Abstract
What does it mean for waters, places, and people to resist their absorption by the expansive logics of capital and the state? This paper interrogates the politics of unabsorbed life and matter through the case of the Tryweryn valley in North Wales, whose flooding to create a reservoir supplying Liverpool entailed the drowning of the Welsh-speaking village of Capel Celyn in 1965. This became a touchstone in Welsh cultural memory and British hydropolitics, but its relevance extends far beyond, revealing the enduring mobilities of water, resistance, and memory, leaking across times and geographies. Focusing on three key moments of activism - the 1956 ‘Hands Off Tryweryn' march, the militant campaign of bombings and sabotage in the 1960s, and the creation and persistence of the ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn' (‘Remember Tryweryn') mural - I trace the mobilisation of water’s meanings and materialities to contest the extractive logics behind the reservoir. Following Raymond Williams' statement that such movements emerged from ‘unabsorbed' places and subjects, I take seriously this aqueous framing of incorporation (or not) by capital and the state, to ask how the Tryweryn campaigns expressed the ‘politics of the unabsorbed', extending this through a political-ecological framework informed by Deleuze and Guattari's theory of assemblage. In addition to its close analysis of the case, and its demonstration of water as a constitutive feature of political formations, the article therefore contributes a novel framework for analysing and evaluating territorial resistance politics, as complex, open processes centred on dismantling the material and poetic assemblages of absorption. The seasonal reappearance of Capel Celyn's ruins in drought-stricken summers reveals that absorption is never total. As climate crisis redraws global hydrosocial relations, Tryweryn’s waters continue to unsettle, resonating beyond their local context, and offering both a warning and a resource for imagining solidarity in a drowning world.
Introduction
“The tiny village of Capel Celyn in North Wales nears the end of its centuries of history, for in a few months’ time, the waters will be rising above its rooftops” Pathé news reel, March 1965.
‘Does Liverpool want this spectre in its water?’ Protest placard, ‘Hands Off Tryweryn’ march, Liverpool 1956
In the heat of an unusually hot summer in 2022, the waters of the Llyn Celyn reservoir in North Wales reached so low a level that they revealed the flooded ruins of a village whose name rings in Welsh cultural memory. The damming of the Tryweryn valley to form Llyn Celyn, which opened in 1965 and today still provides water for the city of Liverpool, entailed the flooding – or
This paper explores the political resistance that surrounded the flooding of that village and valley, through the lens of the water that was rerouted, amassed there, piped away, and that is now evaporating through the hot summers wrought by climate change. The analysis centres on three distinct moments, or currents of resistance: first, the 1956 ‘Hands Off Tryweryn’ march through the streets of Liverpool by Capel Celyn residents and supporters, as they sought to stop the flooding before it could begin; second, the militant campaign of the Free Wales Army and Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (Movement for the Defence of Wales) whose bombings, sabotage and hilltop military drills attacked the infrastructure of water extraction throughout the 1960s; and third, the ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’ (‘Remember Tryweryn’) graffiti, whose painting, vandalising, and proliferation have extended the memory of Tryweryn, and the question of what we are remembering, right up to the present. How did these diverse currents mobilise the meanings and materiality of water to resist the dominant hydropolitical regimes embodied in the reservoir project?
My answer to this question is developed by way of two hermeneutic tools. The first is the water. Tryweryn proposes a story not just of human agents – the evicted community, Welsh nationalists, bomb-makers, graffiti-daubers, a host of state actors and city politicians – but also of the of the waters themselves, whose movement in and out of Tryweryn, as floodings, extractions, evaporations and absorptions, represent an agency of their own, always spilling beyond the limits of strictly social action. They insist time and again on the question of the conditions of their flowing: what places and peoples these connect or cut off, and why.
