Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

four feet, but we went home with bruises, cuts and aching backs. The next Saturday we returned-all set for the break-through into a major cave system. Alas, a heavy shower of rain had washed more mud into the hole. After a week's toil we reached a depth of 12 feet. Here two great boulders blocked the way-as yet we have not returned to that dig. During the following year we explored Bovehill Pot, the deepest pothole in the peninsula, and Wooley's Hole, where there are some fine formations. I go caving for the adventure and because it is very interesting. The world underground is so entirely different from anything on the surface. Through caving also one gains friends and, in my case, my best friend is the one who has done the most caving with me and has shared the greatest adventures and difficulties with me underground. We have learnt that we can rely on one another and have thus become better friends. Caving, like all other kinds of exploration, fascinates man's natural curiosity, and this inevitably leads him even into the most inaccessible places of the world. Early Artists in Gower I by ELIS JENKINS THE FIRST ARTISTS TO DEPICT scenes from the Gower peninsula -the man-in-the-street's Gower without Swansea-were the brothers Nathaniel and Samuel Buck, who in 1741 published a long panel engraving of Pennarth (Pennard) and another of Penrice in their collection of the views of the abbeys, castles and towns of Britain. These etchings, captioned by long descriptive accounts of the subject in a beautiful cursive script, can be bought for a few pounds from antique dealers. The discriminating collector will accept only an uncoloured print, as pure as when it came off the press over two hundred years ago, and will shun the garishly- tinted things that have been tampered with by professional colourists at five shillings a time. Unless the colouring of a print is genuinely contemporary, as it sometimes is with old maps, aquatints and Rowlandson prints, the penny plain is in every respect preferable to the tuppence coloured. Of the other eighteenth-century topographers who recorded Gower, one of the most interesting is Thomas Rothwell, who was the engraver at the Cambrian Pottery, Swansea, in the years around 1790. In the course of his work at the Pottery, Rothwell would engrave copper plates and then transfer the design to the piece of earthenware by means of an intermediate tissue, which, being flexible, could take the ink from the plate and make contact even with a curved surface. The copper plate would therefore show the picture the right way round.