Welsh Journals

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late as 1880 had informed the Aberdare Committee that one classical school at Cowbridge would meet the needs of the whole of Glamorgan !) decided to be rid of the School altogether. The reader who holds no brief for School or College cannot but feel that the College comes out of this unhappy affair far worse than the School; if its attitude was legally impeccable, it was hardly a shining example of walking the second mile. There were warts at Oxford as well as at Cowbridge-more perhaps than the author has perceived. Even so, "A Certaine Schoole" is an important contribution to the history of education in Glamorgan as well as an act of piety to the School. The Governors who commissioned it, the printers who produced it, and above all the author who has devoted so much time and care to its writing are to be congratulated on a volume which is as attractive to the eye as it is a pleasure to read. A. H. WILLIAMS THE LOWER SWANSEA VALLEY PROJECT, edited by K. J. Hilton. London (Longman's), 1967, pp. 329 (maps and plates). 63s, This handsomely-produced volume, with a preface by HRH The Duke of Edinburgh, is the final report on the work of the Lower Swansea Valley Project, a Project whose terms of reference were "to establish the factors which inhibit the social and economic use of land in the Lower Swansea Valley and to suggest ways in which the area should be used in the future". As is to be expected, therefore, the volume consists of a number of specialist research reports on specific aspects of the physical and cultural landscape and the social environment of the area, together with chapters which attempt to apply these results to the problems of the Valley and which indicate courses of action which could be taken to solve them by careful and co- ordinated planning for the future. There are in addition accounts of how the Project came into being and how its varied and complicated work was executed, while a very necessary chapter outlines the history of the valley and analyses the reasons for its having become "a barren wilderness a giant rubbish dump of tips on either side of a river" which was little more than an "industrial sewer". The volume is illustrated with plates, diagrams and maps. One of the major problems in the compiling of a volume of this kind must surely be that of catering for the wide range and depth of interest which the specialist and general reader alike are likely to show in the work and conclusions of the Project. To be intellectually honest, a scientific project must present not only its conclusions but must also present for inspection the basis from which those conclusions are reached. At the same time, however, it will become intellectually arid if all it does is to present large masses of fact which are not merely indigestible but often unintelligible to the general reader and even to the specialist in a different field. In this volume the problem has in general been solved, though not always evenly, partly by transferring some highly specialised material to appendices but primarily through the realisation by individual contributors