The second analytical lens is drawn from a claim by Raymond Williams – that great cultural theorist who was both Welsh and the world's – contextualising the Tryweryn resistance within a wider turn in the era's critical politics, which he identified as increasingly emphasising
The article builds on previous accounts of the politics of Welsh reservoirs (Atkins, 2018; Cunningham, 2007; Griffiths, 2014; Whitehead et al., 2007) while extending these in important directions. Ed Atkins (2018) identifies ‘contested waters’ as a feature of Welsh nationalism, to which I contribute first a focus on the tactics and discourses of political action, and second an orientation to water's role not merely as a symbol but a concrete feature of political networks and possibilities. Hywel Griffiths (2014) explores the politics of
The data for this study is drawn from archives of newspapers, periodicals and testimony spanning the period. For the ‘Hands Off Tryweryn’ march I consulted the British Newspaper Archive, The National Archive, and People's Collection Wales, and analysis is based principally on reporting and documentary photographs from the
With this methodology therefore depending on the sensitivities of the researcher, I reflect on my own presence as the producer of this work. I was raised in Wales with a close relationship to Welsh land- and waterscapes, and vividly remember first hearing the story of Tryweryn from a friend whose father had been imprisoned for his role in the Free Wales Army. That story accompanied my own growing involvement with political activism, which ultimately gave rise to my academic research turning an ethnographic eye to networks in which I was politically active (Matthews, 2018, 2019). Taking this participatory research into the field of water activism (Matthews, 2023) I have developed my sensitivities to the hydropolitical while wading in rivers and lagoons with environmental justice campaigners across Europe. While the present research required me to locate my body in the relatively removed spaces of archive and desk, these experiences from within waterscapes and activist life were brought to my reading of the data.
I begin below by establishing the history of the Welsh reservoir projects, and the uneven resistance they encountered, placing this within the literature on water and power, and my interpretation of Raymond Williams’ diagnosis of ‘unabsorbed’ politics. I ask how this language of absorption can illuminate the spatial politics of water resistance, and apply the assemblage ontologies of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) as an analytical framework for understanding the politics of the unabsorbed. Following this, the article proceeds through three sections, each addressing the different activist currents, their enrolment of water and their adequacy (or not) in furthering ‘unabsorbed’ resistance. While distinguishing each of these currents, my account also follows the way in which traces of past events leak into later moments, as part of a fluid process of flows that are never fully stemmed. To conclude, the article considers how the memory and making-present of Tryweryn acquires new significance in the era of climate crisis, as long dry summers evaporate the reservoir, exposing once more the masonry and graves of Capel Celyn, a stark haunting not just of the lost village but of the many
Water, reservoirs and the politics of the unabsorbed
The flooding of the Tryweryn valley followed eighty years of water exploitation in Wales. This began with the creation of Lake Vyrnwy in Montgomeryshire, whose construction began in 1881 under the auspices of the Liverpool Corporation Waterworks, and involved the construction of Britain's first large stone dam and the flooding of the village of Llanwddyn, home to over 400 residents. Establishing a pattern that would become typical, local people and politicians were not consulted, with arrangements made directly between Westminster and Liverpool city officials (Atkins, 2018). The 1890s saw the beginning of the construction of a vast network of reservoirs, aqueducts and dams through the Elan and Claerwen valleys in Powys to provide water for Birmingham, a move decried by local MPs to no avail (Roberts, 2006). Into the twentieth century, hydrological projects were accompanied by Welsh land requisitions by the Ministry of Defence, which continued up to the Second World War (Griffiths, 2014), though this was met with a growing discontent. The plan by the Corporation of Warrington to drown the Ceiriog Valley near Wrexham in 1923 resembled previous projects, but this time a local Defence Association was established (see Roberts, 2006). Still, the administrations of cities in the English North-West continued to scout Welsh locations for new water sources, just as Birmingham expanded the Elan network well into the 1950s. It was in this context that the Tryweryn plan was announced in 1955, with the Tryweryn Reservoir Bill being passed at a poorly-attended session in Parliament where all present Welsh MPs voted against it (
That the valleys of Mid- and North Wales continued to present the ‘natural’ solution to English cities’ water problems is worth noting. Owen Roberts (2006) has documented how, in the nineteenth century, the dominant cultural imaginary of Wales among English elites shifted from that of a grim, unruly barbarism to more positive notions articulating
It was this turn to questions of culture and place that Raymond Williams identified within the two tendencies of the era's Welsh radicalism: the first, an urban socialism of industrial South Wales whose ‘necessary movement […] was into a larger society’ (Williams, 2003, p. 3); the second based in the country's West and North, more rural, more Welsh-speaking, and far less incorporated into the major formations of Britain's modern capitalist society. For Williams, the primacy of cultural questions reflected the ‘new thinking about culture’, identity and community informing the leading edge of the era's radical politics, from the British New Left to Black Power and Irish civil rights (Williams, 2003, p. 4), which constituted not a reactionary retreat from class struggle, but a new assault from the margins. Williams concluded that ‘it seems to be true that in late capitalist societies some of the most powerful campaigns begin from specific unabsorbed (and therefore necessarily marginal) experiences and situations’ (p. 4).
