I have grown very fond of Hendre'r Ywydd Uchaf. I can smell wood-smoke in the office and it's got me looking forward to Spring, when I'll hopefully be spending more time there, getting to know the building from the inside out. Even if you have visited St Fagans many times, you may not have stayed a long while in there. It is quite a bare building, partly due to the fact that furniture from its period of construction – the early 1500s – need more TLC than can be provided in an outdoor display, and so are tended to in the galleries. Also, there's no chimney, so it can be quite a troublesome building to work with, and even visit, if the smoke is not behaving as it ought to.

The fire behaving nicely at a recent living history demo, with Sally Pointer

It's a timber-framed building, moved here from Denbighshire in the 1960s but lived in, quite comfortably it seems, until 1954. I hope to find out more about the place, and how it was used, by using a variety of skills and sources. After cooking and interpreting in there over the summer, I'm really looking forward to getting my hands dirty and seeing how it works as an Early Tudor household.

Moving headlong into a Tudor way of life at this time of year may be ill-advised (especially since I have no saltfish and this year's attempt at storing apples has been fuzzier than anticipated), so I'm taking the time to pore over sources relating to the building and its original context.

Dismantling Hendre'r Ywydd Uchaf, c. 1964. The 1500s frame had been left almost unaltered - a corrugated roof, chimney, glass windows and that chap with a cigarette being the most noticable modern additions.

There's so much material to explore. Scholars and local historians have written widely on a range of families, buildings, industries and events from Denbighshire in the Early Modern period. I have on my desk a great big pile of articles, ready to be marked with pink and yellow stripes. But you've got to start somewhere. I decided first to find the building's original location.

It's somewhere around here...

Hendre'r Ywydd was originally built in the parish of Llangynhafal, near Rhuthun. I am quite familiar with the area, but had never been able to put my finger on the house's original site; remembering instead the high hedges and spaghetti-thin roads of Dyffryn Clwyd. Thankfully, for every building we move, we create an archive of its context and original location. These archives are usually second-to-none:

Numbering a doorway, St Teilo's Church (1985)

Unfortunately, on this occasion, our forebears did not think to leave enough clues in there to allow for easy pinpointing. Rifling through photos of cruck frames, cow stalls and hazel matting, I came across two shadows of evidence. A copy of a copy of a copy of an 1830s tithe map with no scale, and a transparency with no key. Both featured a strip of land which tapered at one end. This was where, in 1508, Hendre'r Ywydd Uchaf was built.

Map drawn by member of Ffoulkes family. Hendre'r Ywydd is at the bottom left of the strip of land.

It takes a while to get your eye in, so I google-mapped the parish to see if there were any surviving field systems like the one featured on both maps. Going in cold was a bad idea.

I remember when all this were just fields...

I resolved to have another go once I'd chipped away a little more. It was tempting to rely on google maps for place names and postcodes, but our landscape has changed so much, and in fits and starts, since 1500, that the information was of no use for this particular task. Or at least, if the information looked useful, there would be no simple way of checking its veracity. I stared at the shapes on the tracing, trying to memorise the placement of streams, trackways and field systems.

Tracing of undated map, showing original location of Hendre'r Ywydd Uchaf

In the midst of all these abstract shapes, I called to mind another thread of research I'd been doing, using the Royal Commission's Coflein Database. In trying to build up a bit of context, I've been looking at other surviving houses from the area, reading up on their construction and dating. Coflein supplies you with an OS grid reference for every recorded historic building and monument in Wales. You can look at the Coflein archive for Hendre'r Ywydd here.

I still had in my possession a grab-bag of data. Some abstract shapes, some numbers and some very powerful satellite data courtesy of google and NASA. Thankfully, I didn't have to go far in order to make sense of it. Our library at St Fagans has a cache of Ordnance Survey maps, and the grid reference narrowed it down substantially, as you'd expect. The detail of their maps is mesmerising, and after some careful examination and help from our Curator of Historic Buildings, we pinpointed the location, in amongst a few other houses, confusingly also called Hendre'r Ywydd.

Detail, showing Llangynhafal Parish and Hendre'r Ywydd (1956). Here' "Hendre'r Ywydd" is also used as a name for the hamlet itself. Mapping courtesy of Ordnance Survey.

On closer inspection, someone possessing a disregard for conventional, proper, archive-based behaviour had been there before us and marked the map with a tiny blob of red ink.

When I had been brought round with some smelling-salts, I applied the information I'd gathered to the satellite map, and was finally able to find that little strip of land. It's still intact, to a degree, and still maintains a tapered side, as we see on the map. The road twists slightly just as it does in the drawings:

Hendre'r Ywydd, Llangynhafal (1508-1964)

The last thing I wanted to do, after this, was pay it a visit. I find the house replaced with a field of corn. Uninspiring as it may appear, this is where I happily find my feet, as I venture into 1500s Denbighshire.

