Julian Coman: Is a quiet revolution edging Wales down the road to independence?
There was a village choir; there was a folk group with a harp that won prizes; there was a chapel. And all that culture just went under the water. What you see here is the graveyard of a Welsh community.” More than half a century on, Elwyn Edwards still feels a sense of outrage as he contemplates the valley of Tryweryn in north-west Wales, where the thriving village of Capel Celyn was deliberately flooded in 1965.
On the orders of Westminster, the picturesque hamlet was
sacrificed to create a reservoir supplying water to Liverpool, 43 miles away.
Capel Celyn’s inhabitants protested, and there was desperate opposition from
Welsh MPs in the House of Commons. Edwards, 13 at the time and living a few
miles away, went to the demonstrations and remembers the raw anger. After the
deed was finally done, he recalls a sepulchral silence, as labourers built the
reservoir dam using the bricks of the village and sand and clay from local
farmers. “There were no sheep, no noise or life. It made such an impact on me.”
The “drowning” of Capel Celyn – and the brutal truths it
exposed about where power lay in 1960s Britain – led to the birth of modern
Welsh nationalism…
