‘R’wy’n falch iawn i fod yma heno, yn yr hen ddinas Gymreig. I am very pleased to be here tonight in this old Welsh city. And to be speaking in the old language that was once spoken here.

But then you know all this, don’t you? You know that Edinburgh was the Welsh city of Caer Eidyn. Eidyn’s fort. Eidyn’s borough. You know that the oldest surviving poem in these islands was composed here, probably on Castle Rock, around the year 600. Hwn yw y Gododdin. Aneirin ae cant. “This is the Gododdin. Aneirin sang it.” You call this a Scottish poem, but it is in the Welsh language. For here lived the Men of the North. Gwyr y Gogledd. Terrifying as the prospect may seem to some of you, we, the Welsh, are the nearest thing the Lowlands have to a native population.

n the seventh century a man could have walked from Edinburgh to Cornwall, and spoken nothing but Welsh the whole way. Now I drive North through ruins. Past Elmet, the kingdom of Leeds. Past Rheged, the kingdom of Carlisle. Through Ystrad Clud, the valley of the Clud, which you call Strathclyde, its centre at Glas-gau, the Blue Hollow you call Glasgow, a kingdom that lasted for 600 years. And finally the kingdom of the Votadini, the Gododdin.

I have come to the capital of Mynyddog Mwynfawr who ruled from Castle Rock, and sent his golden youth south in their red plumes and chain mail to attack the English at Catterick. Catraeth. Gwir a aeth Gatraeth. For this they trained rigorously for a year. On mead. They were on the piss for a whole year, and the fact that they managed to find Catterick at all is one of the triumphs of the human spirit. It was also the greatest military disaster in a history that has never been short of military disasters. Only one man, Aneirin, survived to come home, to sing his 1250 line epic of linked elegies.

The full version appears in the September-October issue of Cambria

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