#St Fagans

[thesilicontribesman]

Bryn Eryr Recreated Iron Age Roundhouses, St. Fagans National Museum of History, Cardiff, Wales

[praetorianxxiv]

This was my first outing in my Praetorian Guard uniform. I was part of the Steampunk Christmas festivities at St Fagans near Cardiff (South Wales).

It was a joint Steampunk party for the Swansea, Cardiff and Chepstow societies.

Uniform I wasn't able to bring my lasgun on site.

[llyfrenfys]

Cool event happening in St Fagans on the 22nd of July!

I'm in Aberystwyth and sadly can't go, but if you're in the area I'd highly recommend you take the tour with Oska and Reg- I worked with them a while back when I was an ACP in the Trawsnewid project and their tour is sure to be great! (They also run a really cool art collective called S.P.A.F. collective which I also reccomend checking out!)

The tour is 14+, bilingual (printed materials) and pay what you can - it's happening at 12-2pm on the 22nd of July 2023.

[artofgaryyeung]

中文👇I enjoyed sketching at St Fagans National Museum of History always especially it was such a sunny spring day. 每次前往威爾斯歷史博物館，我都同樣享受在這裏速寫，尤其是春天天色晴朗的日子。

[pad-wubbo]

"Golden Crinkle"

Infinite Painter (right).

A photo (left) I took of fallen leaves, ducks, water and the reflection of green on the water at St. Fagans Museum, and a version of it doctored with so many filters and layers that I forgot what exactly I did to it on the right. The altered version looks like some kind of gold hoard in a crystal cave, or something. A bit like the glitched Hidden Palace Zone in the final cartridge version of Sonic 2.

I publish my photograph with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.

[offworld-lamb]

Guyyyys I went to St Fagans on Saturday it was very fun.

[mygirlapril2]

halloween nights 2024 St fagans

Took apey to St fagans for our 2nd year. We had such a great time last year that I was really looking forward to it but it wasn't quite the same this year. Think apey was tired from sports squad and her first ever trick or treating but she just wasn't quite as into it.

her friends knocked the door just as we were getting ready to go to St fagans and she really wanted to go with them so I tagged along and we hit up about a dozen houses. Glad we did it because she loved it and she didn't kick up a fuss when we had to leave which I was super surprised about.

We had an OK time on the scare run and at the fairground and she lived arts n crafts and making a potion with a witch. On the way home she said "dad I had a nice time today " which I appreciated her making the effort to appease me. 🥰

[official-wales]

oh welsh christmas horse skull, we're really in it now

(some of) a Mari Lwyd demonstration at St Fagans

[heavy-nfld]

Liz Fagan Band are heading southwest!

[fionamccall]

St Teilo's: a complete pre-Reformation church decoration scheme

It's year's since I've visited St Fagan's open air museum in Cardiff. Since my last visit more buildings have been added to the collection, and it is quite a trek to look at all of them. What I really wanted to see was St Teilo's which is a church originally sited in Llandeilo Tal-y-bont in Glamorganshire, and removed to St Fagan's in the 1980s, where it was opened to the public in 2007. The wall paintings have been safely put in storage and the church repainted and decorated as it would have been in 1530 and the overall effect is stunning, including rood loft, statues, doom and other painted texts, symbols and images throughout.

There is a squint for looking at the communion.

The decorations have either been copied from those at St Teilo's or from other churches in Wales.

It is hard to make a selection from the many images reproduced in the church but here are a few:

Representation of the trinity that the Protestant iconoclasts would have hated.

Warning against sabbath-breaking, similar to one at Nether Wallop in Hampshire.

The paintings telling the story of the passion disprove the idea that before the Reformation ordinary people were ignorant of the bible, although the inclusion of words of Latin text might have encouraged the belief that they were efficacious for magical purposes.

[thesilicontribesman]

Brass And Silver Sword Guard (And Replica), St. Fagans National Museum of History, nr. Cardiff, Wales

This finely decorated sword guard was found near the Smalls Reef, off the Pembrokeshire coast. 1100-1125 CE

[stylized-corpse]

Liz Fagan Band’s full set from Heavy NFLD Fest!

[celestial-kestrel]

It's that time of year again where Mari Lwyd starts to be talked about and shared around and an INCREDIBLY misleading post gets shared a lot. As someone who grew up with Mari Lwyd I wanted to clear some things up.

Also hello, if you are unaware who Mari Lwyd is. This is about the Welsh tradition of the horse skull who visits houses during the Christmas to New Years period in Wales asking for alcohol.

