Jon In England: Everywhere there's lots of piggies...

Living piggy lives
You can see them out for dinner
With their piggy wives
Clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon.
¬The Beatles

6/26/10-After the parade

I make my way to the St. Fagans: National History museum and begin to explore. St Fagans is an open air museum that tells the stories of the people of Wales; how they lived, worked, spent their leisure time, and the Welsh language can be heard in use amongst the staff. Set in 104 acres of woodlands and gardens, over 40 buildings from all over Wales have been carefully moved and re-erected at the museum. These buildings include a Victorian country school, a rural chapel, a cockpit, a worker’s institute and a row of iron workers’ houses where craftsmen such as blacksmiths demonstrate their skills. Also, grazing in the fields are native livestock and the practice of traditional farming tasks are a daily part of museum life. Oh and did I mention that this was free just like the museum yesterday.

Some of my favorite sites included the Derwen Bakehouse where couldn’t say no to the smell of fresh bread and had a piece of Bara Brith (a Welsh fruit bread), a Saddler’s workshop where the saddler was using his leather skills to make cell phone holders of all things, a post office with some very interesting WWII propaganda, a lovely albeit non-functioning Victorian urinal, Gwalia tea room, St Telio’s Church and St Fagans Castle.

The Gwalia Tea Room was completely surreal. It’s located in the third story of one of these reconstructed buildings. Following the signs for it I was lead to an attic and wasn’t sure what to expect. What I found was a modern tea room complete with carpet, electricity, and many more juxtapositions to the building that housed it. I stop in and have two cups of Rose fair trade black tea, one with milk and sugar, one plain. Believe it or not this was actually the first time I had tea in the UK.

After Gwalia I head to St Telio’s a Medieval Church presented in its pre-Reformation splendor colorfully decorated with a fine series of wall paintings. As I approached the church I noticed cameras and rows of chairs set up outside. It turns out that there was a play scheduled to start three minutes after I arrived. What luck! The play was called Y Gwr Cadarn (The Strong Man) and was a Fulbright commissioned production presented by the School of Welsh Drama Company. It was a Welsh-language performance but at least the introduction was in English. From what I could gather Y Gwr Cadarn (The Strong Man) was written in the 16th century by an unknown playwright who probably came from north-east Wales. The play is found in four manuscripts, two at the National Library of Wales, one at Cardiff Central Library, and a player’s roll at the Bodleian Library. It turns out this was the first time someone had gone to all these places and put the play together and this was potentially the first performance of the play in almost 400 years (actually second performance-I missed the matinee). Though I only stayed for the first acts from what I could understand Y Gwr Cadarn (The Strong Man) was a medieval morality play with a simple love triangle plot and bits of comic interlude woven in.

As much as I would have loved to stay for the whole performance there was too much that I wanted to see in too little time, so I hopped the train to the castle and gardens area of St Fagans. St Fagans castle is a late 16th century manor donated by the Earl of Plymouth. Some of its gardens were lost over the years but the Rosery and Italian Gardens remain to take their place with the tiered terraces, medieval fish-ponds and orchards. Much to my chagrin, I had to leave early. Ideally I would have spent a full day here and still not have seen it all. Hopefully I’ll be able to make another visit one day and see some of the things I missed such as the exhibitions on wool-making, cider-making, pottery and clogging as well as the reenactment of the battle of St. Fagans.