Welsh Journals

REVIEWS WALES: A PHYSICAL, HISTORICAL, AND REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY. Edited by Emrys G. Bowen. Methuen, London, 1957. Pp. 528. 42s. This book is intended primarily for undergraduates, so its editor tells us in his preface. It aims at providing them for the first time with a comprehensive synthesis of the geography of Wales. It is divided into three parts: physical geography, historical geography, and regional geography. The first part contains chapters on structure, climate, and vegetation. The second deals with race and culture, settlement patterns, political development, the growth of modem industry, communications, and population and language. The third enumerates nine main regional divisions and devotes to each a chapter in which its outstanding features are discussed. As befits such a book, the whole is profusely illustrated with admirably clear maps and diagrams. The work is the product of a co-operative enterprise undertaken by a team of colleagues from the department of Geography at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. It represents, says the editor, the fruit of the 'thought that has been given to the study of the geography of Wales by both past and present members of the Department'. The authors have the advantage of having worked in close co-operation and pooled their specialist knowledge. Their work shows evidence of having been carefully planned and integrated by the editor. But it does not entirely escape the defects of this kind of collective production. There is unevenness of treatment and quality; some contributors, notably Professor Bowen and Mr. Gareth Thomas, seem to be a good deal more at home in their subjects than some of their colleagues. The writing has, with few exceptions, more than its share of the pedestrian dullness and fondness for jargon seemingly inseparable from a worthy, but not very readable, work of reference. For almost the whole of part I of the book the reviewer has no com- petence to pass judgment except to say that the contents seem thoroughly sound and the conclusions well documented. The second part comes more within his field. By and large, the geographers here appear to be content to follow closely the conventional lines of historical study. Apart from some useful maps they have little specifically new to contribute. The author of the chapter on rural settlement handles difficult and little- worked material deftly. However, to his discussion of the major factors which have gone to the making of the pattern of rural settlement (pp. 141-2) he ought to have added the effect of the emergence, growth, and decline of the small squires between the end of the fourteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century. His point that in the 'tribal breakdown' of the later Middle Ages nothing was 'more important than the limited amount of arable land available' (p. 145) is a dubious one. At the very