Celebrating The History Of Wales
A Little History
History Of Wales, the historyof.wales website and the Wales Triumphant project are all not-for-profit initiatives that will be managed within a Community Interest Company Limited by Guarantee ensuring that any profits will be reinvested in producing more Wales Triumphant Videos (WTVs).
The initiator of this project is Martin Price, who can trace his family back 500 years to the same Radnorshire valley, and who now lives near Llandeilo. He has an MA Medieval History, and has spent the last 10 years researching various aspects of people and events in Wales with academic rigour as well as an eye for an entertaining and/or enlightening story.
Having successfully presented several village hall events featuring local historical stories, two facts became obvious: that there is an appetite for discovering the past when it is presented as stories about people, not as 'history', and that there is a much larger audience of people who would never attend a 'history lecture', but who would really appreciate entertaining and informative free historical stories on their phone or laptop.
That's why our purpose is now to use the internet to popularise a positive history of Wales that is entertaining, engaging and enjoyable - as well as seriously informative and factually correct - by means of our 3-4 minute WTVs packed with unexpected and dynamic, full colour, often AI generated, images.
Triumphantly Using AI
Because our intention is to make these heroic stories as widely known and viewed as possible (not least by today's generation of mobile phone and TikTok users), we believe it's crucial that we don't use grainy black and white images, centuries old drawings, and images from museums.
As wonderful as many of them are, they alienate, not attract, younger - and older! - viewers, so we have made the fundamental decision that we are going to achieve our objectives best by sometimes using AI generated images and videos.
What they sometimes lack in narrowly academic accuracy, they more than make up for by engaging our viewers, and stimulating their perceptions of our triumphant past. If you want to read more about the arguments in favour of using AI, then do click on the link below.
Our Green Cob Logo
But if you want to know about our logo, well...we think the Red Dragon does not represent the past, present or future of Wales. Rather it seeks to present a two dimensional view of Wales and its people as violent, angry, dangerous, destructive, predatory, and untrustworthy. That may describe another nation, but not the nation of Wales.
If we are to find a more representative animal, then it would have to be the Welsh Cob, or Welsh mountain pony, that has roamed our wild and beautiful hills for well over 3,000 years, and probably 8,000 or more years, but horses (the family Equidae) evolved 50 million years ago as a dog sized dweller in tropical forests, a relative of the armadillo and rhinoceros – and it was those tropical forests that rotted down to provide our coal seams millions of years later.
When farming started in Wales 6,000 years ago, Celtic ponies were domesticated for ploughing and dragging, but not pulling carts as the wheel was only invented 500 years or more later. Since then, being strong, fast, resilient and good tempered, they have contributed greatly to the quality of life in Wales.
They also have a positive impact on our environment helping conserve our wild moorlands, so if there's one animal that is woven into the weft of the history of Wales it is undoubtedly the Welsh Cob, and that’s why we have an intelligent Green Cob – not an angry Red Dragon – as our Wales Triumphant and historyof.wales logos.
