Blackbird Singing In The Dead Of Night

Photo post time!

Before our late May trip to the United Kingdom, we'd taken just two very short trips in 2026: a long weekend in northern Arizona and a work-from-hotel most-of-a-week in New Orleans. For each of those trips, I pre-blogged an introduction to what I planned to be two incredible, multi-site birdwatching experiences. I was thinking roadrunners, condors and evening grosbeaks in Arizona and painted buntings, roseate spoonbills and pelicans in New Orleans. I even started one of those two posts with a question if every trip from now on needed a birdwatching post.

They didn't happen. Don't get me wrong, we birdwatched on both trips. But for whatever reason (and truth be told one of the reasons was that the main trail in Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge in New Orleans was closed), we didn't have an incredible birding experience in either spot. So no birdwatching post in Arizona and no birdwatching post in New Orleans. Nature doesn't always cooperate.

That had to change in England and Wales. No way was i going birdwatching away from home on three straight trips without having a treasure trove of bird pictures that I could no way, no how get at home. So I adopted a strategy that I thought could not fail: go birdwatching a lot. Like seven birdwatching excursions in a 16 night trip. It worked!!!

Rose-ringed parakeet, near Wormwood Scrubs, London.

Taking time out of a trip to go birdwatching seven times in a single vacation may seem like a lot, but most of these were either early morning walks or nice-to-haves on our agenda. Meaning we would squeeze them in if we could on an already packed day's schedule. Clearly we did some squeezing, although we had to swap out a couple of spots that were more local to our hotel and likely less productive overall. You can't always get what you want, right? 

Having said that, among the days "climbing" mountains, exploring castles, walking sheep and navigating canals in Wales, we did plan one full day dedicated to birdwatching on Skomer Island. This was our intentional birdwatching splurge on this trip requiring a two hour drive each way (including a "required" 30 minute early arrival time) and a boat trip from the mainland to the island itself. 

Let's start our birdwatching narrative with Skomer.

So what's so great about Skomer? Puffins are what's so great about Skomer. Like 52,000 plus puffins. And yes, I know we've been puffin watching in both Maine (not great) and Scotland (awesome!) in 2021 and 2022 but we can't resist a day seeing puffins. There's no way you can take a bad picture of a puffin. It's just not possible. These birds are so tame. They have no fear whatsoever of humans so it's not unusual to have a puffin land inches from where you are standing and head to their burrows. Or even just stand around right next to you. It is a super, super intimate experience. It took us walking like more than half of Skomer island (the perimeter loop on the island is about 6 kilometers) to find the right spots, but once you get there, it's completely worth it.

Skomer, by the way, is a commitment. You get dropped off in the morning and your return boat is five hours later. So don't get bored after about an hour because you are not coming back to the mainland for a while. There's also no food and limited water and bathrooms on the island. Be prepared with Tesco meal deals or whatever else you need to keep yourself going.

Puffins. No bad pictures. It's not possible. I'm telling you. 

Puffin-wise, I'd put Skomer below Lunga Island in Scotland that we visited in 2022. The puffin population on Lunga, while smaller by far, was more concentrated in a single spot which meant you never missed an awesome opportunity. On Skomer, things were a lot more spread out. More puffins total but over a much bigger area. We were also about three or four weeks later on in the year at Lunga when there was far more puffling-feeding going on and meant puffins flying back from the sea with mouthfuls of sea eels. Not so much of that at Skomer. Still, by the few pictures above, clearly we found some good looks at puffins. 

Where there are puffins on an island, there are inevitablly guillemots (what in the United States we call common murre) and razorbills and for sure there were plenty of those on Skomer as there were on Lunga four years ago. But Skomer's much bigger size and geographical diversity separated itself from our time on Lunga in one significant way: more total bird species. We found a treasure trove of other birds on the island, including sedge warblers, northern wheatears, meadow pipits and a white wagtail, along with a pile of various gull species. 

There are also about 350,000 breeding pairs (not a typo) of manx shearwaters on ths island. That's more than half the worldwide population of manx shearwaters on a single island off the coast of Wales. So did we see a ton of these birds? No, we did not. In fact, we didn't a see a single live manx shearwater during our time on the island because they are nocturnal and live underground. The island is riddled with burrows requiring a strict stay-on-the-path rule on the island, lest we end up crushing a manx shearwater burrow so we felt their presence because it governed where we could go. No winging it and walking wherever we wanted on Skomer. And unfortunately, we did see a number of dead shearwaters on the island.

Trips like the one we took to Skomer may seem like a slam dunk in terms of birdwatching but we actually got super lucky here. We were told on the boat that this was the only day that whole week that passage to Skomer was even possible. 

Skomer birds (top to bottom): razorbills, sedge warbler, meadow pipit, northern wheatear and white wagtail.

