The Time of Plenty

Welcome to the Time of Plenty in the fictional 6th century world of y Ddraig. Following the harvest and a busy month of preserving or storing food, Plenty was about consuming all those perishables that would not last… Read More

The Time of Smoke

Look up. Tonight you should see the moon in the state that demarks one month from another in the fictional world of y Ddraig – the quarter moon. Half dark, half light (which of course is a quarter… Read More

The time of ‘Song’

It’s the Autumn Equinox in the northern hemisphere and the ‘Time of Song’ in the world of y Ddraig. The last se’nnights of the Light Time of Year and the end of the full Sun’s March are upon… Read More

What is a ‘leap year’?

A LEAP YEAR is any year in which an ‘intercalary’ day exists–that is, a day that is inserted into the calendar to account for the tiny shortages of seconds, minutes and hours that occur across a given period… Read More

A (not-very-yet-too-very) brief history of “Wales” and “England”

It’s just not possible to condense a millennium of history into a single post without generalising massively and becoming irritatingly long. Sorry for both, but in the interests of brevity I’m starting at the non-existant year zero (between 1BC and… Read More

Seeding a Corpse

This week in Ireland, a 1000 year old skeleton was ripped unceremoniously from the ground when the tree in whose roots the skeleton was tangled blew over in a storm. Locals found half of a young man dangling… Read More

Celtic (and old Welsh) Spectrum

The Celtic spectrum different to ours. Theirs was based on and described by the quality of the hue, not the wavelength. Thus, the early Welsh ‘llywd’ can mean brown (like paper), blue (like mould) or grey (like rabbit)… Read More

The Green Man

The ‘Green Man’ is a symbol found in many ancient cultures dating back to 3000BC (and still used today). A visual Green Man is usually timber- or stone-carved face covered in foliage which often emanates from the figure’s… Read More

Visualisation in the Dark Ages

While our lives are saturated with them today, the vast majority of people in the dark ages would never in their lives see a visual image–a painting, a sketch, a statue, possibly not even a map. Just as… Read More

Waxing lyrical

This phrase is still fairly well used — ‘waxing poetic’ in the US and ‘waxing lyrical’ in most other English languages. The fact that waxing lyrical and waxing poetic both exist and are deemed interchangeable makes me think… Read More