What does it mean to take seriously this term, ‘unabsorbed’, conjuring as it does an imagery of water and its mobilities? The use of water metaphors to represent and understand the dynamics of capitalism has a long history (see Langley, 2017; Pasanek and Polillo, 2011) and while this is sometimes deployed discursively to naturalise economic relations (Langley, 2017), it also courses through Marx, where capitalism ‘drown[s] the heavenly ecstasies’ of traditional culture (Marx, 1969), where labour time is ‘congealed’ into the commodity form, where capital ‘lives the more the more labour it sucks’ (Marx, 1976), and where capital's solitary ‘life impulse’ is ‘to absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour’ (Marx, 1976). From the everyday subsumption of workers’ time, to the grand processes of colonialism and primitive accumulation, it is clear that capitalism entails processes of capture, but understanding this through the image of absorption highlights something more specific (whether Williams or Marx intended this or not) where that which is outside the capital-state network is imagined
The work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) provides a framework for understanding Welsh reservoir resistance on these terms; that is as a dispute centred on the territorial problem of absorption. For Deleuze and Guattari, social and other relations unfold through processes of what they call ‘assemblage’, a governing concept describing the way bodies, language, affects and other elements are arranged in contingent, functional wholes. Particular possibilities and forms of agency (the term ‘assemblage’ is often the English translation of the French ‘
This helps to frame firstly the absorption of actual waters: dams and pipelines, and the speech acts that legitimate them, rearrange socio-natural assemblages to incorporate, or absorb, that which is valued – water as resource – while leaving
Colonialism provides the archetypal model of absorption as assemblage, requiring as it did the ‘manufacture’ of new geographies and property regimes (d'Souza, 2006), and the ‘hydrological fixes’ provided by cartography, property law, and accounting methods (Bhattacharyya, 2019). Such dynamics can also be found in the ‘internal peripheries’ (Wallerstein, 1991) – those outsides within – of contiguous states, and the ‘Celtic fringe’ of Wales and Scotland was taken as an early case to demonstrate this (see Hechter, 1975 on ‘internal colonialism’). Taking Spain as his object of study, Erik Swyngedouw's (2015) analysis of water's ‘enrolment’ by the state sees the centralising territorial project articulated not only through engineering works, but through an orientation to what water
This framework clarifies the political project of the ‘unabsorbed’, and a means of assessing each current of Tryweryn resistance in terms of their attempt to counter a process of selective absorption of ‘natural resources’, advancing already-dominant centres of agency. The activities of the community activists, saboteurs and graffiti painters were oriented to resisting the composition of the reservoir assemblage, interrupting the physical and symbolic connections that made it possible, and affirming
First current: the March to Liverpool
The ‘Hands Off Tryweryn’ march through Liverpool was organised for 21st November 1956, to coincide with a major meeting on the reservoir scheme by the Liverpool Corporation, and was the culmination of a campaign organised under the banner of the Capel Celyn Defence Committee (Atkins, 2018). Two bus-loads of demonstrators took the journey from Capel Celyn, including all but three members of the village community, supporters from nearby towns (some walking the seven miles from Bala) and a number of Plaid Cymru activists including leader Gwynfor Evans. Heading to the Town Hall, the marchers hoped some of their number would enter, and implore the councillors to save their village and valley. Maybe they could still be convinced to consider an alternative: an extension to the reservoir in the Dee: a supply route from Thirlmere, Cumbria (Thomas, 2013)? In the event though, they were not allowed into the building and would remain in the cold square outside, until heading home with little to show for their action. The Corporation would go on to entirely bypass Welsh councils planning directly with Westminster (Liverpool, Town Clerk's Office, 1956) with the Tryweryn Reservoir Act passed in July 1957.