OK, so that takes care of Skomer. What else stood out? I'd say Teifi Marshes Nature Reserve about 25 minutes south of Aberaeron (a good there-and-back early morning trip before breakfast was over at our hotel) in Wales and Hyde Park smack dab in the middle of London. We had not great (meaning Welsh on-and-off rain) weather at Teifi Marshes but the place is set up for success, with a number of excellently placed bird blinds and a good mix between wetlands and non-wetlands environments. We were also effectively alone, seeing (if I'm remembering correctly), just two other people in our time there. Hyde Park was totally different. We had awesome weather on that London morning but we also had a lot of company in tourists and joggers everywhere. Hyde Park, though, is stocked full of interesting birds.

I will say that a lot of the value we got out of both places (and other spots we visited) was in birds that are foreign to us but possibly very common to people who live in England and Wales. At both places we geeked out over blue tits, a bird I know as not in any way rare from my time growing up in England in the 1970s. But we don't have them in the United States and they are gorgeous little blue and yellow birds which are a treat to see. We spent a lot of time tracking them in Teifi Marshes and went way off the beaten path in Hyde Park when we sleuthed out a nest in a cavity of a tree. 

I have a feeling that if I lived in central Wales, I could go back to Teifi Marshes a lot. I feel we just scratched the surface of that spot. We saw some birds (like coots and mallards) that we can see locally here in the United States but I think spending some time in those blinds might reveal more than what we saw before breakfast on the day we visited. There were also a lot of trails that we left unexplored and we were there for over an hour.

Teifi Marshes birds (top to bottom): moorhen, grey heron and bullfinch.

I used to be amazed at the kinds of birds you can find in the centers of cities but not any more. We went birdwatching a few years ago in New York's Central Park and found a surprising amount of birdlife. London's Hyde Park was a similar experience. I guess birds have to live somewhere and while most cities have trees sprinkled all over street corners and small squares and parks dotted all over the urban landscape, really large city parks have a tendency to attract multiple species of birds, especially when there are water features. 

Hyde Park was maybe a 10 minute walk from our London hotel to the edge of the Park and entering the Park didn't immediately get us a lot of birds. But our experience definitely improved when we got to the water. Our walk from the north side to the main portion of The Serpentine (which is the largest body of water by far in the Park) in the south made us start to question our decision to visit the Park. But as soon as we hit the water, we saw ducks, swans, plenty of coots and some great crested grebes, a gorgeous waterbird that we haven't really seen many of up close before. It's a treat to find these in an urban environment on vacation (we also found some later in the week in Cardiff's also urban Bute Park).

But Hyde Park kept going and kept revealing more and more birds, including rose-ringed parakeets that are not native but are now definitely resident all over London parks these days. We saw a few elsewhere in London on this trip (picture above) and spent some time looking at them in St. James's Park on our trip to England in 2024.

Hyde Park birds (top to bottom): marsh warbler, grey wagtail, great crested grebe and blue tit.

If these three spots were the stars of our trip, there was a great supporting cast. Wormwood Scrubs in London. Cardiff Bay Wetlands Reserve. Bute Park in Cardiff. RSPB Conwy. We visited all with camera, binoculars and the Merlin app in hand. The quality and quantity of bird sightings at each place varied significantly. We definitely visited at least one at the wrong time of the day but if I know anything about visiting any place wild to see wildlife, it's that a place that seems empty on one day can be the best place you have ever been the next. 

If there was a disappointment in our birdwatching in England and Wales, it was the almost complete lack of birds of prey in our birdwatching trips and the lack of kingfishers, particularly considering how much time we spent next to water. On the raptor side of things, we did manage a look at an eastern buzzard while walking our sheep and we saw plenty of red kites in the skies all over Wales but only when we were driving around the various back roads from one place to the next. On the kingfisher sightings (or lack thereof), Merlin heard one at Teifi Marshes and we may have seen a flash of common kingfisher orange and blue in Cardiff. But those common kingfishers were certainly not common for us.

I won't blow-by-blow the complete bird list we came home with from the UK. But bear with me for three small stories that meant something. 

There are species of birds in the United States and elsewhere in the world that share the same name but which look significantly different than they do in the United States. I guess these three quick stories have that issue in common. 

If there's a signature English backyard bird for me, it's the European robin. It's a small sparrow-ish sized bird with an orange-red patch extending from its face to halfway down its breast. Here in the U.S. our American robins are larger with the orange-red color extending over its entire breast but not up to the face. Robins in England are cuter. They just are. But despite my childhood memories of them, they were not super common in the spots we visited.

But we found one in our time at RSPB Conwy that was utterly unconcerned with our presence and decided to hang out on some branches which were about mid-thigh height for me. We got to within less than six feet of this bird and it would not leave where it was sitting which allowed us to get a signature look at the bird I associate most with England (although admittedly, we were in Wales). These five minute or so looks like this that you get every so very rarely are always super intimate experiences. This one was no exception. It was like watching a puffin.

Next bird named similarly on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean? The goldfinch. We have goldfinches in the United States. They are very, very yellow with black on their wings and head. They are without question gold. European goldfinches look like the picture above. We'd never seen one before this trip. We were a bit astonished at the lack of gold.

