Stories of Newborough Forest
Welcome to our new local community/social history project: Stories of Newborough Forest! This is a very exciting project!
As many of you know, Llyn Parc Mawr Community Woodland Group (constituted 2015) is a local sustainable woodland that benefits both wildlife and the community of Newborough and District.
A new project in our five-year National Lottery-funded plan (Connecting Communities and Nature, creating a sustainable woodland space for all) celebrates a special part of our local culture and heritage.
There is so much fascinating history connecting Newborough Forest and the community. It is hard to believe how much the area has changed since the forest was planted and how memories, such as cutting the Marram Grass by hand and taking the mats by horse and cart across the Menai Straits on a boat to get to the market in Deiniolen, are still within living memory!
We have been working with ‘Newborough through the Ages’ and the Prichard Jones Institute who have helped share and add to these stories. The coastal habitat of Newborough and District area is something that links all the communities along this historic coast. People value this link and recognise the coastal area has been significant for our community for thousands of years. This cultural and natural heritage will be celebrated by this project.
The stories that have been collected so far, together with stories collected by the Forestry Commission in 2002, have all been shared on our website for your listening pleasure!
Read and listen
Click the images below to read and listen to the stories we’ve collected so far.
Lindsey Colbourne
As part of this social history project we have commissioned Artist Lindsey Colbourne to create films about the social history of the area by combining people’s stories, photos and footage from the Newborough area.
Message from artist Lindsey Colborne:
“Thank you to everyone who has contributed to these evocative stories!
Making these films during the coronavirus ‘lock down’, with stories of ecological and climate change becoming more and more worrying, I have wondered about the future, and whether we can learn from the process of change in the past. So rather than looking back with nostalgia, or a sense of permanence, I’m looking at the past to understand the experience of change.
I hope, when you see the films, that you’ll be struck – as I was – by how closely lives, community and place have always been entangled here. And how this entanglement of place and each other (family, neighbours, other species and the environment) has created a resilience in the face of continual change.
Each film looks at a different aspect of those changes, and asks us what do these changes in the past tell us of life today, and of possibilities in the future? “
National Lottery Heritage Fund
We have received a 15 minute heritage fund from the National Lottery to celebrate the role that local people had in the creation and management of Newborough Forest. The funding will pay for the installation of bilingual interpretation boards within Llyn Parc Mawr exhibiting local stories of the planting of the woodland and Newborough Forest in an engaging format, to inform both the local community and tourists of the history of the site.
We also propose a series of woodland activities delivered primarily through the medium of Welsh. The activities will involve both local school children and families and be based around ideas which link the past of the site to the present. Proposed activities will include basic wood crafts, weaving and learning about trees. The events will be used to showcase the photographic, aural and/ or film-based stories, through the interpretation boards and projections of photos or film playing in our timber framed building. The events will also remember the historical importance of Marram grass weaving to the district’s history.
We hope to stimulate a conversation about the community’s relationship with the forest and the local environment both now and in the future.
Get involved!
It was more than 60 years ago when Newborough Forest was conceived and created, and we want to find and share those local community memories – tell the stories of all the local people with strong historic/present links to the forest.
We want to gather photographs and archives linked to the forest, and explore its history from early planting (do you remember playing in the dunes before the first trees appeared?) to subsequent management of Newborough Forest (especially Llyn Parc Mawr).
All the stories, photographs and videos will be gathered to highlight this important part of the community’s history and celebrate its cultural and natural heritage. We’re planning an exhibition that will evoke past memories and stimulate discussion about the community’s relationship with the forest now and in the future.
We all know how easy it can be to forget to gather local and community stories, and then realise we may have lost them forever. So our aim is to talk with everyone who has any memories of the forest – whether you remember or were involved in the early plans and work, or if your grandparent or parents still tell stories of that time, more than half a century ago. Perhaps some old tools are still in the shed? Or old movies in the attic? Or, you’ve grown up with the forest, and now share it with your children? We want to hear/see it all!
So, if you have any memories or stories, photos, movies or objects relating to the past 60+ years of Newborough Forest, please share them with us. You may also want to get involved with the project in other ways, so please do get in touch.