There was an interesting piece on the BBC breakfast show this morning featuring the Knighton rugby club or Tref y clawdd to give the team its proper name. The point of the segment was to highlight the Wales/England rivalry at a club whose pitch straddles the border. Pleased to say that most of the players support Wales - I've noticed that a few grumpy Welsh bloggers have been unfairly pooh-poohing what they call 80-minute-patriots recently. My own view is far better that than a no-minute-patriot.
One of the young players said that although they didn't have a Welsh accent his father had always told him that the border folk were the first line of defence for Wales. In part that's very true - after all the Saxon advance was pretty much stopped at Knighton and the Normans didn't fair much better. Indeed the tide of language-shift took nearly a thousand years to travel from Knighton to Rhayader. One thing the lad did get wrong was the accent bit - there isn't one Welsh accent there are many, and an East Radnorshire accent is just as much an authentic Welsh accent as anything heard from the mouth of Robin McBryde or Neil Jenkins.
In the meantime here's a youtube channel with some fabulous pictures of 20C Knighton.
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