For our last intentional birdwatching outing of this trip, we visited Cardiff Bay Wetland Reserve. The weather was terrible. It started out OK but it ended up pouring rain for about 20 minutes and we got soaked. The birdwatching was difficult. The wind before the rain clearly was making birds take cover for the coming rains and at one point I told Sophia that I'd be happy just getting a good picture of a goldfinch out of this trip. Nothing else. Just a goldfinch. And Boom! One landed in a tree right in front of us during a break in the weather when it was sort of sunny. Perfect picture pretty much. So fortunate but so much of photographing wildlife is being in the right place at the exact right time. We were.

I still don't get the gold thing. This is an attractive, interesting bird. I love the deep, deep red on the face and I love the flash of gold on the wing. But goldfinch? I don't know. Not what I would have named it. I assume it was named that before people who named all the birds of the world found the American goldfinch.

Birdwatching often comes with a soundtrack. If there was one bird which was sort of the universal background music for all our time in Wales and England (and not just when we were birding) it was the blackbird. Like robins and goldfinches, we also have blackbirds in the United States but ours locally are either red-winged backbirds (tons in the wetlands and swamps) or rusty blackbirds (which are just not that common). They do not live near our house.

If we heard tweeting in the United Kingdom, almost guaranteed (with a bit of an apology to the wrens in London) it was a blackbird. I just heard a bird! Blackbird. What was that song? Blackbird. That birdsong was really loud and clear! Blackbird.

Because they were so common, I didn't really focus on taking pictures of them until the very last day when I thought that I should have something to remember all the serenading they had done for us for the two weeks we were in country. The above picture is the best I got on our very, very last birdwatching excursion in Cardiff's Bute Park. I'm sure I could have done better if I had tried harder earlier in the week. Blackbirds made part of our experience in England and Wales. Including a picture is super appropriate in this post.

That wraps our England and Wales birdwatching story. I'm not sure we are going to get much in the way of blogworthy birding experiences in our last two significant trips of 2026 and the weather in the D.C. area for at least the next month or two is going to make it rough getting out to see birds for the rest of the summer. But rest assured we will keep going. As I finish writing this post I can hear one of the pair of catbirds that have nested in one of our trees in the back yard just furiously cheeping away. I never knew catbirds were such whistlers until we had a pair living right next to our house. Wildlife continues to reveal surprises which is why we will likely continue to chase it until we are no longer able. That day is hopefully a long, long way away.

The Ring Of Iron

The title of this post sounds scary, right? You have no idea. But only if you are Welsh.

I am fairly confident that growing up and going to school in England until the age of 11 that I studied some sort of English history. Not like detailed complicated stuff in Primary School but something I am sure. But before I started returning back to the country of my birth every two years-ish (no trip during 2020 because of COVID...) starting in 2014, I'm finding that I really didn't understand much about English history at all. And by English history, of course, I mean British history.

Let me take a quick stab at how I would sum up English / British history from the time I was 11 to let's say when I was 46ish.

A long time ago there were Picts and Gaels and Angles and Saxons living on what is now Britain. Eventually they got themselves organized and some how, some way, they decided that someone should be king. Then in 1066, William the Conqueror invaded from France, killed King Harold and took over the throne and thus the entire island of Britain. A couple of centuries later, there was a civil war started by some dude named Oliver Cromwell and that lasted a few years until the crown was restored. After that...the War of the Roses...exploration and colonization all over the world...Queen Victoria...and then we're at the 20th century.

That's it. That's my take on English / British history from when I was 11 and supplemented by absolutely zero learning for the subsequent 35 years or so.

Of course, it's way wrong. I mean, it's not exactly wrong. It's just missing some subtleties. 

Take what is now Wales, for example. And we'll start with William the Conqueror and 1066. 

Edward I, King of England 1272-1307.

When William the Conqueror took over what at that time was England, he established control over as much territory as possible by dividing his newly acquired land among lords that were loyal to him. That strategy allowed him to maintain control over a ton of land without having to secure the area with any sort of National or Crown-provided military force. But he didn't control the entire island of Britain right away. There were local warlords and landowners in charge of their own piece of turf who didn't turn over their lands to the Conqueror as soon as he was crowned. 

And spoiler alert: that situation lasted way beyond the rule of William the Conqueror. Over the centuries there was a ton of small scale, localized fighting and changing of hands of lands. Let's go forward in time about 150 years beyond 1066 and let's focus on Wales. Specifically the north of Wales. Which was decidedly not under the control of the English king at the beginning of the 13th century.

In the early part of the 13th century (so the early 1200s...), much of what is now the north part of Wales was controlled by a Prince named Llywelyn ab Iorwerth (or Llywelyn the Great). By all accounts, he was one of the greatest or maybe THE greatest Prince to have ever ruled the northwest part of Wales which somehow carried the title Prince of Wales. During his rule, Llywelyn managed to transform a territory ruled by lords engulfed in continual civil war into a territory which worked on all levels. He was even officially recognized as the Prince of Wales by the English crown.

