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Living in Wales | The Truth About Life in Britain's Forgotten Corner | 4K Travel Documentary – Transcript
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- Wales features over 600 castles, giving it a higher concentration per square mile than anywhere else on earth.
- The South Wales Coalfield experienced massive growth, eventually producing over 46 million tons of coal in 1913.
- The Welsh language has gained official status equal to English through legislative measures like the 1993 act.
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Somewhere in Wales right now, sheep outnumber people by more than three to one. Roughly 10 million of them scattered across hills where humans are the minority. This one country, barely the size of New Jersey, has crammed in over 600 castles, more per square mile than anywhere else on earth. Its capital city didn't even become the capital until 1955. Seven centuries after English kings first ringed the place in stone to keep its
people in line. The name on the map isn't the name its people use. Wales comes from an old Germanic word for foreigners, a label pinned on by outsiders. Locals call it Saimru, closer in meaning to fellow countrymen. It sits on the western edge of Great Britain, squeezed between the Irish Sea and the English border, covering just over 8,000 square miles,
smaller than the state of Massachusetts. Around 3.1 million people live there, fewer than the city of Chicago, spread across valleys, coastline, and mountain. Cardiff, on the southeast coast, holds the title of capital and around 380,000 residents, along with the Senned, the devolved parliament. England borders it to the east, Ireland lies
across the water to the west. The coastline stretches past Twotwoodwounder Poded Miles, and three national parks cover a huge share of the interior. A giant is supposedly buried under the highest point in the country, Snowden, at 1.85 meters, was recently rebranded by the National Park Authority to its original Welsh name Irwedfa meaning Grave. After a legend claiming the giant
Radigar was killed by King Arthur and buried under a cairn on the summit, nearly 600,000 walkers climb it most years, making it one of the busiest mountains on the planet, and a small train has hauled tourists to the top since Victorian times. The surrounding national park, once called Snowdonia, now goes by Irriri, likely rooted in the Welsh word
for eagle. Further south, Brecon Beacons National Park underwent the same treatment, rebranded Bonau Breccianiog in 2023, dropping the English name entirely because officials decided it no longer matched the park's identity. The terrain across the country split sharply into three bands, jagged peaks and glacier carved ridges up north, rolling farmland
and river valleys through the middle, and steep industrial river valleys packed with old mining towns down south, each one carved by a different chapter of the country's past. Pembrokeshire's coastline in the far southwest cuts through cliffs, sea caves, and hidden coves that pull in surfers and kayakers every summer, and a 186 mile coastal path traces the entire edge of the peninsula for walkers willing to take it in stages.
Puffins nest by the thousands on Skomer Island, just off that coast, alongside one of the largest colonies of Manx shearwaters on the planet, birds that spend their days out at sea and only return to their burrows after dark to avoid predators. Red kites, hunted almost to extinction in Britain by the early 1900s, clawed their way back from a handful of surviving pairs hiding out
in the Welsh Hills, now soaring by the thousands across the whole country in one of Europe's more dramatic conservation turnarounds. Rain falls often here, some western valleys logging over 2,000 millimeters a year, more than double what London gets, which is exactly why everything stays so relentlessly green through every season. The Gower Peninsula became the first place in
Britain ever designated an area of outstanding natural beauty. Back in 1956, setting a template later copied across the rest of the UK and its beaches regularly topped surveys of the best in the country. Further inland, the Elan Valley holds a chain of Victorian reservoirs and dams built to supply drinking water to Birmingham, over 70 miles away in England. An engineering project so large,
it displaced entire villages when it flooded the valley floor in the 1890s. Bottlenose dolphins patrol Cardigan Bay in one of only two resident dolphin populations, found anywhere around the British coast, drawing boat tours out of small harbour towns every summer.
Roughly 90% of the Welsh coastline sits under some form of protected status today, a proportion almost unheard of for a country with such a long industrial past pressing right up against the water. Waterfalls cluster so thickly around the brakes on beacons that one narrow valley near Istrad Felt has earned the nickname Waterfall Country, with paths that let hikers walk
directly behind the curtain of falling water at Skúrvud-Eira, and beneath all that greenery sits the reason the South turned industrial. A coal field so dense, it once powered a global empire and shipped fuel to ports on nearly every continent.
