrch on Guto’r Glyn.net
• Dafydd ap Gwilym’s llatai poems addressed to the seagull (poem number 45) and the roebuck (46) on Dafydd ap Gwilym.net
• Richard Suggett, ‘Creating the architecture of happiness in late medieval Wales’, in Dylan Foster Evans, Ann Parry Owen a Barry J. Lewis (goln), ‘Gwalch Cywyddau Gwŷr’: Ysgrifau ar Guto’r Glyn a Chymru’n Bymthegfed Ganrif (Aberystwyth, 2013), pp. 393–428
• Dylan Foster Evans, ‘ “Cyngor y Bioden”: ecoleg a llenyddiaeth Gymraeg’, Llenyddiaeth mewn Theori (2006): 41–79