But then in 1240, Llywelyn the Great died. And after a brief period where his son, Daffyd, was mostly kind of sort of in charge but then also died, all of Llywelyn the Great's lands and holdings passed to his grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. And this is where the end of Welsh independence started. 

Conwy Castle, as seen from the opposite bank of the River Conwy.

Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was no Llywelyn ab Iorwerth. He feuded with neighboring lords. He treated his people poorly. He started to call himself the Prince of Wales without endorsement from the King (who was then Edward I). And when Edward I called Llywelyn to Chester to pay homage, he declined the invitation. Now most of these things may seem like small stuff, but the direct snub to the King was pretty bold for the 1200s. And pretty bold to do it to Edward. We'll get to that last part.

Eventually of all Llywelyn's nonsense got to be too much for Edward and he mustered an army and marched on north Wales in 1277. Victory was swift and the resulting Treaty of Aberconwy left Llywelyn in place as a recognized Prince of Wales but with much reduced lands. That defeat and reduction in power really didn't sit well with either Llywelyn or his half brother Daffyd. 

Lots of Llywelyns and Daffyds in this story, I realize. Apologies. It will be over soon.

Five years later, Llywelyn was back at it, this time waging war on neighboring lords in the name of Welsh independence. And this time, Edward had had just about as much as he could take was determined to leave Wales with a different outcome. He marched on Wales again but this time killed Llywelyn (and Daffyd, who ended up with his head on a spike) and kept the land he captured, determined never to deal with Welsh rebellion or skirmishes again. 

To ensure control of the land (and complete subjugation of Wales), Edward decided not to rely on anyone Welsh to hold lands and keep things in order. Nor did he settle on some kind of agent of the Crown to do the same thing. Instead, he relocated a population of English men, women and children into Wales and granted them land and safety. And he constructed a series of ten castles from Howarden and Flint in the northeast down to Aberystwyth and Builth in the southwest. The castles collectively were known as the Ring of Iron and they were there for one purpose: to make sure Wales would never have any illusions about being independent ever again.

I am sure there is a ton of detail missing in my four paragraph description of two wars waged by Edward I on Wales. But I think a little history is important every now and then. Or like maybe all the time.

Caernarfon Castle, as seen from the parking lot.

So, we visited some castles in Wales. Let me say a few words about that because this is not something we would normally do. And this is going to make me sound spoiled.

One of the side effects of traveling so much (I know...poor me...just bear with me here...) is that we end up seeing a lot of the same sorts of things in all sorts of different points on the globe and we start to get numb to the exposure of it all. I don't know how many churches, royal palaces and botanical gardens we have been to over the last 13 years or so but it's a lot. I mean like a ton. So many that we really start to question if we really need to go to another one. I mean how is it going to be any different than the last one or two of five or ten of whatever we happen to be thinking about visiting?

Castles are on this list, although let's face it, this is mostly an issue only in Europe. Since I turned 45, I've been to castles in Germany, Ireland, Scotland and maybe one or two other places and they are all pretty much the same. Big stone walls; no roofs; maybe a moat and a drawbridge; a dungeon sometimes; and maybe a keep or some lawns inside. If there's one place I associate castles with more than any other land, it's Britain. I grew up there in a town with a castle in it, for crying out loud. We can't visit every castle that is near where we are going when we travel. We just can't.

So when I drafted my first list of what we could possibly see in England and Wales, the list had a few castles on it. Seriously? After all that numb-ness, I wanted to visit another castle or two? The answer is yes. Because some of those castles in the Ring of Iron built by Edward I are quite possibly the best that have ever been designed and built on this planet ever. And yes, that sentence deserved two "ever"s. We had to visit some castles in Wales.

The outside walls of Conwy (top) and Caernarfon (bottom).

We picked two. And then added a third. 

When I wrote earlier that Edward I built a series of 10 castles to make up the Ring of Iron, that wasn't exactly true. It would be more accurate to say that he started building 10 castles but some were just never finished, including one of the three that we visited. Castles cost a lot of money, even for kings, and building 10 of these things in quick succession apparently was more than the Crown could afford. 

Four of Edward's 10 castles have been honored with a UNESCO World Heritage Site designation. These four today (Harlech, Beaumaris, Caernarfon and Conwy) are largely intact and apparently exhibit outstanding military architecture design courtesy of Edward's castle architect, James of St. George. We selected two of these four to visit, Caernarfon and Conwy, and then added a third in Aberystwyth Castle, which just happened to be there in rainy Aberystwyth and totally free when we were in town. Other than the picture below, I'm skipping Aberystwyth. There's just not much to engage with there.

Some of what's left of Aberystwyth Castle, built after the first of Edward's Wales campaigns.

Both Conwy (1283-1287) and Caernarfon (1283-1330, but never completed) are castles that are attached to a larger city wall. Harlech and Beaumaris are not. We didn't know this before we got there. We just happened to pick two that were a combined castle and attached town in one package. Both the castles and the walls were built by Edward: the castle to hold the royal quarters and those Crown officials needing those sorts of accommodations and the town to hold the English citizens that Edward imported to Wales as part of his plan to crush the spirit of the Welsh.