You can visit, too, by clicking here:
View Llangynhafal 1510 in a larger map

Merry Christmas from Professor Plant & Baby Bulb!

Thanks to all the schools that have been recording and sending in their data over the last few months. I look forward to hearing about when the flowers start to grow in the Spring!

Some of you have reported hail and some even snow! See your comments below.

Last week in Cardiff, we had quite a bit of hail. This got me wondering, how exactly are hail stones formed? Derek the Weatherman had the answers. Click here to see his blog and a picture of a giant hail stone that fell near Cardiff in 1968. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/walesnature/2011/12/how_hailstones_are_formed.html

Hope you have a fantastic holiday!

Professor Plant

Saturday 19 November

Today began grey, overcast and cold, with light snow falling on the ship. We’ve now been breaking our way through the pack ice of the Ross Sea for three days, picking our way south through whatever open leads or thin ice present themselves.

On the southern horizon, in places, open water shows up as dark reflections on the underside of the cloud - a ‘water sky’. In other places, we see ice blink, where the clouds are brightened by the presence of the sea ice beneath. Our navigation through the pack is aided by satellite positioning; Scott relied upon dead reckoning and the sun to chart his progress.

This afternoon we sighted land for the first time in five days. Away to the west we’ve had our first glimpse of the continent of Antarctica. The faint, white, distant mountains rise to over 3500 metres. Appropriately, one of the first we see, Mount Murchison, is named after a geologist who worked in Wales 180 years ago.

We set course for the mainland, a point called Cape Washington, but the pack ice is too thick, even for our icebreaker. Instead, we’re continuing south, deeper into the Ross Sea, in the hope of breaking out of the pack and into a polynya, which satellite pictures show lies to the south of us.

Sunday 20 November

It’s been slow getting through the pack ice, but we’ve finally made it to Franklin Island, at 76o south.

The ice is thick around the island, but we got within 5 miles of it, so we took the helicopters and landed on the sea ice at the foot of steep black cliffs. From there we hiked about a mile and half south across the ice to a large colony of Emperor penguins at the southeastern end of the island. These are the stars of the movies March of the Penguins and Happy Feet. They walk long distances across the ice to breed, and after the egg is laid it is transferred to the male who then stands on the ice through the severe Antarctic winter holding it on his feet.

The males in the colony huddle together against the cold. The march of the penguins was first observed by Captain Scott on his first expedition. Their chicks are some of the cutest things on the planet and infitinely photogenic. We have a couple of examples of Emperor penguins in our collections in Cardiff, including one presented to us by Lt Teddy Evans of Scott’s last expedition, and that will be in January.

This morning I presented my last talk to the Fisheries Department which was about the methods of collecting and identifying polychaetes. It seemed to go down reasonably well and then I handed back my key and left for the last time.

My samples are now officially with the Post Office hopefully to be on their way back to the UK shortly. As for me my journey back starts at 5am tomorrow morning. It will already be daylight then and will be the last time I see daylight at that time of the morning for a few months to come. Arrival back in the UK is likely to be a bit of a shock for me I think as there is currently around 8 or 9 hours less daylight there each day than here and the weather is now decidedly wetter and colder. Shortest day is fast approaching in the UK with longest day due here next week. Ah well.

Several weeks ago I pointed out that my challenge would be to still be finding new animals on Day 28. By my calculations that would actually be today so I failed there as there has been no new sampling since Friday which was Day 25. However, as I did have a new worm that day, from my final site, I think that’s pretty good going!

My sampling here has gone well and I’m really pleased with the variety of animals I have been able to collect. I’m looking forward to being able to spend some time looking at them in more detail in the New Year. I’ve enjoyed my time here and had an amazing opportunity to visit a place and see things that many others won’t get a chance to and I appreciate how lucky I’ve been.

I know that some of the people I’ve meet here have also been reading this blog and I’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone involved for all of the help I’ve had getting out here and during my stay, from loaning me cars to get around to coming out on the shores with me or taking me diving to get more samples. This trip wouldn’t have been nearly as successful without all of your help.  

 
The Shallow Marine Surveys Group, whose survey work I piggy-backed to go diving, do a fantastic job out here with their dive surveys, mostly as volunteers with a few grants to help with costs and the Fisheries Department allowed me free run of their lab at all hours.

Not least of course I must thank the Shackleton Scholarship Fund and National Museum Wales who have funded and supported this visit.

Thank you all!