Tuesday 15 May 2012

Tryweryn Bill

In the late 1950s Liverpool City Council decided that the city would soon require an additional source of water for the city. A scheme was conceived whereby a valley would be flooded with water and turned into a reservoir. It was decided that eight hundred acres of land that formed Tryweryn and Capel Celyn would be the ideal land on which to construct the reservoir, and on August 1st 1957, the Tryweryn Bill entered Parliament, sponsored by Liverpool City Council and supported by Harold Macmillan’s Conservative administration (including the then- Minister Of Welsh Affairs), and passed despite the opposition of almost all Welsh MPs. The bill allowed the compulsory purchase of the required land, amounting to twelve entire farms, land from a further four, and the entire village of Capel Celyn, including the cemetery, displacing around seventy people. This would be the destruction of an all Welsh-speaking rural village, where the Welsh culture was being represented in its truest form. Although the drowning of the village did not take place until 1965, I feel it would still be interesting to write a song that would project the feelings towards the bill, and the uncertainty that surrounded their situation.