Generally speaking, the condition of both castles and their attached walls are pretty similar. The perimeter of each of the castles is generally intact, with impressive towers (like lots of towers) at various points around exterior walls. The town wall at Conwy is intact; you can actually walk around the whole of the perimeter as long the town is not performing work on parts of the wall when you are in town like they were in late May of 2026. Caernarfon's walls are a bit less continuous. There are clearly spots which are largely intact, particularly along the west side of the town.

Once you move inside of each castle, the condition of the interior is also pretty similar between the two. There's basically nothing there. Maybe a stone vault or arch here and there but they are way more runied on the inside than the outside. This makes a ton of sense. The interiors of medieval castles didn't need to be made out of stone. The shell was the thing that mattered and stone was expensive. Less durable interors made sense on a number of levels. 

A model showing Caernarfon Castle and the attached town. Very GOT-ish.

The presence of both castles when you are next to them is super impressive. The walls are thick and high and full of murder holes, tiny gaps through which things can be dropped on sieging forces with a very low risk of any retaliation. They are also both sited next to a significant body of water, restricting any sort of land attack. 

If you plan to visit and you want to be fairly comprehensive about your time in these castles, plan on about an hour for Conwy and about twice that for Caernarfon. And by walking the whole thing (or most of each one) you get a sense for how the circulation is or is not tied together. I don't know how many towers there are at Caernarfon but each one seems like it's one way up and one way down and there's nothing joining these things together above absolute ground level. That means a ton of climbing to get up each one. On the day we visited Caernarfon, my step counter on my phone topped out at over 12,000 steps and I'm convinced at least half of those were actual steps climbing and descending the very large and oversized steps in Caernarfon's towers. At the end of two hours, I was done climbing steps. I can't believe people ever could do this in armor.

Of the two castles, I'd go with Conwy as my favorite. I'm half convinced I'm developing some sort of ADD as I age and definitely taking in something that was smaller with fewer spaces to investigate was preferred over massive Caernarfon. I also think if someone asked a random person to draw a castle, there's a good chance that they would produce something close to what Conwy looks like. It's like a cartoon version of a castle but of course, cartoons generally come from the real thing. From across the water, it's just four massive towers with crenellated walls connecting the towers. I love it. 

I also love the approach sequence to Conwy along the town walls. I know this is a very modern approach (I mean it's not like residents of the town on Conwy back in the 1200s would go to the castle for a picnic on a Saturday afternoon or something) but the walk from the parking lot along the old walls getting you closer to this massive medieval fortress with each step definitely builds anticipation for your visit. Of course, you don't enter the castle the way they did back in the day. The original staircase (which is now mostly ruined) to the front door is super steep. The gentle paved ramp is much better for our 21st century physiques. 

The approach to Conwy along the city wall and the interior of the castle today.

There's something else that we got out of our visits to Conwy and Caernarfon: Edward I was one bad dude. And I'm not using bad in a good sense. Bad means bad here.

Maybe it was the time that he was alive. Maybe it was the fact that he was bigger and stronger than pretty much everyone around him (Edward was 6'-2"). Maybe it was the fact that he was personally involved in wars for much of his life (including one of the Crusades to the holy land). Maybe it was because he was the King of England. But Edward I (or Edward Longshanks as he was sometimes known) did not seem like a pretty nice guy.

The historical stories about Edward's fits of rage are a little unbelievable, including him ripping out some of his son's hair from his head and someone else dying in Edward's presence just because Edward was Edward. But there seems to be little debate about the fact that Edward had an unpredictable and fierce temper and was also vindictive. I mean he did put Daffyd ap Gruffudd's head on a spike, but that's not really all he did to that dude. He first had him dragged alive through the streets of Shrewsbury, hanged him, revived him and then disemboweled him and burned his entrails while he was still alive. Of course, all kings might have behaved similarly back then. I'm not sure. 

He also seemed pretty vindictive towards the Welsh. Maybe they deserved it. But the kind of personal revenge he plotted and executed seemed petty. I mean moving in an entire population of loyal subjects just to make sure the locals (who I assume were automatically lower in social status) understood their place is a lot of effort to show someone who's boss. He also removed any sort of notion of there being a Prince of Wales who was actually Welsh. He crowned his own first-born son as the Prince of Wales, making his offspring the first non-native Prince of Wales in history, a tradition which continues to this day to still humiliate the Welsh. And that's outside of the whole mutilation of Daffyd ap Gruffudd's body while he was still alive. 

There is speculation that Edward used the story of the dream of Roman emperor Magnus Maximus as inspiration for the construction of Caernarfon castle. In the legend of Magnus Maximus, who had strong Welsh ties, the emperor dreamed that he met a beautiful princess and when he awoke, sent messengers out to find her while also building a castle to impress her. It is thought that the colored banding on the walls of Caernarfon is deliberately imitative of the walls of Constantinople and that the legend of Maximus' dream was a source of inspiration. World leaders using emperors from past and long dead empires as a source of real inspiration to guide decisions in an era far removed from those times? Sounds like crazy stuff to me. Or maybe it happens often. Who knows? 