The Liverpool march marks a first mobilisation of water's meanings, affects and associations, as part of a moral and emotional plea to the city's councillors and citizens, against the logic underpinning the reservoir plan. In a very concrete sense, these two places – Liverpool and Capel Celyn – had been part of quite separate socio-natural universes, but the reservoir water (or at this stage the promise of that water) now connected them, in that way that water always mediates relations between places. For Liverpool lawmakers this would be a water abstracted from the actual place and conditions of its sourcing, and so the marchers sought to
The main banner behind which they marched insisted ‘YOUR HOMES ARE SAFE. SAVE OURS – DO NOT DROWN OUR HOMES’ (
That these homes faced
This found perhaps its most evocative expression in a placard that clearly stands out from the rest as the only one to use an image. The rudimentary painted illustration depicted a hand holding a glass of water and, in the bottom of the glass, the chapel, houses and a few inhabitants of a submerged village (Liverpool Echo, 1957). Framed with the question ‘DOES LIVERPOOL WANT THIS SPECTRE IN ITS WATER?’, the placard not only extends a grim, supernatural threat of haunting, it grounds this in a common understanding and knowledge that water's mobility between places is always also about what it carries with it. More than this, it introduces the idea that, in the event of the marchers’ failure and the drowning of their homes, the traces and afterlives of the past would not be erased but would persist as an ongoing presence. If, as I have argued, new territorial regimes are never entirely final, the spectre in the water might be seen precisely as an unruly leakage, the germ of future unsettlings.
Within this, it is noteworthy that the marchers emphasised a relational dynamic between two localities, Liverpool and Capel Celyn, rather than England and Wales. The one banner that foregrounded the national question – ‘LIVERPOOL HANDS OFF WALES’ – still imagined its antagonist at the level of an uncaring city council, not a grand historical oppressor. The presence of Plaid Cymru, and the central role played by leader Gwynfor Evans, meant that Welsh nationalist framing remained an important feature of this phase of mobilisation (Thomas, 2013); Evans, who spoke at the rally that day, had stated that ‘No Welshman can feel happy about the position of his country when it is possible for any body outside Wales to take Welsh land and resources’ (Evans, 1956, p. 15). Nevertheless, the march sought to draw its legitimacy from that more immediate presence of direct victims and the concrete place of Capel Celyn, a feature worth highlighting in comparison to the militant wave that followed.
Looking back through the reports and documentary photographs of the march, it is hard to be shocked that this relatively small band of marchers and their smattering of hand-painted banners were unable to interrupt the prevailing forces embodied in that developing cityscape towering over them, and in the mixture of disdain and disinterest in the people they passed (Evans, 1996). In some ways this clear disparity in scale – the booming city, the tiny community – dramatised precisely that arithmetic that calculated that the ‘greater good’ was served by meeting the water needs of a city of over 700,000 at the expense of a few hillside homes. But this in turn depended on the ideological might of a symbolic framework – an ‘assemblage of enunciations’ – that affirmed a common sense of the United Kingdom as the logical territorial container within which water-as-resource might be allocated and rationally governed. Minister for Welsh Affairs, Henry Brooke, lamented ‘I cannot believe that preservation of the Welsh way of life requires us to go so far. I cannot believe that the Welsh people, of all people, want to stand outside the brotherhood of man to that extent’ (Thomas, 2013, p. 9), while the Liverpool Daily Echo, decrying the delusion of the protests, insisted that, as the water fell from the heavens it was ‘surely more God's than taffy's’ (p. 162).
In this way, a powerful confluence of material and discursive forces set about the absorption of Welsh land- and waterscapes – their territorial capture and integration with global capital flows – while the community of those inhabiting the land and riverbanks remained a valueless surplus. In the Liverpool march, that constituency of the unabsorbed began a sequence of resistance. In their call to ‘NOT DROWN OUR HOMES’ and their embodied presence as the people that would be sunk in the bottom of a glass of water, they insisted that the water could not be simply abstracted from its location and social interdependencies. At the time this insistence remained all but inaudible against the forces gathered for the reservoir project. Nevertheless, their activism did establish the context for a coming and intensifying wave of action, and the poetic articulations of this first current would later persist and seep into the politics of
Second current: the militant campaign
The militant campaign, which escalated through the decade of the 1960s, centred on a programme of sabotage, property damage and bombings, with twenty explosions and six failed detonations between 1963 and 1969 (Atkins, 2018). This represented not only significant tactical developments in the resistance to the reservoirs, but also a shift in the politicisation of water, predicated on water's potency in the material and cultural reality of mid-Century Wales.
