Silwria chronicles the wanderings of a ‘Gog’ around his adopted homeland of south Wales, comprising for the most part of walking routes in Glamorgan and Gwent, along with the occasional cycle trip and posts on places of historical interest.

While I started this site without a specific purpose in mind, it has come to focus fairly quickly on two main types of walks: the linear walks across the valleys that I had planned on from the start, and the project of completing and documenting all the Marilyns in Glamorgan and Gwent. No doubt, its focus will change again over time.

Posts will include links to maps created in ViewRanger  for walks and Strava for cycle routes. Please feel free to contact me should you need any more information about any of the routes.

Language

Most posts will be written in Welsh, usually with a one-line summary of the content in English and a link to an English translation via GoogleTranslate. Alternatively, you can use the GoogleTranslate button in the website footer. Oddly, the two options will often provide slightly different translations, while copying the text into the main GoogleTranslate website will provide yet another (and often is seems, a better one). I have no idea why that is.

The machine translation should hopefully be mostly comprehensible, but sadly it cannot replicate the fine prose of the original…:-) No doubt you will find the odd comical turn of phrase and unexpected choice of word (‘pedestrian’ for walker, and ‘missions’ for walks being two of my personal favourites), but nothing so mangled that it would cause you to turn left instead of right, or go uphill instead of down.

The translated version should always open in a new window: because GoogleTranslate will sometimes translate things that it shouldn’t including, annoyingly, some place names, you may want to occasionally refer to the original. If anything is unclear, please feel free to get in touch.

Where I link to a bi-lingual website, the link will be to the Welsh site, but the English button should be easy to find, usually in one of the top corners of the page. On Wikipedia, you will find it at the bottom of the column on the left.

Comments

Comments are welcome in any language, and please feel free to use them to ask for clarification on anything that’s not clear from the machine translation.

Historical info

Whilst I am interested in history, I am in no way a historian. My aim therefore is to share information that I have found about the places that I visit, and I will provide links to sources/further reading wherever possible. I won’t tend to repeat at length information provided in the linked-to site, so it really worth clicking on them. I am more than happy to be corrected if I have misunderstood or misled, and very grateful to be pointed towards new or additional information .