The interior of Caernarfon and a view of the town wall from one of the Castle's towers.

These two impenetrable fortresses that Edward built that we visited by the way? Both captured by the Welsh.

OK, so it was really brief in one case. 

Caernarfon Castle was captured by Welsh rebel leader Madog ap Llwelyn in 1294 and held for a year. How awesome a name is Madog, by the way and I promise that's the last Llwelyn in this post. 

At Conwy in 1401, two Welshmen disguised themselves as carpenters convinced the guards to let them in while everyone who would usually be inside the Castle was at Good Friday services. The two "carpenters" then killed the guards and held the castle for 15 days before a surrender was negotiated. 

Were Conwy and Caenarfon worth keeping on our agenda despite our (probably snobbish) aversion to visiting castles? Probably. I'm glad we went, particularly to Conwy. Does that mean all castles are back on future agendas? Umm...no. There's still a high bar for an intentional castle visit for us, I think. But I definitely feel a little more connected to English / British history. Subtleties, I'm telling you. 

The original (now ruined) entrance to Conwy Castle.

Sheep

Until the age of 11, I grew up in England, which meant I grew up with sheep in my life. By that, I don't mean like we had a flock of sheep in our back garden or anything (we didn't!), but sheep were out there. Somewhere. Somewhere close. Not that far away. If we took a drive to see my grandparents or went for a walk somewhere or even went on a family holiday (all too often to Wales in my grandma and grandpa's caravan), we were bound to find some sheep somewhere. You can't grow up English and not have sheep in your life.

Then we moved to the United States. All of a sudden...no sheep. Like none. Nowhere. Like lamb to eat was not a thing. No fluffy white animals baa-ing in the fields. No lambs gamboling in spring. Cows? Sure? Lots and lots and lots of cows and their chewing and their methane. But sheep? Nowhere to be found. Not a one. 

That lack of sheep here in America sticks with me. So much so that when I go to Great Britain and leave a city, the first thing I do when I see sheep is turn to whomever I am traveling with (newsflash: it's my wife) and say "sheep!" (although admittedly, sometimes it's "sheeps" or "sheepies"...). It's a thing. Sheep = Britain = home. What can I say? And this year, on my first trip to Wales since I was a kid younger than 11 years old, when I saw my first sheep in Wales, I am sure I exclaimed "sheep!" or my wife said the same thing to me. 

Or it might have been "sheeps" or "sheepies". 

Sheep on Mount Snowdon.

We expected that we would see a lot of sheep in Wales. And we were correct. There were sheep seemingly everywhere. In the fields. On the mountains. Around corners. Close. In the distance. Sometimes on the side of the road. Sometimes in the middle of the road. We figured maybe it would be worth spending a little time in Wales getting a little bit up close to some sheep and some sheep history.

Sheep history? Bear with me a little bit.

Invariably when we travel, we dig a little bit or a lot bit into the local history of the place where we are exploring. Wales was no exception to that rule. When we started to piece together some sites to explore Welsh history, we kept running into the Industrial Revolution. 

Why the Industrial Revolution? Well, because there was a lot of industry in Wales that was at the epicenter of the transition away from an agrarian economy and into manufacturing, that's why. And with industry to remove those natural resources from the land, you also need an infrastructure to transport those materials to points of sale. 

One of the first things that got inked into our agenda was a visit to the Pontcysysllte Aqueduct near Llangollen. We booked our passage over Thomas Telford's masterpiece of civil engineering early and it paid off with an amazing day puttering along in a narrow boat through part of the United Kingdom's vast canal network. 

Then we explored visiting a coal mine but we kind of did that in 2014 when we paid a visit to an old coal mine in Yorkshire (and then sort of repeated it with a tin mine visit in Cornwall just two years ago). We looked at slate as a source of inspiration and found that the National Slate Museum was closed for renovation. Bummer! 

So we decided to double down on sheep. Or wool. And if you are thinking that wool does not have any part in the Industrial Revolution, you'd be way wrong. 

Now, there was a time when wool production in Great Britain looked a lot like the photograph above. Individual men and women with spinning wheels in their houses taking wool that had been cleaned and straightened by hand and then made into thread and spun onto bobbins all over the land. And yes, I did ask if it was OK for me to take a photograph but clearly the woman on the left is the only one who was interested enough to pose and smile. We'll come back to these ladies later.

I know what you are thinking...where on Earth did we find a group of women sitting around using spinning wheels? Well...the National Wool Museum, where else? 

We journeyed through a lot of back roads and even more back, back roads that were one to one and half cars wide in our week plus in Wales. It took a lot of those sorts of roads to get to the National Wool Museum in Dre-fach Felindre. Don't know where that is in Wales? Neither did we. Apparently it's near Newcastle Emlyn Llandysul. Don't know where that is in Wales? Neither did we and neither do we still. But Google Maps knows. And despite a lot of very tight roads, we made it just in time for opening time at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. 