The militant current was comprised of two distinct organisational forms – the Free Wales Army (FWA) and the Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (MAC, Movement for the Defence of Wales) – with important differences between the two. The FWA, whose more theatrical elements have resulted in a longer cultural memory of its activities, was established in 1963 as a loose association, but really entered the scene at the 1965 opening of the Llyn Celyn reservoir, and had a likely membership of around fifty, although its leaders claimed many thousands (Thomas, 2013). Under the leadership of Julian Cayo-Evans, a public school educated former soldier, FWA activities centred on paramilitary drills for attacks that didn’t materialise, propaganda (including claiming responsibility for bombings) and uniformed marches under elaborate insignia and slogans. In contradistinction, the MAC, responsible in fact for the majority of the explosions, was more secretive, with its fifteen or so activists organised into small cells, each unaware of the others’ activities. Founded by Emyr Llewelyn Jones in the fulcrum of growing student militancy at the University of Aberystwyth, and based on early connections with IRA veterans, the initially amateurish attempts at sabotage became more dramatic and successful when leadership was taken over by John Jenkins, a dentist in the British army (Thomas, 2019). It was Jenkins’ arrest and imprisonment that effectively ended the militant campaign of this period. Marked therefore by differences in their methods, aesthetics and their politics (the broadly left-wing MAC unlike the anti-communist FWA) it is nonetheless worth considering them together, as part of a common escalation that affirmed a more resolutely
The drowning of Capel Celyn was the event that gathered and combined these new forces of agency, and a critique of prevailing hydrosocial arrangements was at the heart of their founding. Emyr Jones was moved to establish the MAC after meeting a small boy named Tryweryn at Capel Celyn's primary school; Wyn Thomas, who interviewed Jones reports him saying that he ‘began to wonder what that word [Tryweryn] might mean to future generations […] a term describing an act of betrayal or capitulation? Or would it perhaps mean something else?’ (Thomas, 2013 p. 22).
The official opening of the reservoir in October 1965 was a decisive compositional event, not only connecting a new extractive waterscape, but gathering disparate parts of a possible resistance, such that several key militants and their funders met for the first time at the protest there. While Plaid Cymru had promised an ‘orderly, brief, concise and disciplined’ demonstration (Evans, 1996), this quickly escalated into an angry crowd shouting abuse at the shocked Liverpool council delegates. From this crowd, the uniformed members of an inchoate Free Wales Army made a first public appearance, taking a leading role in the chanting of slogans and what became a deluge of stone-throwing from the crowd. This more confrontational reaction marks a difference between this moment and that of the peaceful ‘Hands Off Tryweryn’ march, when there was no documented escalation even when they were turned away by that same council whose representatives were now met with stoning at the reservoir opening. We might wonder if this stone-throwing crowd revealed a more generalised insurgent potential that the militants could build on. Indeed, the incipient violence of stone-throwing is a recurring theme in the political expression of ‘unabsorbed’ social constituencies across history, providing fleeting and spontaneous experiences of agency that might be directed into more organised forms of militancy. Locating the emergence of the Free Wales Army amidst a crowd hurling missiles usefully reminds us that while the militant phase would be spearheaded by groups with small memberships, these were the more extreme expression of an affective shift in the mood of reservoir resistance politics.
Next though followed a moment which perfectly dramatised the centrality of the question of who could direct the flow of water: as the jeering crowd got louder, chair of Liverpool council, Frank Cain, prematurely and without ceremony opened the valve to begin filling the reservoir, the resulting roar drowning out the voices of the demonstrators. As the water level rose, those gathered could watch it slowly unmaking the ecological assemblage of the valley just as it was brought within a new matrix of relations. As Elwyn Edwards, then a small boy, recalled years later. ‘I remember the water coming out in a huge gush. There was nothing left – not a tree, a hedge, no sheep, cattle, or birds singing. It was deathly quiet, like a funeral’ (
The militant campaign reflected a desire to interrupt – materially, directly – the flows and articulation points of this extractive, absorbing regime. The first bomb was laid at the Tryweryn construction site in 1963 by Emyr Jones, directly following his questioning about whether Tryweryn would mean ‘betrayal and capitulation’ or ‘something else’ (Thomas, 2013). This was ultimately a question of which relations and agencies would be successfully constructed in and through the valleys of North Wales.