First off and probably the most important one:

Mari Lwyd is not a cryptid!

I can not emphasise this enough. She. Is. Not. A. Cryptid. There is no story or mystery about a ghost or zombie horse roaming the Welsh valleys. She's not even supposed to be a ghost or a zombie. It's just a horse skull on a stick with a guy under a sheet. She's a hobbyhorse and a folk character used to tell Welsh stories and keep songs alive. When people spread the misinformation that she's a cryptid, it's the equivalent of saying Kermit the Frog is a cryptid.

She is actually only one character in a wider cast of characters who go door to door or, in more modern times, pub to pub. The cast of characters can change town to town and village to village but there are some common ones I see time and time again. The Leader, the Merryman, The Jester and The Lady are just some I see regularly. Punch and Judy used to be more popular a few years ago but I haven't seen them in a while as their tradition has mostly fallen out of popularity. In most cases, almost the whole cast will be played by men. Even the characters are considered and referred to as female. Though this again depends and varies by which group is partaking in the Mari Lwyd tradition.

This point also goes onto my second point,

Mari Lwyd does not rap.

I think this comes from a very common misunderstanding of what rap is vs spoken word. Rap is a very specific style of music originating from the African American communities of the USA and has it's own structure and motifs unique to it. It's a lot more complex than people give it credit for as a style of music and just flippantly assign anything similar to it as being rap. If someone is talking fast or reciting poetry, it is not rap. Or anything that is an exchange of words between two people is not a rap battle. Mari Lwyd does not do rap, actually something that gets left out of these posts is the fact Mari Lwyd does not even speak. It's actually the Leader, who does all the speaking and song based banter between the house/pub owner for entry. Mari Lwyd just clicks her mouth, bites people and bobs her head around.

I think Mari Lwyd is a really beautiful and unique part of Welsh culture. She's not actually as wildly celebrated as a lot of the posts make her out to be. Actually, I think most Welsh people themselves learn about Mari Lwyd through the internet as well. Her popularity is increasing thanks to the drive of local groups wanting to keep the traditions alive and a renewed desire to document Welsh traditions before they're gone. Which is why it's such a shame that she's turned into something she's not to earn horror points on the internet. I think this is why it bothers me so much to see the misunderstandings of the culture and the folk tradition. Mari Lwyd's origin is very hot debated as well as how long it's been going on for. But I think it's thanks to a lot of traditions like this that the Welsh language and our stories weren't lost forever. Welsh culture is recovering as is the language. But it's still in a very fragile place. I think it's why it's important to document and correct information when it's spread.

Anyway, if you want to see the tradition in action, here's a lovely video from the Cwmafan RFC going to one of the pubs for charity. It includes the song exchange with the pub owner for entry and the whole pub singing and joining in once Mari Lwyd and the rest are inside.

As well with another video from St Fagan's showcasing the more traditional and door to door form with the larger cast.

[denimbex1986]

'Calling all Whovians - this month marks the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who.

The series has seen 14 different time lords travel across time and space, encountering various fictional monsters and saving the world one Tardis trip at a time.

Much of the series was filmed in Wales, with famous places spotted in various guises by eagle-eyed viewers...

National Museum of Wales

The National Museum of Wales has been a stand-in for various art galleries and venues featured in Doctor Who, including the Musée D'Orsay in Paris and the International Gallery.

It featured in the show's 50th anniversary special The Day of the Doctor, which was shot in 3D and took five weeks to film.

St Fagans National Museum of History

The museum transports visitors back in time to various periods of Wales' history, so it made the perfect location for wartime episodes of Doctor Who.

It was the backdrop to David Tennant's adventure back to the eve of World War Two which aired in late 2006...

Southerndown beach

Southerndown Beach near Bridgend has featured in several episodes, but every Doctor Who fan will remember it for one of the series' most heartbreaking scenes.

In Doomsday, David Tennant's Doctor Who said a final farewell to Rose, played by Billie Piper...'

[dykeredhood]

Merry Terrormas and a happy new Erebus, @silkenbutterfly7! I’ve knitted you a welsh wig and Crozier’s cozy scarf from episode 5 🧊

Edit: this is the pattern I used for the welsh wig

[grays-life]

The Vulcan Pub, Cardiff. Side angle with the lovely Guinness Advert painted on the wall. Now moved to St Fagans Museum of Welsh Life. Photographed on Ilford Delta 100asa film.