Come and join us next week at the 2023 Llŷn ac Eifionydd National Eisteddfod, 4 August to 12 August 2023

We are really looking forward to next week’s 2023 Llŷn ac Eifionydd National Eisteddfod. This year the Eisteddfod is being held at Boduan, Gwynedd, LL53 6DT, near Garn Boduan a prominent Iron Age hillfort covering 25 acres.

During the week we will be joined on our stand by other heritage organisations for a week-long programme of activities, events and heritage information. They include the Portable Antiquities Scheme, Gwynedd Archaeological Trust, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and Addoldai Cymru (Welsh Religious Buildings Trust); Cadw will also be providing information. On Thursday afternoon, 10 August, we will be running a ‘Place Names Surgery’ where you can contribute your place names to the List of Historic Place Names so they can be protected, and put your questions about Welsh place names to our expert, Dr James January-McCann. Every day we will be offering an exciting range of children’s activities, including making and designing your very own ‘duck-stamped’ pot as used two thousand years ago by the Iron Age inhabitants of Pendinas hillfort (Penparcau, Aberystwyth), and building your own Lego monument as well as colouring sheets and word searches. We have also created a new range of free info-cards with striking images and details of current work and projects including our NLHF- funded partnership community archaeology project on Pendinas hillfort. As usual, we will be offering a range of books with special Eisteddfod show discounts. When visiting our stand, don’t forget to enter our competition with the chance of winning a signed copy of Darganfod Tai Hanesyddol Eryri/ Discovering the Historic Houses of Snowdonia.

This year our stand (numbers 425 and 426) will be in Row 4 (Heritage Row), near Prifysgol Aberystwyth and The National Library of Wales.

Our exhibitions will include a partnership exhibition with ‘British Ugandan Asians at 50’ on the Tonfanau Resettlement Camp. This is the first event of our exciting new project recording Welsh Asian heritage: ‘Places I remember’. This project will celebrate Welsh Asian culture, particularly the history of those Ugandan Asians expelled from Uganda in 1972 by Idi Amin and initially settled at Tonfanau in Wales. The exhibition will include contemporary news film of the events in 1972 kindly shared by The National Library of Wales Broadcast Archive.

The week’s events:

Monday 7 & Tuesday 8 August: David Howells from the Portable Antiquities Scheme will be available to discuss and identify finds.
Wednesday 9 & Thursday 10 August: Staff from the National Lottery Heritage Fund will be on hand to advise about grants for heritage projects.
Thursday 10 August: Place Names Surgery with Dr James January McCann. Contribute your place names to the List of Historic Place Names so they can be protected, and put your questions about Welsh place names to our expert, Dr James January-McCann.
Friday 11 & Saturday 12 August: Make Spindle Whorls with staff from Gwynedd Archaeological Trust and discover more about the archaeology of the area.

Why not find out more about historic monuments in Boduan and the Llŷn by searching Coflein and downloading the Commission’s Caernarvonshire Inventory, Volume III: West, which is free to download from our online bookshop. Monuments near the Maes include Plas Boduan, a large Georgian mansion close to St. Buan’s Church, the nineteenth-century former Post Office, Plas Boduan Lodge and Efail Gledrydd, a former smithy which was worked by the three generations of the Jones family until its closure in 1952.

We look forward to seeing you and answering your heritage questions!