Join Julie for an evening of journeying with particular relevance to Y Gelli – Hay, and its place on the edge of Cymru. We read about a Cymru which is ‘now one of the least wooded and most biodiversity-poor countries in Europe’ where ninety-eight per cent of flower-rich hay-meadows has disappeared,’ where pollinating insects are in steep decline. Microplastics are found in half the mayflies in some Welsh rivers. There is litter in the sea, and so, so much of it.

But now, driven by human activity, it is turning into hothouse rather than icehouse at a truly disarming and a fearful rate. But, notwithstanding the decline and disasters of the period of the 1960s through to the 1990s that Brittle With Relics portrays, this is ultimately an uplifting book. Despite the narrow referendum victory for devolution in 1997, support for the Senedd is now solid throughout Wales, as indicated by the overwhelming 2011 vote on increasing the Welsh Government’s powers. And according to the language app, Duolingo, Welsh is the fastest growing language in the UK. (Full disclosure here – I’m a Welsh learner with Duolingo myself!) Interest in independence for Wales is growing. But, to know where we’re going, we need to know where we’ve come from. Which is why Richard King’s book is such a valuable contribution to this debate. The long history of the campaign for language equality in Wales started in 1962 with the founding of Cymdeithas yr Iaith, the Welsh Language Society. Taking inspiration from the civil rights movement in the United States, Cymdeithas yr Iaith launched and sustained a long campaign of non-violent direct action demanding that Welsh be accepted on an equal footing to English. Their targets were always property, such as road signs, and not people and the activists always made a point of taking responsibility for their actions, often waiting to surrrender themselves to the police. As a result, hundreds of Welsh language campaigners served time in prison during the 1960s and 1970s.Pete Evans certainly seems to feel this way. For many years he has lived in a village called Hope close to the banks of the lower Alun. He too refers to the meandering of the Alun and its seemingly ubiquitous presence in this part of the world. But it was not until I read his Resurrection River that I realised there were two branches of the Alun, one the natural course of the river and the other, man-made, heading off in a totally different direction. It was not just a case of the Alun seeming to be in two places at once, it really was its own watery doppelganger. This is a history of a nation determined to survive during crisis, while maintaining the enduring hope that Wales will one day thrive on its own terms.

In reality her walk was the catalyst that led to more journeys. A quest to examine her identity as an English incomer. A subsequent research journey into Cymru’s language and history. An environmental pilgrimage as she considers how we arrived at this state of environmental crisis – and how we can best respond. The Alun is a river of tranquillity, of droughts, floods and trade; fortunes made and lost. At times it doesn’t exist at all and yet at the same time it is two rivers! What emerges in form of a book, is a homage – to Cymru, its past, present and potential future, and to its peoples, land, language and biodiversity.Sad to say what she describes is in a parlous state, a small part of a planet which should, if we follow the patterns of the past, be heading for another Ice Age. The Real series of books was started by Cardiff writer Peter Finch in 2002 with an alternative guide to his home city. Real Cardiff was so successful that it spawned three further editions and led to Real guides being produced for cities and counties throughout Wales and the rest of the UK. Other writers have created these later guides, but Finch remains as the series editor. Narrow Boat is, nonetheless, an engaging and informative book, a satisfying mix of travel writing and social history. It describes a world, the working canals of England, that is now all but gone. But its importance goes beyond the book itself. Narrow Boat created a deluge of interest in England’s canals and led directly to the creation of the Inland Waterways Association (IWA) in 1946. Having been replaced by rail and later by road as the primary network for commercial transport, the canals faced an uncertain future and the threat of closure. Energetic campaigning by Rolt and other members of the IWA successfully saved much of the canal network from that fate and allowed it to be transformed into the wildlife habitat and resource for leisure that we have today. The short stories presented vary in style and length and, it has to be said, they are of variable quality too. But I think the whole point was to present a representative picture of Welsh crime fiction in the twentieth century, some of the work good and some necessarily not quite so good. In fulfilling this objective Martin Edwards has fully succeeded and has produced a very entertaining collection with an extremely helpful introduction and notes on each author. This period also saw the winding down and removal of heavy industry in Wales. Jobs in coal, steel, quarrying and manufacturing all disappeared. But this was not just about the loss of jobs, it was about communities; vibrant, confident and self-reliant communities were destroyed: