23 minutes past seven, Wales has a new national poet, Ifor ap Glyn.
And guess where he grew up -
London. But he writes in Welsh and with a name like that,
what else could he be but Welsh?
What does it mean, though, being...
In March 2016, I was appointed as the new National Poet of Wales.
We have a long tradition of honouring our bards in this country,
and each year at the National Eisteddfod,
the winning poets are acclaimed with due pomp and ceremony.
This year marks the centenary of the poet who was perhaps Wales'
best-known national winner - Hedd Wyn.
It's a uniquely Welsh tale -
a talented young man with little formal education succeeds in winning
one of the major prizes at the National Eisteddfod,
but then tragically is killed in the Great War
before he can claim his award.
It's a story that symbolises the sacrifice and terrible waste of war.
And no wonder it became the subject of an Oscar-nominated film.
Although Hedd Wyn wrote in Welsh,
his tragic story transcends language,
and in 2014, after their qualifying match against Belgium,
the Welsh national football squad
paid their respects at his graveside.
But what exactly is it about the Hedd Wyn story that continues
to fascinate us today?
In this programme,
we'll retrace Hedd Wyn's footsteps in Wales, England,
France and Belgium,
but the central location in his story is his home here at Yr Ysgwrn
near Trawsfynydd in North Wales.
This was the place that inspired him as a poet
and visitors have been coming here ever since his death
to try and get closer to the man behind the myth.
To mark the centenary of his death,
nearly £3 million has been spent over the last two years to create
a new visitor centre and exhibition spaces in the old outbuildings.
The aim is to reinterpret Hedd Wyn for future generations.
But the house is a veritable time capsule
that's hardly changed since 1917
and ever since then, this is where Hedd Wyn's family have been showing
visitors the six chairs that he won.
This is Hedd Wyn's nephew, Gerald Williams.
But who was Hedd Wyn?
This is his statue, here in the middle of Trawsfynydd,
and it's worth remembering that statues of working class men
like Hedd Wyn are few and far between here in Wales.
When this statue was unveiled in 1923,
Hedd Wyn had become a hero to the ordinary people of Wales.
And indeed, it was their pennies and shillings that paid for it,
with contributions flooding in from all over the country,
and even from Welsh exiles in England and America.
In a war that saw destruction and loss of life
on an unprecedented scale,
Hedd Wyn came to represent a whole generation of lost Welsh talent.
He's portrayed here not as a soldier with his rifle or even
as a poet with his pen, but as an ordinary working man.
As a shepherd.
Ellis Evans, or Hedd Wyn as he later became known,
was born in 1887, the son of a farmer.
He was the eldest of 11 children but was more interested in his poetry
than in running a farm.
According to a newspaper interview
with his mother shortly after his death...
He was no shepherd.
I would tell him, "What if you get married, my boy?"
"Your poor wife will starve."
Perhaps his mother was being a little harsh.
After his death, the press were keen to project the image of Hedd Wyn
as an otherworldly romantic dreamer.
But his parents were undoubtedly supportive of their son
and his poetic gifts.
He would pen his compositions at night,
between half past ten in the evening and three in the morning.
The next day, we'd let him get up as he pleased.
Hedd Wyn's father introduced him to poetry when he was 11
and soon he was competing at his local chapel in Trawsfynydd.
The chapel has since been demolished but it was in a meeting on this site
that Hedd Wyn apparently won his first-ever prize as a poet,
aged only 12 years old.
In 1901, when he was 14 years old,
Hedd Wyn left school to help on the family farm.
But his talents as a poet would frequently be in demand,
composing poems for weddings, funerals,
indeed any kind of special occasion, as is still the tradition today.
He was a poet rooted in his community
and a valued commentator on its various events.
Hedd Wyn excelled at writing poetry in cynghanedd,
in traditional Welsh meter.
It's an intricate and demanding form
in which every line must be written
according to set rules of alliteration and internal rhyme.
Now, there are three kinds of cynghanedd.
The first one involves internal rhyme.
For instance...
The "ard" in "bard" rhymes with the "ard" in "Cardiff".
The second kind of cynghanedd involves alliteration.
The consonants in the first part of a line must be repeated
in the same order in the second part of the line.
So, as an example...
The T-R-T-V in "to write verse"
are repeated in the second part of the line -
"eat root veg."
T-R-T-V.
The third kind of cynghanedd is a combi-cynghanedd
that involves both alliteration and internal rhyme.
As an example...
"Line" rhymes with "mine",
and then the "M" in "mine" alliterates with the "M" in moaned.
So, that's cynghanedd.
Quite easy to explain, but not so easy to write.
Hedd Wyn also excelled at writing simple lyrical poems,
inspired by the beauty of his surroundings.
But unfortunately,
there was little money to be made in farming the land
and even less in writing about it, and in 1908,
Hedd Wyn joined the exodus to the booming coalfields of South Wales.
He found work here in Abercynon.
He lived in this house, on Glancynon Terrace
lodging in all probability with Mr and Mrs Robert Morris.
Mr Morris, like Hedd Wyn, hailed from Meirionnydd.
He was one of the 2,500 men who worked at this pit.
It was quite a change for the young man
from the heart of rural Meirionnydd,
but he would recall afterwards that the spirit of community,
the willingness to share, was just the same in Abercynon as at home.
He would repeat one of the miners' favourite phrases,
tra bo chwech 'da fi, bydd tair 'da ti, bachan -
while I've got sixpence, there's thruppence here for you.
Whilst the proverbial generosity of the miner may well have appealed
to Hedd Wyn, working underground certainly didn't.
After just a few weeks here in Abercynon,
he wrote this note to his friend Jane Williams,
who was in the same Sunday school class as him, home in Trawsfynydd.
And he kept to his word.
He only stayed for three months
before returning home to Trawsfynydd.
Only one short poem has survived from his time here in Abercynon
and its last two lines go like this...
Yn y South fy nghorffyn sydd
A f'enaid yn Nhrawsfynydd.
My body may in south Wales live
My soul is in Trawsfynydd.
Gerald Williams was the last of Hedd Wyn's family to actually live
in the old farmhouse at Yr Ysgwrn.
But as he is in his 80s and has no children, in 2012,
he had to make a difficult decision.
The Snowdonia National Park are the new owners of Yr Ysgwrn,
with Gerald now living in a nearby bungalow.
In 2014,
the Park made a successful bid to the National Lottery for funds
to restore the farmhouse and to develop the outbuildings.
This was the day the work began in earnest.
First, the entire contents of the house had to be catalogued.
Naomi Jones and Jess Enston are part of the team
who look after Yr Ysgwrn on behalf of Snowdonia National Park.
Hugh Haley from St Clears
is one of Britain's leading furniture conservators.
The job this week is to remove the chattels from the house,
and the furniture,
so that the conservation work can be done to the house itself.
There you go, try that.
We will be back up here next week.
How are you bearing up, Gerald?
Yes. Good question.
The bed won't go down the stairs. We'll have to dismantle it.
The six chairs that Hedd Wyn won in different eisteddfodau
are handled with particular care.
What do you think of that? Good idea?
Wow, Gerald. 'Dach chi'n cael specialist treatment!
SHE LAUGHS
Thank you very much.
According to the specialists,
95% of the contents of the house date back to Hedd Wyn's time.
Including, of course, the chairs that he won.
Hedd Wyn would compete regularly at eisteddfodau.
Apart from anything else, the prize money gave him a source of income.
His parents couldn't afford to pay him a wage for working at home
on the farm - just pocket money, occasionally.
With the money that he won at eisteddfodau,
he would treat his friends to a celebratory pint.
On one such occasion, having won three shillings
at the Llan Ffestiniog Eisteddfod for a verse in praise of Y Moelwyn,
a local mountain, he took his mates to the pub to celebrate.
After they drank the prize money, which was worth about 12 pints,
Hedd Wyn exclaimed, "This is quite something.
"We have drunk a whole mountain in a quarter of an hour."
But if Hedd Wyn enjoyed the company of his contemporaries in the pub,
he also enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of his peers.
Although he'd left school at 14, he was still keen to learn.
He read the works of Shelley, and would spend time
with the local journalists and ministers of religion -
Silyn Roberts, for instance,
introduced him to the principles of socialism.
One such friend was John Morris, a local teacher at the time.
Perhaps Hedd Wyn was a little careless
with his work once it was completed, but as that story indicates,
the standard of his poetry was improving all the time.
He won his first bardic chair in 1907, and the other poets
in the area began to take notice of this young talent.
Although we have been referring to him as Hedd Wyn,
he was actually 23 years old before he acquired that name.
The poets of the Ffestiniog area would come together
every now and then in order to induct new members into their midst
and to give them bardic names,
by which they would henceforth be known.
Now, this is a practice that continues to this day.
My bardic name, although I don't use it very often, is Tafwysfardd -
The Poet of the Thames.
And it was on this spot in August 1910,
on the outskirts of Llan Ffestiniog,
that Ellis Evans from Trawsfynydd
had the bardic name Hedd Wyn conferred upon him.
Hedd means peace or tranquillity, Wyn means white, or sacred.
And from that day on, to all but his closest family and friends,
he would be known as Hedd Wyn.
THUNDER RUMBLES
Storm clouds were gathering over Europe, however,
and in Trawsfynydd, they were more aware than most
of the military build-up.
Even though Hedd Wyn lived here
in the heart of the Meirionnydd countryside,
the sound of heavy artillery firing
would not have been entirely unfamiliar to him.
Since the early 1900s, soldiers had been coming
to the Trawsfynydd area on military exercises.
By 1914, the War Office had over 8,000 acres under its control
and a permanent camp had been established at nearby Rhiw Goch.
Trawsfynydd train station was expanded to handle
the increasing numbers of men and guns
who were sent here for artillery training.
In July 1914, according to the Congregationalist minister
J Dyfnallt Owen, the firing around this small chapel
here at Pen y Stryd had been so intense
that the walls had cracked and the windows had shattered.
But more interesting for us, perhaps,
is the fact that he also recorded what Hedd Wyn thought about this.
When Hedd Wyn was told about the consequences
of the incessant firing, his eyes lit up in anger.
And nobody spoke out more vehemently than he did
against this loathsome profanity that was corrupting the area.
So when war broke out soon afterwards,
it's perhaps not surprising that Hedd Wyn was not amongst those
who felt compelled to join up -
though, of course, many of his contemporaries did.
And it was that that moved Hedd Wyn during the months that followed
to write a number of poems in response to the war.
These poems weren't so much in support of the war
as to let his friends in the Forces
know how much they were missed at home.
As the casualties mounted,
he was called upon increasingly to write memorial poems
for the local men who had been killed.
This is one of the best-known examples,
and has been used to commemorate several soldiers,
including, ultimately, Hedd Wyn himself.
However, Hedd Wyn did not write exclusively about the war
and its impact on the local community.
By 1915, he had won five bardic chairs in local eisteddfodau
and now he had his sights on the ultimate prize -
the chair of the National Eisteddfod.
He sent in a poem to the National Eisteddfod at Bangor in 1915.
Unfortunately, it wasn't very well received.
In 1916, the National Eisteddfod visited Aberystwyth,
and this time, Hedd Wyn came second with his poem.
In fact, one of the judges wanted to give the chair to him.
The following year,
the National Eisteddfod was set to visit Birkenhead
and the Welsh expatriate community there.
Could Hedd Wyn go one better this time?
He began to write.
The competition required him to write a 500-line poem in cynghanedd
on the subject of Yr Arwr - the hero.
However, before he could finish his poem,
he had been conscripted into the Army.
Military conscription had been introduced for all men
aged between 18 and 41 at the beginning of 1916.
It was possible to be exempted if you were employed in work that was
of national importance, and helping his ageing father
run the family farm certainly fell into that category.
And besides, as his girlfriend of the time, Ginny Owen,
recalled years later, Hedd Wyn was no soldier.
But exemptions were only granted for a few months at a time.
Then you had to reappear before the military tribunal
and make your case all over again.
According to Hedd Wyn's sister, Enid,
it was the process of constantly appealing for exemption
that ground him down in the end
and he chose not to oppose his conscription any further.
Although the family were allowed to keep one son of military age
at home to help run the farm, Hedd Wyn knew full well
the authorities would never allow two of them to stay at home.
So, as his younger brother Bob was about to turn 18,
Hedd Wyn came to a heroically unselfish decision.
Despite his own socialist and pacifist leanings,
Hedd Wyn joined up so that his younger brother might be spared
to work on the farm.
After he passed his medical at the barracks in Wrexham,
at the beginning of 1917,
Hedd Wyn was sent to join the Royal Welch Fusiliers in a training camp
at Litherland on the outskirts of Liverpool.
If I'd been standing here 100 years ago,
I'd have been right in the middle of the Army camp
where Hedd Wyn was sent for his military training.
You can still see the church behind me over there.
However, it was a bleak enough place in Hedd Wyn's time.
Just behind the church over there was a munitions factory
and the smoke from its stacks
stung the soldiers' eyes terribly, apparently.
However, it appears that Hedd Wyn, at first, at least,
settled quite well into his new life as a soldier.
He wrote this verse about the camp at Litherland.
And every now and then,
the soldiers would be let out of the camp to go into town.
This is York Hall in Bootle where the Liverpool Welsh community
would host fortnightly gatherings
for the Welsh soldiers from the nearby camp.
This hall could seat approximately 200 people and in one concert
that was reported in the local paper,
there were over 20 different items,
mostly musical but with some comic recitations
that had the soldiers in stitches.
And at the end of that meeting in March 1917,
it was Hedd Wyn who was asked to give a vote of thanks
on behalf of his fellow soldiers,
which shows how well-regarded he was by his comrades.
The soldiers showed their heartfelt gratitude
with a deafening hip-hip-hooray
and then sang Cwm Rhondda with great emotion before leaving
that world of blessing and privilege
to return to the cold and inflexible world of duty.
Although Hedd Wyn enjoyed the social evenings at York Hall,
how was his long poem for the National Eisteddfod coming along?
The given title was Yr Arwr - the hero,
and he'd written nearly half of it before leaving home.
But the constant routine in camp didn't suit him creatively,
as he recorded in a letter to a friend.
To his great surprise,
Hedd Wyn did get a chance to finish his poem in the spring of 1917,
thanks to the intervention of one of his friends at Litherland,
Jack Buckland Thomas from Seven Sisters,
who was on the camp's administrative staff.
Battalion orders asked for a list of experienced farm workers
in order to get more land in Wales under the plough.
As everyone knows, Hedd Wyn was a shepherd,
but I don't think I upset anyone when I put him top of the list
of ploughman from D company.
By 1917, so many men had been conscripted into the Armed Forces
that at certain points in the agricultural calendar
there was a severe manpower shortage -
for instance, at harvest time or spring ploughing.
The answer to this was to release men from the Army
on a temporary basis to help out.
But Jack Buckland Thomas had not only managed to get Hedd Wyn's name
onto the list of men who were to be released,
he'd also spotted that Yr Ysgwrn was one of the farms that was
supposed to receive help, so Hedd Wyn effectively was sent home.
This was the chance of which he'd been dreaming,
to finish his Eisteddfod poem.
According to his father, Evan Evans,
Hedd Wyn managed to write 250 lines during the six weeks
he was at home to help with the ploughing -
around half the completed poem.
By the time he returned to Litherland,
he only needed to polish and tidy what he'd already written.
Most of the hard work had already been done.
He left Trawsfynydd on May 11th 1917.
That was the last time his family would ever see him alive again.
His sister Enid was ten at the time
and three quarters of a century later,
still remembered that day well.
By the beginning of June 1917,
Hedd Wyn and his battalion had crossed over to France
and he was at the fifth infantry base depot in Rouen.
As we see from that letter,
Hedd Wyn simply just couldn't stop himself from searching out
the poetic potential of his new surroundings.
His battalion had been sent here to Flechin to be trained up for
the coming assault and it was while he was in camp here that he finally
succeeded in completing his poem for the Eisteddfod,
and he posted it off to Birkenhead from here
on July 13th 1917.
I've returned to Hedd Wyn's former home in Trawsfynydd.
The site is being transformed by a 15-month programme
of major building works, and the most radical transformation
is taking place in one of the old outhouses.
This is where I met Jess Enston from the Snowdonia National Park
in order to get a better idea of how the building
will eventually be used.
So, this will be one of the first places that people will see
when they visit the site. Yes, they will,
they'll come across from the car park over there
and then they'll come into a reception area.
Which will be... Will be just through there.
And then once they've seen us and had a sense of what we're all about,
because, obviously, some people won't know the story
or the background, they'll come through here then
and this'll be an education community space,
so this is where we're going to be able to do more workshops with
schoolchildren and communities. Right.
And what will be nice about this building
is there'll be glass walls so that you'll be able to sit
in the landscape and get a sense of the landscape around you
and what inspired Hedd Wyn.
Because this was a barn for keeping hay, yeah, originally?
It was, for keeping hay and stock.
It will still feel like an agricultural building.
It won't look much different.
But then they'll go through to the space there,
which will have a rather different feel.
That will definitely have a different feel.
From the outside, at the moment, it looks like a bit of a monstrosity,
but what we're going to be doing is we're going to push the earth
back to where it was, so it will be covered.
So it's freestanding at the moment but it will sort of
disappear back into the mountain.
It will, and then a grass roof will be put on the top of it,
so it will be hidden inside the landscape.
And what else will be in this particular space?
So, it will be quite quirky.
When you come round, what you'll see is sort of a bench,
it'll look like a bench, but within the bench you'll see artefacts,
catalogued artefacts. So you'll have letters from Hedd Wyn,
you'll have some family photographs, you'll have his medals.
On the end of the bench,
you'll be able to hear a recording from Simon Jones,
who was in the war... One of his fellow soldiers.
..in Passchendaele with Hedd Wyn.
Let's walk through the wall while we can.
Simon Jones came from Llanuwchllyn
and he joined the army on the same day as Hedd Wyn.
The two of them had trained together at Litherland
but nothing there could have prepared them for the sheer squalor
of life in the trenches.
On the 23rd July, Hedd Wyn's battalion was sent
into the front line for the first time near Ypres.
The British trenches at this time ran parallel to this canal.
It's a pretty enough site today, but back in 1917,
it would have been choked with rubble and with soldiers' refuse
and crawling with the rats who gorged themselves
on the flesh of the dead.
At 6pm, the battalion paraded in fighting kit to march to
where the assembly trenches for the offensive were to be dug.
Gas shells were sent over by the enemy during the night.
And that, according to the battalion war diary,
was how Hedd Wyn and his comrades spent their first night
in the trenches - digging more trenches prior to the big attack.
The idea was to create spaces where men could congregate
before going over the top.
This trench dates back to 1917 and was discovered recently
whilst clearing land to extend the surrounding industrial estate.
None of Hedd Wyn's letters have survived from this time,
but after a week spent in and out of the front line near Ypres,
the Royal Welsh Fusiliers were ready to take part
in the big push against the Germans.
Zero was timed for 3:50am, July 31 1917.
Once having got clear of Canal Bank,
it was fairly easy-going for the battalion as far as Pilckem.
When Hedd Wyn's battalion moved forward that morning,
the weather was fine, but it soon deteriorated and heavy rain made it
difficult to move the guns forward to support the advance.
The casualties began to mount up in the face of German resistance
and some time that morning, Hedd Wyn was hit.
Thousands of troops were lost that day as they crossed the ground
from Ypres over there to here.
It would appear that Hedd Wyn did receive some medical treatment
for his wounds but it was too late.
He died a few hours later,
in all probability in the ruins of a building that stood on this site.
This trilingual plaque was unveiled here at Langemark
to mark the 75th anniversary of Hedd Wyn's death.
His little sister Enid had vivid memories of how that sad news
first reached Yr Ysgwrn back in the summer of 1917.
When he was killed, Hedd Wyn was just 30 years old.
As the sad news spread,
these letters of condolence began to flood into Yr Ysgwrn.
Here are some examples.
"I was truly sorry to hear about your gifted boy.
"Such a flood of grief has never been seen in this area before."
"Losing a lad as talented as Hedd Wyn
"is a loss of national proportions."
These are the recurring themes in these letters,
the talent that had been lost and what might he have achieved
had he but lived.
But there was still one last chapter in the story of Hedd Wyn,
the National Eisteddfod of 1917.
That year, it was in Birkenhead, near Liverpool.
This was a time when the Eisteddfod frequently crossed the border
to visit the expatriate communities in London and on Merseyside.
It was actually the sixth time the Eisteddfod had been held
outside of Wales within less than 40 years and this stone was erected
to mark that occasion. And in these fields in front of me here
stood a temporary pavilion where the Eisteddfod's competitions were held.
WD Williams was at the Eisteddfod that year
and remembered the occasion well.
After the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George,
had given a speech from the Eisteddfod stage,
it was time to move on to the chairing ceremony.
The judges of the competition delivered their verdict
and announced that there was a winning poem
that was worthy of the chair.
But what followed next was completely unexpected,
as the Archdruid Dyfed stepped up at the side of the stage.
Dyfed, coming gravely forward,
announced that the victor had fallen in battle
and lay in a silent grave in a foreign land.
In view of what had happened, there could be no chairing ceremony.
Instead of that, the chair would be draped in black.
THUNDER RUMBLES
There have been few times in Meirionnydd as stormy as the day
that Hedd Wyn's empty chair was brought home to Trawsfynydd.
Heavy rain fell all day until the rivers overflowed
and the wheat fields were waterlogged, and yet,
despite the storm, the assembly hall at Trawsfynydd was packed
last Thursday night when the empty chair was unveiled.
It's a custom that survives to this day for the people
of a poet's home town to celebrate when he or she has won
one of the major prizes of the National Eisteddfod.
It's a chance for those who weren't present on the big day
to congratulate the poet personally,
it's a chance for them to see the big prize itself,
in this case, the chair.
And imagine how different the evening would have been
when the people of Trawsfynydd gathered here in this hall
in September 1917 to honour Hedd Wyn.
If only the poet himself could have been present.
But of course, the pride felt by the community of Trawsfynydd
because of the success of Hedd Wyn was tempered
by a huge sense of loss, knowing that the poet had been killed
before he could claim his prize.
And the chair itself was set up there, centre stage,
a silent witness to the evening's proceedings.
This chair has become a national icon
and because it was awarded posthumously,
it's become known as Gadair Ddu, the Black Chair.
It was carved in the Birkenhead workshop of Eugene Vanfleteren,
one of a quarter of a million Belgian refugees
who had fled before the German invasion of their country in 1914.
Vanfleteren was an expert woodcarver
and the 1917 chair is his masterpiece.
It's one of the ironies of the Hedd Wyn story,
that his most famous chair was carved by a Belgian
who came from a town not far from where he died.
This is the military ceremony at Artillery Wood near Boezinge
on the outskirts of Ypres where Hedd Wyn was buried.
A cursory examination of the cemetery visitor book
reveals a constant stream of Welsh visitors.
In 2014, the Welsh football squad came here
after their group qualifier against the Belgians.
Gareth Bale had asked specifically to see Hedd Wyn's grave,
having been told the story by his mother.
This tradition of visiting Hedd Wyn's grave
stretches back the best part of a century.
One of the first Welsh visitors to this cemetery
was Hedd Wyn's friend Silyn Roberts in 1923.
He'd been instrumental in arranging the Welsh inscription
on Hedd Wyn's gravestone.
Only those who have won a chair or crown at a National Eisteddfod
are entitled to be called Prifardd, or Chief Poet.
In 1934, Hedd Wyn's own brother, Bob,
came here as part of a group of Welsh visitors
touring around the cemeteries of Ypres.
They held a service here and sang hymns at his graveside.
The thousands of Welsh soldiers who were killed in the Ypres area
are commemorated at this new memorial near Langemark.
And the local businesses make sure that the Welsh visitors
know that they're welcome.
But there's a particular interest in Hedd Wyn.
A special walking route retraces his last steps,
a selection of his work has just been translated into English,
French and Flemish.
But without doubt, one factor in the continuing interest
in Hedd Wyn was the film that brought his story
to a new audience in the 1990s.
The film is studied as part of the A-level Welsh course.
It was shown internationally and was the first-ever Welsh language film
to be nominated for an Oscar in 1993.
If the film has raised Hedd Wyn's profile abroad,
it has also renewed the interest in his home near Trawsfynydd.
The work on the outbuildings is nearing completion and will no doubt
result in ever increasing visitor numbers when Yr Ysgwrn reopens.
But what's surprising is that visitors began turning up
unannounced at Yr Ysgwrn almost from the very day
that Hedd Wyn won his chair.
One of the first recorded visits is by a couple of journalists from
a Carnarvon newspaper who came here as early as September 1917.
The article describes their breathy excitement
as they approached the farm gate.
The reporters seemed to be hoping
for some kind of spiritual connection.
They haven't even got to the house yet
and there're already employing the kind of language
that one would more usually associate with a pilgrimage.
Their report was published in September 1917,
just a few weeks after he died,
and yet already the myth of Hedd Wyn,
one might almost say the cult of Hedd Wyn, is taking shape.
And that tradition of visiting Yr Ysgwrn has continued for 100 years.
I wonder how many of the children in this footage from the 1970s
have brought their own children, or grandchildren, even,
back since then to visit the place.
For children and adults alike,
the key attractions at Yr Ysgwrn over the years
have been Hedd Wyn's chairs.
Awarding a poet a chair is a tradition that dates back
to the Middle Ages, when the foremost poet
would be given a chair at the King's table,
such was the respect accorded to poetry in Wales.
And of the six chairs that Hedd Wyn won,
this chair from the 1917 National Eisteddfod
is the most treasured of all.
In 2013, it was scanned in 3D so a replica could be made,
just in case anything happened to the original.
A certain amount of wear and tear has occurred over the years.
And the man who's been given the responsibility
of restoring the chair to its former glory is Hugh Haley,
one of Britain's leading furniture conservators.
I visited him at his workshop in St Clears.
Oh, and the chair. Here is the chair, yes.
Gosh. So, how's it going? Are you on schedule?
It's going well. Yes, yes, I think we are.
If you'd asked me a month ago, I would have doubted it,
but we seem to be getting there.
Something I've been wanting to ask you, I mean, to me,
as a layman, this is an amazing piece of furniture, but to you,
as somebody who works with intricately-carved pieces
of furniture every day of the year, just how good is this piece?
Oh, it is extraordinary.
There's no doubt.
All eisteddfod chairs tend to be heavily carved
and are all pretty impressive, but this one is definitely a cut above.
The closer you look, the more you find.
Really? And particularly, you'd have to come round to this side to see...
..the work just continues to get more and more extraordinary.
This is clearly the work of Eugene Vanfleteren.
So would it all have been his own work?
No, I think...
We know that the chair was ordered six months before the Eisteddfod,
so he couldn't possibly have carved the whole thing in six months.
And in actual fact,
when you come to study it, you can see the different hands,
almost like handwriting... Really?
..of the different people who worked on it.
Can you give me an example?
Well, an example would be that perhaps his best carver
did the back. Around here you get the work of the master.
This is certainly Eugene.
And then in places here and here, there's the apprentice.
Oh, yes, they're not quite as confidently executed, are they?
Absolutely. So to appreciate the work of the master, so to speak,
we will have to resort to the magnifier, if you could.
In the corner here, what looks like a smudge is actually three horses.
On something about the size of a 50p piece.
It's like fine lace, isn't it? Yeah.
Carvers all over the country have studied this and everyone is agreed
it's bordering on impossible.
Really? Absolutely. Oak is a very coarse timber.
As you carve it, little pieces will just flake away
and yet that hasn't happened.
All the way round, it's absolutely perfect.
But the main work we've been doing has been the dragons, of course,
which I think the last time you saw this...
Yes, it was missing. Well, the other one still is missing.
Hugh then took me next door to see the other dragon
that he was still working on.
Oh. And this is the problem that we've had with the dragon.
It looks as if you have to be very good at jigsaws to do this job.
Absolutely.
According to tradition, the wood for the chair
came from ancient roofing timbers salvaged from Valle Crucis Abbey
near Llangollen, one of the monasteries that was closed down
and burned in the time of Henry VIII.
Experts have tended to dismiss the story but Hugh
has made some intriguing discoveries that suggest otherwise.
Because on taking this piece apart -
this had been glued up with a modern white PVA glue -
and there within the body of the dragon...
A scorch mark. ..there's a scorch mark. Gosh.
And as well as scorch marks
there's evidence of death-watch beetle,
and death-watch beetle comes in damp roofing timbers.
Ah, not in furniture?
Not in furniture, which is too dry for them.
So, if that's the case, the monastery was built in 1201,
which makes this an 800-year-old piece of oak.
Now, timber shrinks over time, as it seasons.
That means that this timber has now become extraordinarily tightly...
Ah, so the loose grain becomes tighter grain.
And will take that level of detail.
So this tree was an acorn in the year 700. Wow!
THEY LAUGH
That's incredible. Yeah. So, in mending it, this piece here,
the wing tip there, you've carved that in as a new piece?
Yes. This is the last bit of carving to be done.
This piece was missing altogether, so I've grafted a bit on
and that's what I'll be doing this afternoon now,
is quietly chipping this into shape.
OK, well, I know you're on a tight schedule, so, Hugh,
thank you very much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
The pleasure's all been mine. Thanks very much indeed. Bye-bye.
A few weeks later, I returned to Yr Ysgwrn.
Having worked for over a year on the chairs and all the other
pieces of furniture from the house,
today was the day that Hugh was bringing everything
back home once again.
The return of the Black Chair was a news item in itself
and Gerald was called on to pose for pictures.
The fitting out of the various exhibitions
in the farm outbuildings is underway.
As well as telling Hedd Wyn's story,
these will also tell the agricultural history of Yr Ysgwrn
and look at the wider impact of the Great War on life in Trawsfynydd.
These are the 33 young men from the Trawsfynydd area
who died in the Great War.
Every community in Wales had to endure similar losses.
In remembering Hedd Wyn, we honour the memory of his comrades too.
It's very difficult to comprehend the loss of thousands of men
in one day, but Hedd Wyn's story helps to personalise
the wider tragedy for us.
But is there a danger that his story comes between us
and a true appreciation of his work?
In this respect, Hedd Wyn is similar to another famous Welsh poet,
Dylan Thomas.
Although they are poles apart in terms of language and lifestyle,
they both have this much in common -
their colourful and ultimately tragic stories
can overshadow their achievements as poets.
So, how good was Hedd Wyn as a poet?
His chair-winning poem, Yr Arwr, The Hero,
certainly brought him his greatest success,
but was perhaps not his greatest poem.
Although impressive in terms of its technique and its ideas,
its romantic approach to its subject matter
would soon be considered outmoded.
However, Hedd Wyn was also already embracing a sharper,
more modernist style in some of his shorter poems
and it's for this work that he is best remembered today.
At the beginning of June,
the first school trip was welcomed to the new-look Ysgwrn.
A news crew is keen to get the young people's first impressions.
When they'd left, I was keen to talk again to Gerald himself.
An important part of the Hedd Wyn story
has been his family's readiness to welcome visitors.
Gerald was raised by his grandmother, Hedd Wyn's mother,
and she instilled in him the importance
of never turning anyone away,
of always keeping an open house for visitors.
How does he feel about the changes at Yr Ysgwrn,
as it enters this new phase in its history?
We remember Hedd Wyn not just as a poet
but as a symbol of Welsh loss in World War I.
He was killed by a shell and by a strange irony,
in one of his last letters from the Front,
he writes of how the creative impulse
can triumph over destruction, even with shells.
There's a combination of optimism and sadness in those words
by Hedd Wyn and perhaps that's how we should remember him too -
with sadness because of the untimely nature of his death
and the deaths of millions of his contemporaries,
but Hedd Wyn's legacy lives on in the form of his poems
and his home here at Yr Ysgwrn, and that, surely,
is a cause for optimism.