Museum guide was called Non.
I agree john…wondered where you and mike disappeared to…well, see you next year
Yup…that hits the spot! Diolch Steve…
I’ve never had the puff for that walk but, seeing that golygfa hyfryd, I must get in training for next time
Hi Iestyn,
I am on the June boot camp and really looking forward to the Welsh immersion.
Not sure where we meet in Tresaith, times of arrival what to bring to help - food etc…
Rather shy on the forum so my first message, but always happy to give the Welsh a go.
Do you send us information?
Sorry for ignorance.
Nicky
Shwmae Nicola,
I think Iestyn normally emails everyone a bit nearer the time, but just so you have an approximate idea, I think people usually start arriving around 3pm, going directly to the Canolfan.
If you take the road through the centre of Tresaith and take the road that bears left and goes downhill, you should come to this junction:
(hope the link works!)
Take that, and the Canolfan is at the end on the left, past the cottages. You can usually park there to unload, but may have to move the car later, to the car park by the shop (free to bootcampers).
I think people are usually advised to bring pillow-cases and either a duvet, or a sleeping bag (or both if you have the carrying capacity and if it might be cold - hopefully not a problem in June). A small torch may be useful.
I can’t persuade Google maps/streetview to go down the end of the road, but this is what the road looks like at the junction:
Hope that helps a bit.
Hwyl,
Mike
EDIT: Oh, here’s a link to an earlier post, with direction-finding advice from Hewrop (Huw):
Bootcampwyr will recognize this lovely view of Penbryn Beach, which appears with other info on West Wales in the current issue of Travel + Leisure in an article titled “The Europe You Don’t Know: 16 Destinations for the Traveler Who’s Seen It All.”
A few more of my pictures from April/May:
Helen and I have a competitive photo-shoot-out on Mwnt beach!
Polly living dangerously on the rocks at Mwnt!
Steve also living dangerously …if I had been a bit quicker off the mark, this would have been a picture of him skipping much higher up and as nimbly as a gafr mynydd!
“Feed my sheep” (John: 21:17) "Dywedodd Iesu wrtho, ‘portha fy nefaid’ (Ioan: 21:17 - fersiwn Cymraeg Newydd)
“I’m doing my best, but this one doesn’t seem hungry”
(that’s because it’s not a real sheep Mike - get a grip!)
(Photo, courtesy of @ramblingjohn )
Oops
Last week I went to a bilingual poetry reading in the local bookshop in Machynlleth. It was by Cyril Jones who has recently completed a group of poems about the Afon Arth (River Bear - that’s what he said), which meets the sea at Aberarth. Further up the valley is a place called Penarth! One of the tributaries of the Afon Arth is the Nant Erthig (the plural of arth is eirth, so maybe related?). Also, a couple of kilometres further south is Nant Camel.
What were these people thinking of, when they named these streams? How did they know about bears and camels?
I have checked this out on the OS guide to Welsh place names and it confirms Aberarth as being the mouth of the River Bear. However, it doesn’t mention Penarth.
So, apologies Steve - nothing I say is accurate!
(Vocab note: Arth - bear, Garth - promontory)
I’m wondering if that’s, Nant Carmel…?
Definitely Nant Camel - I took my contact lens out so I could look at it very closely
Grid reference: SN 505601
On the bear or promontory question, I have looked in Welsh Place Names by Dewi Davies and the following are listed;
Aber-arth - mouth of the river Arth (bear or headland)
Arthog - prob. land of the bears or headlands
Penarth - head of the enclosure or promontory.
And to think that @Steve_2 and I had a conversation about this in Welsh at bootcamp!
Ah, like boot camp so many interesting questions.
I checked the grid reference and it is the nant camel.
There is a river camel in Cornwall with which i am a little familiar.
Apparently the name comes from an old Cornish word which means crooked.
In welsh one word for crookedness is carmen (just maybe a link there).
Cheers J.P.
Nice to hear the gardd / arth debate rumbles on, although given how certain you were at Bootcamp I’ve been telling EVERYONE that it’s gardd, not arth
Out of curiousity I did a quick trawl in the library this evening… the last convincing archaeological remains of brown bears in the UK come from Roman sites.(Derek Yalden, who knew a thing of two about the subject, sees later evidence of bears as being linked to an import trade in bear baiting / dancing)… Apparently Welsh hunting laws imply that bears were around in the 8th century (haven’t gone back to the Laws of Hywel Dda to find out more, but it sounds interesting). And apparently “there are also some weak claims that place-names of Welsh, English and Scottish Gaelic incorporate bears” (says Yalden), Who’s he calling “weak”!
Looking forward to further debate, in Welsh, Helen!
Well, I just thought, and still do, that Penarth is much more likely to be the Pen of a mutated Garth than the Pen of an Arth ;-). How many bear-shaped hills are there in Wales? But, like my Welsh, I just make things up that sound vaguely possible!
I think a bootcamp visit to every Penarth in Wales is called for, so we can investigate these things further.
There is a very good view of the Pen of the Arth from Cadwalader’s ice cream shop in Cardiff Bay… sounds like a good start point for a Bootcamp to me.
I definitely need to investigate that one…
And @ramblingjohn can come to take the photographic evidence - of the hills, not the ice cream
Also, it’s made me wonder about how many words there are in Welsh that, when mutated, are the same as another word with a different meaning. There must be a few.
Yep, that had crossed my mind as well.
Looking forward to the time when my Welsh is good enough to ask locals what these names mean to them.
Cheers J.P.
It’s a good line of thought, but I have a nasty feeling that Garth is one of those words that really ought to have an ‘y’ in front of it (a bit like ‘y Borth’, which explains why you don’t say ‘dwi’n mynd i Forth’!)… so I’d expect to end up with Pen-y-Garth if that was the source.
I seem to remember learning at bootcamp that the prefix “cam” can also mean “crooked” as in camgymeriad and camder.
I’ve just browsed my Geiriadur Mawr and found that many words beginnig with “cam” have some connotation of crookedness or deviation.
Actually the first word for crooked in the English-Cymraeg section is cam! (That’s new to me)
Members of Oxford University would probably not be too surprised to learn this …