Welsh Journals

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY FROM WALES: PROCEEDINGS OF THE E.G. BOWEN MEMORIAL CONFERENCE. INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERS IN VOLUME 12 (PART I) The initial paper in the first part of this special issue, by Colin Thomas (Coleraine, Ulster), provided an overview of the sources of E.G. Bowen's ideas in Geography and their associations with the work of his contemporaries. Delivered in sparkling fashion, reminiscent of Bowen's entertaining style in the appropriate setting of the Examination Hall in old college, where so many of us first heard E.G.B. the study provided an excellent start to the Memorial conference by tracing the roots of Bowen's approach to Human Geography. The other seven papers form a partial unity in being linked to some of Bowen's abiding interests, the historical evolution of Welsh patterns of settlement, administrative areas and social groups, mainly in Wales and the Celtic fringe. Bowen's work on rural settlement suggested that Welsh kinship inheritance practices were impo'tant in producing a dispersed habitat and that the Church provided incipient nucleations in the landscape. Glanville Jones (Leeds) produced new evidence on this topic from the LIanelwy area near St. Asaph. By adding to his other distinguished work on this topic, the importance of these processes in the patterning of the Welsh rural landscape are now firmly clarified. Still on the theme of historical evolution, this time with administrative areas, William Ravenhill (Exeter) delivered a fascinating account of the development of the parish, with particular reference to Cornwall. His description provided a reminder of the cartographic difficulty of producing accurate maps of this basic unit of government, and the way it was eventually solved through the pioneering work of Joel Gascoyne. Bringing the focus much closer to the modern period is the valuable case study of Gwyn Rowley (Sheffield). Rowley's study shows the effect the construction of the early nineteenth century Menai Strait bridge had upon the relative importance of settlements in Anglesey and the adjoining Gwynedd coast. Using statistical measures to precisely show the changes in accessibility, his study also makes a special plea for the development of a dynamic approach to central place studies. The essays by Robert Gant (Kingston) and Huw Jones (Dundee) are studies of settlement and demographic change that take one into the contemporary period. Gant reconstructed the detailed distribution of rural settlement in the eastern valleys of the Black Mountains of South East Wales at its 'high water' mark in the late nineteenth century, tracing the extent of abandonment (and revival as vacation homes) right up to the present day. The large number of vacation homes based on the abandoned permanent dwellings