The terrain of tactical opportunities was therefore found in the pipelines, reservoirs, rivers and seas which organised a particular spatiality of power and possible disruption. Prior to the opening of Llyn Celyn, militants vandalised electrical transformers, set fire to out-buildings, and bombed pylons supplying power to the construction site (Thomas, 2019). Afterwards, the bombings began to target the pipelines taking its water to Liverpool, the first being at Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant (Powys Country Times, 2024). When the reservoir programme then expanded – with the Severn River Authority announcing forty-one possible new sites of interest in Montgomeryshire (see Thomas, 2013) – there were explosions at the Llyn Vrynwy reservoir site (September 1967), at pipelines from Cwm Elan coming above ground at West Hagley, Worcestershire (December 1968), and other failed attempts, like the FWA botched pipe-bombing of Cwm Elan pipelines to Birmingham (February 1967) (Thomas, 1973). By the end of the 1960s, Welsh nationalist grievances were being principally directed toward the 1969 investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales, and while Investiture Day was the occasion of multiple explosions and failed detonations (including the death of two MAC bomb makers) one target remained a stretch of pipeline carrying Tryweryn water through Cheshire (Thomas, 2013) an indication that water extraction still expressed a wider regime of absorptions that was relevant even when the central grievance shifted.
As a focus on nationalist grievance became stronger, new waters came into focus. The water marking Welsh national borders already resonated in the poetics of the nation; as the national anthem states, the Welsh language will endure ‘Tra môr yn fur i'r bur hoff bau’ (‘As long as the sea serves as a wall for this pure, dear land’). Now the militants turned their attention to Wales's bordering waters. A bomb planted on Llandudno Pier to stop the Royal Yacht landing for the Investiture ultimately failed to detonate (North Wales Live, 2019). The Severn Bridge, bridging a major river at the border, also became a target. The Western Mail and magazine Tit-Bits reported in 1966 that 200 FWA members had begun mountaintop military drills and hatched plans to ‘blow up the Severn Bridge’ in the build up to its formal opening by the Queen (
If water's role in place-making had a
Some connection to the era's wider anti-colonial and separatist militancy was quite concrete. Emyr Jones had visited IRA veteran Máirtín Ó Cadhain to seek advice on starting the MAC campaign, and later John Jenkins enjoyed good standing among IRA prison inmates. Sinn Fein had formally mourned the death of ‘two freedom fighters’ when their MAC bomb detonated early on Investiture Day, 1969 (Interview with Owain Williams, Thomas, 2013). Nonetheless, such associations were often more spectral, their threat hanging over the imaginations of the English establishment. A
This mocking tone reflected a certain failure of the militant campaign. The material and poetic interventions of the MAC and FWA could hardly unmake an extractive assemblage build from such strong parts: the cement, metal and legal infrastructure of the state; the utilitarian arithmetic of water's best uses; the ideology that made Wales so easy to ignore. Perhaps the only hope was that more among the ‘unabsorbed’ Welsh population might be moved by the haunting presence of another, insurgent assemblage of decolonial nationalism and growing acts of popular agency from below. In the event though, the stone-throwers of the reservoir opening ceremony did not turn into the base for escalating direct action. Instead those very tactics, their scale and secrecy, reflected a break with the wider social composition to which they were notionally directed (see Thoburn, 2010).
However, as I have said above, a territory is never final or fixed, and any assemblage remains pregnant with a host of possible deterritorialisations. The structure of water and power in place by the 1960s did absorb the waters of Tryweryn, but this remained haunted by the meanings, memories, experiences and affects of another
Third current: ‘Remember Tryweryn’
The third current of Tryweryn activism involves quite a different type of political action – a piece of graffiti – and a different order of political network; not a self-conscious community of activists or uniformed cadres, but a disaggregated network of people, paint brushes, walls, and internet connections. At the centre of this particular outgrowth of the flooding of Capel Celyn was one roadside mural with the words ‘COFIWCH DRYWERYN’ (‘Remember Tryweryn’), the story of which demonstrates how the problem of Tryweryn seeped – and continues to seep – into the future, carrying with it the residue of those past waters and campaigns while picking up a new set of relations.
In late 1963 or 1964, a little before the opening of the Llyn Celyn reservoir, Meic Stephens, a young Welsh nationalist, painted the words ‘COFIWCH DRYWERYN’ in white capital letters on a red background, across the gable wall of a ruined cottage, on the roadside of the A487 near Llanrhystud, Ceredigion (BBC Cymru, 2015). Evidently addressing that totemic injustice of the 1960s, as time passed, as the flooding of 1965 became an ever more distant memory, and with new political cycles coming and going, the mural remained there, occasionally retouched and maintained by unknown others. In a 2015 interview with the BBC, Stephens said ‘It must be noted here that the words seen today are not my work. Other hands have been busy from time to time, to keep the slogan visible’ (BBC Cymru 25th March 2015). It became then a work of collective labour by those – who knows who or how many – who saw in it something worth keeping.
