Coal and slate built the towns. Song, verse and a language older than England kept them company.

Some of it is history now. The pits closed, the quarries went quiet, and the men who worked them are photographs on a chapel wall. The rest never stopped. The language is still in daily use, the choir still rehearses on a Tuesday night, and there are poets, painters, printmakers and makers working in Wales right now whose names most of the world has never heard.

We make things that carry all of it forward, so that none of it has to be explained in the past tense.