It was packed. I'm not kidding. The parking lot was at least half full. In the morning in the middle of nowhere. I told you wool was a big deal.

The National Wool Museum is housed in a pair of old textile mill buildings that used to be the Cambrian Mills. Industrialization makes a lot more sense, now, right? Mills I can get behind as a concept. They must have been chock full of looms making blankets or some other kind of large scale textile products, right? 

And yes, that is what happened at the old Cambrian Mills, but it's not all that happened. 

We started our tour of the Wool Museum by chatting to the four ladies above, then we moved past a quick history of sheep and wool and then walked into the first floor of one of the mills and found the willower and the carding engine. What's a willower, you might ask? It's a machine that disentangles wool. Pretty simple, right? 

No. No, it is not. This machine is massive. I'd guess (and I'm going from memory a bit here), it is about five to six feet wide and maybe 15 feet long. It's absolutely enormous. It's as complicated as a bunch of rollers with teeth through which cleaned wool is fed into from a large hopper of sorts. This machine is gigantic. And all it does is disentangle wool that people used to have to do by hand.

So what's a carding engine then? It's a machine that combs the wool after it's been willowed and gets it ready for spinning. It effectively converts wool fibers into almost wool thread. How big is this machine? Slightly bigger than the willower. Put these two machines end to end and it's about 30 to 35 feet long. All these two things do is take cleaned wool and make it into thread. Almost. They occupied an entire length of a giant mill building.

Industrial Revolution? Wool? Yes. Very much so.

The carding engine (top) and the spinning mule (bottom).

The machinery didn't stop there.There is a spinning mule on the second floor of the mill, a machine that basically takes the thread out of the carding engine and puts it onto bobbins. This machine is the one that killed spinning as a cottage industry in England and Wales and other parts of the world where that sort of thing went on. If you had one of these things, you no longer needed to pay women and men to do this at home. It was cheaper and faster to have a machine do it. That's amazing that you can buy this giant machine which you have to maintain and operate and that it pays off over time. I'm sure that return on investment was quick. Don't mess with the power of machinery.

After the spinning mule? Some looms and some machines to dry and finish the final products woven on the looms. The scale and size of the machines in the Museum is staggering. I can't imagine how revolutionary these would have seemed to people back in the 18th century when some of these contraptions were rolled out. We think we are scared by Artificial Intelligence today? Try seeing one of these giants for the first time. It must have been astounding.

Some of these things are absolutely gorgeous, by the way. These are old school machines. Large mechanisms made up of giant pieces of iron that move and interlock and work together precisely to make what once seemed impossible into very real possibilities. I cannot imagine the noise and the heat coming off these machines. We were told they were originally coal-fueled and steam-powered, although there is an operational water wheel outside one of the two mill buildings. I am sure at some point water was used as some sort of power for the whole process.

Mills, with an abundance of natural materials from all the sheep in the country, proliferated in Wales. In the late 1800s there were 23 mills in the area around Dre-fach Felindre alone. If we thought this was in the middle of nowhere today, I can't imagine how it would have been 140 or so years ago. There must have been mills and nothing else. And it must have been noisy and dirty.

The absolutely gorgeous teasel gig (top) and the old water wheel (bottom).

Wool comes from sheep, right? 

Not a trick question. It does come from sheep.

Earlier in this post I wrote that we doubled down on sheep and then all I've done since that sentence is write about the National Wool Museum. But we did do something else sheep-related before we went to the Wool Museum. And it wasn't about history or learning or the Industrial Revolution. It was about chilling with some sheep for a bit.

What exactly does that mean? We took a sheep for a walk. That's what that means.

Say hi to Biscuit. She's a nine year old Ouessant sheep, which apparently is pretty old for a Ouessant. Ouessants are often called Breton dwarfs; they are the smallest naturally-occurring breed of sheep in the entire world and they originated (maybe not surprisingly given their alternate moniker) in Brittany, France. On an island name Ouessant, if you must know. They tend to top out at about 19 or 20 inches tall. That's a pretty small sheep.

We didn't meet Biscuit in Brittany. We met Biscuit in Wales in a town called Crai, which is somewhere in the vicinity of the Brecon Beacons National Park. And if you thought the National Wool Museum was in the middle of nowhere, Dre-fach Felindre has nothing on Crai. It took us the better part of 3-1/2 to 4 hours to get there from Llandudno. Not a quick trip. 

Biscuit lives on the Aberhyddnant Organic Farm in Crai along with a number of other sheep of various species. Pretty much all of those other sheep, including some April born lambs, are bigger than Biscuit. We were there to walk one of the sheep on the farm for about 45 minutes to an hour. 

And no, I'm not kidding. We went to the middle of nowhere to walk a sheep. So did six other people who we'd never met before. Sheep trekking is a thing in Wales, I guess.

Introduction to the flock (top) and those sheep not eligible for selection on the move (bottom).

