Elystan Glodrydd

Now here's a new website the idea of which will gladden the heart of any Radnorian with historical interests. Why it has even made the pages of this week's County Times. The proposed gathering of Elystan's descendants in Llanbister this coming October could be a sizable affair though, as it's doubtful if anyone with the slightest hint of a Radnorian ancestry isn't related many times over to those princes of East Central Wales who claimed descent from old EG.

Of course a lot of folk have no time for heraldry and genealogy, no doubt because of the way it has been hijacked by the likes of the Countess of Wessex. The truth is that they do provide invaluable insights into history. Elystan, his name is actually a Cymicised version of Athelstan, was the patriarch of leaders who led the Welsh resistance, often successfully, for half a millennium, in the lands between the Severn and the Wye.




As that great patriotic bard of the 15C Lewis Glyn Cothi declaimed:

Tarian Elystan fal iâ,
Iddo hon a ddihuna,
Ac ynddi'n meistriol'r drin
Ben baedd yn erbyn byddin.

(The shield of Elystan like ice, is awakening unto itself, and within it mastering the threat, the head of a boar against an army)

That's the ticket.