A single letter carved into stone once ended a bloodline. Edward I built his iron ring of castles, crenorphine, conwy, harlech, and more. In the late 1200s, after crushing the last native Welsh Prince, Llewelyn AP grew food, and folding the country under English control through the Statute of Ruddlin in 1284. To seal the point, Edward declared his own
infant son the first English Prince of Wales, a title the English crown has recycled for its heirs ever since, regardless of whether that heir ever set foot in the country. Full legal absorption into England didn't happen until the Laws and Wales Acts of the 1530s, which banned Welsh from official use in courts and administration, and merged the two nations
into a single legal jurisdiction that technically lasted almost 500 years. Resistance never fully died. In 1400, a landowner named Awain Glindor declared himself Prince of Wales, and launched a revolt that, within a few years, controlled most of the country.
He captured harlech and Aberystwyth castles, held a parliament at Machinleth with envoys from France, Scotland, and Spain, and planned two national universities and an independent Welsh church, a program more ambitious than most medieval rebellions ever attempted. French troops landed to support him, and by 1404 he had solidified control over most of the country.
By 1409, though, English resources ground the rebellion down piece by piece. Glindor vanished from the historical record entirely around 1412, and nobody or grave was ever found. He remains the last person to hold the title of a genuinely Welsh Prince of Wales, and pubs across the country still name themselves after him.
Centuries later, Coal rewrote the country's fate entirely. The South Wales Coalfield exploded from 1,500 workers in 1800 to roughly 250,000 by 1913. The industry's peak year, producing over 46 million tons of coal in that single 12-month stretch.
That same year, on October 14, an explosion at the Universal Colliery in Sengenid killed 439 men and boys, still the deadliest mining disaster in British history, and the sixth deadliest recorded anywhere in the world. 90 of the dead were 20 or younger, several boys as young as 14, and one chapel in the village lost 60% of its male members in a single morning.
The mines manager was eventually fined a total of 24 pounds. A local newspaper calculated it worked out to roughly a penny per dead miner. Industrial fury had already boiled over decades earlier, in 1831, when workers in Merthyr Tideville rose up against wage cuts and unemployment, raising a red flag, believed to be the first labour movement to use that symbol anywhere in the world. Troops killed more than 20 rioters, putting the uprising down,
and one of its leaders, a young man named Dick Pandaren, was hanged for a crime historians now widely believe he never committed. Decades of decline followed the coal boom, pit closures gutting entire valleys through the 20th century, culminating in the bitter miners' strike of 1984 and 1985 that shut down whole communities almost overnight.
Whales spent much of the following decades rebuilding an identity and an economy around something other than the seams underground, a process that, in some valley towns, is still visibly unfinished today. Long before any of that industrial upheaval, the country had already changed the course of English history by accident.
The Tudor dynasty that produced Henry VIII and Elizabeth I traced its roots to a Welsh gentleman named Owen Tudor, whose secret marriage to a French-born English queen eventually placed his grandson on the English throne in 1485 after victory at the battle of Bosworth Field. Wartime brought its own upheaval centuries later, when tens of thousands of children were evacuated from English cities into rural Welsh villages during the Second World War.
Many hearing Welsh spoken as a first language for the first time in their lives, and some never fully returning to their old accents afterward. Even the country's medieval legal system stood apart from its neighbors. The laws of high-willed DDA codified around the 10th century granted women property rights and divorce protections that English common law wouldn't match for centuries, including compensation
if a marriage broke down, and clear rules on custody that treated mothers as more than an afterthought. A drinking fountain in a Cardiff pub still gets pointed out to tourists because it marks where a language nearly died out, and clawed its way back.
Welsh, Simrag, has been spoken continuously since roughly the 6th century, making it one of the oldest living languages in Europe. But by the late 20th century, usage had fallen so far that campaigners chained themselves to buildings demanding road signs and television in the language. The Welsh Language Act of 1993 and later the 2011 language measure
gave Welsh official status equal to English, and today around 800,000 people, more than a quarter of the population speak it, with a government target of 1 million speakers by 2050. Street signs across the country now carry both languages, and Cardiff and Denbighshire councils have ruled that brand new streets get Welsh only names going forward,
a policy that occasionally sparks arguments among residents who'd rather keep the English version they grew up with. Rugby occupies a place here that borders on religion. The men's team has won 12 outright grand slams in the six nations, and match days in Cardiff can empty entire towns as everyone heads to a pub or the stadium. The streets around Cardiff Castle turning into an
open-air party hours before kickoff. Male voice choirs, born out of chapel singing traditions in the mining valleys, still perform across the country. Their harmonies once used to keep spirits up during strikes and lockouts, a tradition passed down through generations of the same mining families. The Eyestead fold, a competitive festival of poetry, music, and performance