Bardsey Island - Culture

Culture

It was tradition for the island to elect the King of Bardsey (Welsh:Brenin Enlli), and from 1826 onwards, he would be crowned by Baron Newborough or his representative. The crown is now kept at Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool, although calls have been made for it to return to Gwynedd. The first known title holder was John Williams; his son, John Williams II, the third of the recorded kings, was deposed in 1900, and asked to leave the island as he had become an alcoholic. At the outbreak of World War I, the last king, Love Pritchard, offered himself and the men of Bardsey Island for military service, but he was refused as he was considered too old at the age of 71. Pritchard took umbrage, and declared the island a neutral power. In 1925 Pritchard left the island for the mainland, to seek a less laborious way of life, but died the following year.

Yorkshire born poet, Christine Evans, lives half the year on Bardsey Island, spending the winters at Uwchmynydd. She moved to Pwllheli as a teacher, and married into a Bardsey Island farming family. While on maternity leave in 1976, she started writing poems, and her first book was published seven years later. Cometary Phrases was Welsh Book of the Year 1989 and she was the winner of the inaugural Roland Mathias Prize in 2005.

Edgar Ewart Pritchard, an amateur film-maker from Brownhills, produced "The Island in the Current", a colour movie of life on Bardsey Island, in 1953. A copy of the film is held by the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales.

Opera singer Bryn Terfel, a patron of the Bardsey Island Trust, has performed in the island's chapel; and triple harpist Llio Rhydderch in 2002 released Enlli, an album inspired by the spiritual emotions evoked on the pilgrimages.

Dilys Cadwaladr, the former school teacher on the island, in 1953 became the first woman to win the Crown at the National Eisteddfod, for her long poem Y Llen; and artist Brenda Chamberlain twice won the Gold Medal for Art at the Eisteddfod; in 1951 for Girl with Siamese Cat, and in 1953 with The Christin Children. Some of the murals she painted can still be seen on the walls of Carreg, her home from 1947 to 1962. Wildlife artist Kim Atkinson, whose work has been widely exhibited in Wales and England, spent her childhood on the island and returned to live there in the 1980s.

Since 1999, Bardsey Island Trust has appointed an Artist in Residence to spend several weeks on the island producing work which is later exhibited on the mainland. A Welsh literary residence was created in 2002; singer-songwriter Fflur Dafydd spent six weeks working on a collection of poetry and prose. Her play Hugo was inspired by her stay, and she has produced two novels, Atyniad (English: Attraction), which won the prose medal at the 2006 Eisteddfod; and Twenty Thousand Saints, winner of the Oxfam Hay Prize, which tells how the women of the island, starved of men, turn to each other.

In 2009 Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog became the first electric rock group to play on the island, as part of S4C's "Bandit" series.