"The arms that you wield now are not such as your forefathers wielded; but they are infinitely more effective, and infinitely more irresistable" ~ Cymru Fydd leaflet, 1890

Tuesday 1 January 2013

The Battle of Llwchwr

January 1st marks the anniversary of the battle of Llwchwr. Where the Welsh stood up against the would be colonists and defeated them. As we know Wales eventually lost the war and we has been a colony of our neighbour to the east ever since.
Star marking the commemoration stone - Google map link
But almost 900 years later a new battle is to be fought on this site and hundreds of others in the City and County of Swansea alone. Across the whole of Wales the number will be in the thousands. The enemy is the LDP (Local Development Plan).

This link lists every LDP candidate area in the county, the site of the battle is included in the following LDP.
Cropped image from this original. The thick black line denotes the outer boundary of the propsed LDP site.
In order to make it clearer I have overlapped the two pictures and added some transparency to the google maps picture so that the LDP boundary shows through.
Map showing local of the commemoration stone within the LDP
This historic battle site is now one of thousands of modern day battle sites across Wales. Do you know what your LDP are? How many houses are they planning on building near you? How many green areas do they want to tarmac over? How many species of wildlife are under threat? How many Welsh speaking communities are at risk of dilution? How many areas already prone to flooding do they want to build on?

Local authorities are required to make these LDPs available. They are freely available via a search. Just enter the name of your county and the keyword LDP into google and see what you come up with.

But before you do that, here's a couple of photos I took of the stone, plaques and surrounding areas.
The first photo is of the commemoration stone, unveiled in 1986
Plaque - Yn Gymraeg

Plaque - In English

Panorama of the stone, Parc Fforestfach can be seen in the background.
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