First activity? Sheep selection. Socks. Fluffy. Patches. Jacob. Benji. And of course Biscuit. Maybe there was a Bo in there. Some others that I can't remember. I picked Biscuit because she was absolutely the smallest adult sheep I had ever seen in my life and I figured if there was any chance of a sheep bolting or getting out of control under my care, better that I have a 35 pound or so sheep to deal with than something larger. 

Rookie sheep walker. What can I say? 

Next up? Rules of the road. Keep the lead (that's leash in American) on the same side of the sheep's head as you are standing; if you lose control of your sheep, it will go find other sheep to be with and chasing it won't make things any better; and sheep have absolutely no spatial awareness so beware those horns because they don't register as being there to a sheep. 

Biscuit had no horns. I'm good with that last rule. Or so I thought. 

What comes next? Take your sheep by the lead and let's go! Walking time!

Let's go, Biscuit!

If this isn't one of the silliest and most self-indulgent things I have ever done in my life, I don't know what beats it. I mean, we drove almost 4 hours to get to a farm and paid someone to let me walk one of their sheep for an hour (to clarify...Sophia also had her own sheep). But when am I ever going to have the opportunity to do this again? And why NOT do this? There's no answer to that last question by the way because there is no acceptable answer. This was a can't miss experience. 

What's it like walking a sheep? It's pretty relaxing. There's absolutely no stress involved in leading a fluffy sheep around through fields both empty of other sheep and full of other sheep. It's actually kind of peaceful. If the sheep want to walk, let them walk. If the sheep want to eat, let them eat. If they just decide to stand still, you can generally get them going with a tug of the lead. They are very inclined to be led. They are, after all, sheep. 

Biscuit, by the way, is all sheep. And by that I mean a natural born follower. I was told at the beginning of our sheep trek that Biscuit is pretty docile and that she is happy just following a "big white bottom" (not my words). That description of Biscuit is spot on. Give her a couple of other sheep to follow and she's all in! She's motoring as fast as those little Breton legs can carry her. Third or fourth or even second in a pack and she's off! 

But get to the front of the pack and she stopped dead in her tracks. Not interested in being out front in any way. Not Biscuit. Not this tiny sheep.

Biscuit following other sheep.

She's also a talker and not much of an eater. All of the other sheep seemed to be stopping regularly to munch of some leaves. Biscuit? Not interested. She was all about the walk except for one spot where she did actually stop for a snack until like three or four other larger (because ALL sheep are larger than Biscuit) piled over and on top of her and pushed her aside to get to whatever she had found to eat. Poor Biscuit.

This is the point in the walk when sheep having no spatial awareness kicked in for me. In the process of knocking my sheep out of the way, one sheep also managed to get his or her horns into my waist area on the way to the greenery. "I have horns? Didn't notice. Needed a bite to eat. If my horns get in the way, who cares." Yes, that's my made up dialog from the sheep that horned me.

But when it came to voice and volume, Biscuit was the champ. She was making way more noise than any of the other sheep which also endeared her to me. We managed to get a video of her looking over to her left before she turned towards the camera, let out a giant "baaaa" and then turned back away, her cameo for the camera done for the day.

Yes, I got attached to a sheep in Wales. I'm telling you...I got the best one.

Larger sheep moving Biscuit (center) out of the way.

It is amazing to think that at one time, sheep like Biscuit were part of a giant economic engine that drove trade between countries and caused men to invent huge contraptions to maximize the return on the power of their precious natural resources that just happened to have four feet. Before sheep were domesticated and wool was sourced and converted to thread, mankind relied on plants and skins for clothing, I guess. Imagine having a predictable product that could be reliable made into intentional garments when you had no such option before. It must have been revolutionary.

I did have one question about this whole thing though: what did sheep do with all this wool before humans were around? Did it just grow and grow and grow because there were no men and women with shears around to cut it off? 

The answer from the farm? Apparently sheep were bred over time to produce the maximum amount of wool, which of course required frequent shearings from humans. 

What does the Wool Museum think about that? Pretty accurate, I guess. The Wool Museum did acknowledge that breeding is a factor in how modern sheep produce wool. But it also mentioned that before sheep were domesticated (that would be more than 5,000 years ago in Wales), sheep would shed their wool in the summer. Makes sense. I mean we sort of saw the same thing happening to wild bighorn sheep in Rocky Mountain National Park six years ago.

Sheep? Industrial Revolution? Yes, it's a thing.

Two last wool thoughts. 

First, if it wasn't obvious already, I loved the National Wool Museum. The place completely fascinated me and it started before I even set foot inside the old Cambrian Mills. Outside the Museum, there's a natural dye garden. Who knew that the roots of the madder plant were used to dye wool red? Certainly not me, who had never even heard of a madder plant.

Second and lastly, the woman on the left spinning and smiling at us and who was so gracious to walk us through a lot of the mechanics of using a spinning wheel? She was spinning thread from the very same farm where Biscuit lives. Connections. I'm telling you. The things we connect to each other when we travel.

You know the next time I'm in England or Wales and I see sheep, I'm saying "sheeps!". It just has way more meaning now.