After many years of this gentle upkeep, correction and occasional minor additions, things intensified in 2019 when, following the latest repainting, the wall itself was part demolished by suspected anti-Welsh ‘vandals’ (Nation Cymru, 2019). The wall was rebuilt and the mural restored, only to be painted over with the word ‘ELVIS’ later that year. Restored again, in June 2020 it was painted over with Nazi and white power symbols (Nation Cymru, 2020). In the ongoing cat-and-mouse of restorations followed by fresh paintings-over, the call to ‘COFIWCH DRYWERYN’ was overlaid with personal messages (smiley faces; ‘Mike [heart] Bev’) but also by new, complementary political slogans – ‘COFIWCH ABERFAN’, recalling the colliery tip disaster of 1966; and Free Wales Army slogan ‘FE GODWN NI ETO’ (‘We will rise again’). In this context, calls for legal protection of the mural began, CCTV was set up near the wall, and the landowner pledged to secure its future. Elin Jones, member of the National Assembly, stated ‘The Tryweryn wall is a message to spur us on to demand respect and freedom for our country’ (Denbighshire Free Press, 2019). The wider response to this sequence of damage and restoration revealed a deeper resonance, as people began reproducing the mural – not just the slogan, but its exact appearance from colours to lettering style – in new locations across Wales, including in the English-speaking majority South (in Bridgend and Penarth), on the coast (at Milford Haven) and as far afield as a Welsh-themed pub in Chicago (People's Collection Wales, 2020). By the end of 2019, over one hundred ‘COFIWCH DRYWERYN’ murals had been counted across Wales.
Within this, the command to ‘remember’ raises the question of what exactly we are remembering. The slogan ‘Remember Tryweryn’ had been at the centre of a demonstration of 4000 in Bala the same year as the Liverpool march. In 1956, it was a call to remember this easily-ignored place before it was too late, a meaning it retained, with fresh urgency, when the mural was painted not long before the reservoir opened. But this took on a new set of resonances once the reservoir waters had filled the valley, remembering now a lost place and the crime of its erasure. It is significant that the graffiti called one to remember not Capel Celyn, the village that was lost, but Tryweryn; the name of the valley calling upon a wider sense of place but also of ‘Tryweryn’ as an event, problem and reality that must not be forgotten.
Putting this in the context of the composition and consistency of socio-material assemblages – that is in terms of the political problem of the ‘unabsorbed’ – the call to ‘remember’ commands a realignment of assembled parts. Against the tendency of the reservoir's extractive network to embed itself deeper, more stably, in the ground, the slogan brings an unsettling jolt and partial uprooting:
But the mural is not just incorporeal language, it is a wall. The very materiality of paint and bricks permitted the enduring physical presence of that command as a collective space and practice of contested memorialisation; the sequence of upkeep, demolition, vandalism, and memetic proliferation reflected the vitality that has continued to hang over the memory of Tryweryn, in no small part as a result of the poetic and material connections woven together by the waves of activists in this paper. Long after the submerging of Capel Celyn, and the embedding of a new infrastructural reality in that corner of the Welsh countryside, the mural (and muralists) ensured that some trace of Tryweryn – the spectres in the water – would insist upon the future, in ways that have been riven with creative frictions: irreverent vandalism also reinscribes the sacrality and importance of the mural and what it names; the slogan's proliferation is both kitsch and a meaningful expression of identity; police and legal protection now brings the mural within the terrain of the state, while the slogan remains inseparable from its recrimination of power. Memorialisation is often riven with such tensions.
Collective memorialisation is never strictly about the past. It makes present again, problematising new realities and situations (Bell, 2010). Many key phases had characterised Welsh nationalism since the Sixties – from the Welsh road-sign campaigns, holiday home arson and non-payment of English language bills, to the fight for a Welsh language television channel and Devolution – but the physical presence of the ‘COFIWCH DRYWERYN’ mural meant that both the event it named and the object of the wall represented an ongoing resource for meaning-making. Significantly, a number of the 2019 iterations were accompanied by the addition of the words ‘Yes Cymru’, the slogan of the latest push for a referendum on Welsh independence (People's Collection Wales, 2020). The attachment of this second slogan indicates how the call to ‘Remember Tryweryn’ and its insurgent Welshness was being reinterpreted amidst the context of late-austerity, Brexit, and the close run of Scotland's own independence vote. In that sense, what exact problem Tryweryn poses has remained a somewhat open question, shaped by the poetic and material relations in which it is reassembled at different historical moments.
