Cymru Celts
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During the last ice age people hunted reindeer and mammoth in what is now Wales. When the ice age ended around 10,000 BC new animals appeared in Wales, such as red deer and wild boar. Stone age hunters hunted them both. They also gathered plants for food. In about 4,000 BC farming was introduced into Wales, although the people still used stone tools.
Ancient and Medieval Wales
The National Eisteddfod of Wales is Europe's oldest and largest festival of culture, literature and indigenous music; its origins backdate to the 12th Century. Every August, the attraction of Wales's National Eisteddfod draws 170,000 visitors over a week long event, which is best described as a Welsh cultural and artistic Olympics, a celebration of the Welsh love of art, literature and pageant. Throughout the year, local and regional Welsh Eisteddfodau qualify a total 6,000 competitors for the national event, which range from poets to choirs and musicians to artists. While the Eisteddfod is held at towns and cities alternately in northern and southern Wales, the institution is exclusively Welsh language orientated and provides a high profile focus and convergence of the Welsh speaking communities of Wales.
Wales - the ancient Celtic heritage
Welsh mythology is the mythology of the Welsh people . It consists partly of folk traditions developed in Wales , and partly of traditions developed by Britons elsewhere before the end of the first millennium. Some of this contains remnants of the mythology of pre- Christian Britain, surviving in much altered form in medieval Welsh manuscripts such as the Red Book of Hergest , the White Book of Rhydderch , the Book of Aneirin , and the Book of Taliesin . The prose stories from the White and Red Books are known as the Mabinogion , a title given to them by their first translator, Lady Charlotte Guest , and also used by subsequent translators. Poems such as Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees) and mnemonic list-texts like the Welsh Triads and the Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain , also contain mythological material. These texts also include the earliest forms of the Arthurian legend and the traditional history of post- Roman Britain .
Welsh mythology
Rhys ap Thomas
Soldier, knight, landowner, king-maker (1448-1525) The tomb of Rhys ap Thomas (1448-1525) in St. Peter's Church, Carmarthen, with Rhys lying in effigy on top.