With this sense of memory as an active process in the present, it is hard not to think once again of those ruins of Capel Celyn that now creep above the waterline after hot summers. Climate change is reconfiguring the assemblages that move through the Tryweryn valley, and remembering takes on a new tone when you can see those ruins again. As the receding reservoir waters reveal the stonework and crumbled structures of Capel Celyn, the spectre in the water that the Liverpool marchers warned about continues to insist on Capel Celyn and Tryweryn as features of the cultural – and literal – landscape of twenty-first century Wales. Not only this, the scales and vectors of climate change – planetary and atmospheric as they are – bring hauntings of far stranger space-times, connecting this place to others where waters will rise, drowning homes, and leaving fresh ruins below the water.
Conclusion
This article has interrogated how successive currents of political activism mobilised the meanings and mobilities of water to disrupt the governance of Welsh landscapes and populations. While the Tryweryn plan entailed the material absorption of Welsh waters by capital, overseen by the British state, the inconvenient social networks and ways of life in rural Wales remained an ‘unabsorbed’ fringe. The experience of these partial and wrenching absorptions revealed to those communities the unfolding of extractive power through the construction of new assemblages and discursive formations. Against this, successive currents and modes of political interventions sought to extend, from those unabsorbed positions, a material and poetic critique of the reservoir and the world that made it possible, proposing in this way
The 1956 Liverpool march, drawing on its community base, used water's poetics to demonstrate the unjust relations between two places now mutually implicated in a common hydrosocial assemblage. The slow marching bodies, and their placards about drowned homes and haunted water could nonetheless not divert the crude arithmetic which counted them only as a marginal minority. The militant current aimed to dismantle – physically and symbolically – the network of reservoirs and pipelines, and escalated the dimensions of the campaign to the scale of the nation, with echoes of anti-colonial guerrilla uprisings, though this largely stalled at the level of the aesthetic and theatrical. Still, these events contributed to the ongoing aura of Tryweryn, surrounded by a cluster of potent associations and memories, such that the ‘COFIWCH DRYWERYN’ mural did not simply memorialise a once-important reservoir; it continued, in its materiality and public presence, the possibility for ongoing, creative reinterpretations of the floodings, and the new possibilities that might emerge from this.
There is something about water that has contributed to the intensity and effects of this cycle of contestation. Through the language of ‘absorption’, water provides a morphology through which to understand the forces moving through the Welsh countryside, and the tensions between the territorial fixing of domination and the aqueous, molecular outside into which capital expands and which might present a position and possibility of resistance. In this case at least, this is not just a metaphor. Water literally connects and separates; it carries and deposits; it flows, pools, gathers and leaks. Water's presence
The periodic reappearance of Capel Celyn above the waterline is a potent reminder that, though flooded, landscapes and life can never be fully absorbed by capital. Rather, that which resurfaces resists, demonstrating the fractures and refusals that remain the submerged potential of fraught geographies of capture. The case of Tryweryn therefore speaks not only to ongoing hydropolitical struggles, around dams and reservoirs, floods and drownings, but to the wider question of a radical politics that can emerge from places that appear so completely saturated in exploitation and subjection.
Revealed due to climatic forces that are planetary in their scale, the soaked ruins of Capel Celyn remind us that this story, far from parochial or narrowly historical, is connected to a global transformation of waterscapes in a climate changing world. The unfolding of capitalist social relations across the earth now moves the planet's waters in ways that will drown more homes and eradicate more ways of life. Faced with these resonances, remembering Tryweryn might mean something quite different to anything envisaged by the marchers, saboteurs and graffiti-painters of that particular cycle of struggle. Recalling Marx's (1969) sense that spectres haunt not from the past but from possible futures that are already somehow here with us, the spectres of Tryweryn may yet provide a set of experiences and presences from which to build new solidarities adequate to a drowning world.
Highlights
Explores the political mobilisations surrounding the flooding of a North Wales valley and the populated village of Capel Celyn, in 1965
Develops the idea of a ‘politics of the unabsorbed' through Raymond Williams' commentary on the era's Welsh resistance, and with Deleuze-Guattari’s orientation to the assemblage of material and symbolic parts to advance forms of agency.
Water's meanings and mobility enrolled by three currents – a protest march, a wave of bombings, and a piece of political graffiti.
Water a constitutive part of these contested political formations.
Memorialisation part of ongoing problematisation of what ‘Tryweryn’ means, in changing political and environmental contexts – now climate change.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.