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The news was confirmed by a Welsh Government spokesman on Saturday.Clare Drakeford, the wife of Wales' First Minister Mark Drakeford, has "suddenly" died, the Welsh Government has confirmed. A Welsh Government spokesperson said: "It is with deep sadness that we confirm the sudden passing of Clare Drakeford, wife of the First Minister." They added: "The thoughts of everyone in the Welsh Government are with the family at this time and we ask that their privacy is respected." Mark and Clare Drakeford were married in 1977 and have three children together. Mark Drakeford, the First Minister of Wales, had the support...

I could tell the way things were going when, in the last week of the election campaign, it became clear that the Conservatives were ahead in Ynys Môn and nervously confident in Newport West. Two very different seats that in their different ways told me the sort of movement that was going on. If voters on Anglesey were ignoring the selection problems of the Conservatives and criticism of the candidate from other parties, where else would they be ignoring such issues? And although the Tories didn’t win Newport West, the fact that they were actually worried about saying they were...

Klingon was the chosen language for the Welsh government in its response to queries about UFO sightings at Cardiff Airport. While English and Welsh are the usual forms of communications in the Senedd, it opted for the native tongue of the enemies of Star Trek's Captain Kirk. Shadow Health Minister Darren Millar had asked for details of UFOs sightings and asked if research would be funded. A Welsh government spokesman responded with: "jang vIDa je due luq." The Welsh government statement continued: "'ach ghotvam'e' QI'yaH devolve qaS."

Y chromosomes rewrite British historyAnglo-Saxons' genetic stamp weaker than historians suspected 19 June 2003 HANNAH HOAG Some Scottish men's Y's are remarkably similar to those of southern England. © GettyImages A new survey of Y chromosomes in the British Isles suggests that the Anglo-Saxons failed to leave as much of a genetic stamp on the UK as history books imply1. Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans invaded Britain repeatedly between 50 BC and AD 1050. Many historians ascribe much of the British ancestry to the Anglo-Saxons because their written legacy overshadows that of the Celts. But the Y chromosomes of...

Castles have played an important military, economic and social role in Great Britain and Ireland since their introduction following the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Although a small number of castles had been built in England in the 1050s, the Normans began to build motte and bailey and ringworks castles in large numbers to control their newly occupied territories in England and the Welsh Marches.1 Caernarfon Castle Caernarfon Castle (Welsh: Castell Caernarfon) is a medieval fortress in Caernarfon, Gwynedd, north-west Wales. There was a motte-and-bailey castle in the town of Caernarfon from the late 11th century until 1283 when...

A recent excavation led by archaeologist George Nash in November 2010 at the Trefael Stone in south-west Wales - originally a portal dolmen transformed in later times in a standing stone - has revealed a small assemblage of exotic artefacts including three drilled shale beads, identical to those found at a nearby Early Mesolithic coastal habitation site. These items, each measuring about 4.5 centimetres in diameter, were found within a disturbed cairn or post-cairn deposit... Similar perforated shale beads have also been found at a number of other sites including Manton Warren (Humberside), Newquay (Cardiganshire), Star Carr (Yorkshire) and Staple...

From studying the present day population of the Orkneys, a small archipelago off the northeast coast of Scotland, geneticists from University College, in London, have gained a deep insight into the earliest inhabitants of Europe. Of the medley of peoples who populated Britain, neither the Anglo-Saxons nor the Romans ever settled the distant Orkneys. The Romans called the islands' inhabitants picti, or painted people. The Celtic-speaking Picts dominated the islands until the arrival of the Vikings about A.D. 800. The islanders then spoke Norn until the 18th century when this ancient form of Norse was replaced by English, brought in...

Irish, Scots and Welsh not Celts - scientists September 09 2004 at 08:15PM Dublin - Celtic nations like Ireland and Scotland have more in common with the Portuguese and Spanish than with "Celts" - the name commonly used for a group of people from ancient Alpine Europe, scientists say. "There is a received wisdom that the origin of the people of these islands lie in invasions or migrations... but the affinities don't point eastwards to a shared origin," said Daniel Bradley, co-author of a genetic study into Celtic origins. Early historians believed the Celts - thought to have come from...

History books favor stories of conquest, not of continuity, so it is perhaps not surprising that many Englishmen grow up believing they are a fighting mixture of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans who invaded Britain. The defeated Celts, by this reckoning, left their legacy only in the hinterlands of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. A new genetic survey of Y chromosomes throughout the British Isles has revealed a very different story. The Celtic inhabitants of Britain were real survivors. Nowhere were they entirely replaced by the invaders and they survive in high proportions, often 50 percent or more, throughout...

Who were the Celts? The Celts were a group of peoples that occupied lands stretching from the British Isles to Gallatia. The Celts had many dealings with other cultures that bordered the lands occupied by these peoples, and even though there is no written record of the Celts stemming from their own documents, we can piece together a fair picture of them from archeological evidence as well as historical accounts from other cultures. The first historical recorded encounter of a people displaying the cultural traits associated with the Celts comes from northern Italy around 400 BC, when a previously unkown...

Professor Peter Donnelly, of Oxford University, said the Welsh carry DNA which could be traced back to the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. The project surveyed 2,000 people in rural areas across Britain. Participants, as well as their parents and grandparents, had to be born in those areas to be included in the study. Prof Donnelly, a professor of statistical science at Oxford University and director of the Wellcome Trust centre for human genetics, said DNA samples were analysed at about 500,000 different points. After comparing statistics, a map was compiled which showed Wales and Cornwall stood out. Prof...

A BBC journalist is urging helpful linguists to come forward to help solve a mystery - why the Hindi (India's official language, along with English) accent has so much in common with Welsh. Sonia Mathur, a native Hindi speaker, had her interest sparked when she moved from India to work for the BBC in Wales - and found that two accents from countries 5,000 miles apart seemed to have something in common. It has long been known that the two languages stem from Indo-European, the "mother of all languages" - but the peculiar similarities between the two accents when spoken...

William Shakespeare's plays were penned by a little known Welsh law clerk, Dyfed ap Davis, it was revealed today. Because Welshmen were out of favour at the court of Queen Elizabeth 1, Monmouth-born ap Davis bribed the actor William Shakespeare to put his name to what are fallaciously known as the works of the great Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon. They shared the royalties and were often seen drunk together in Covent Garden and Cardiff Bay. Many of the plays were originally set in Wales but, because of the Queen's preferences, had to be transferred to more exotic climes. The character Hamlet...

Men of Valor: Part III The 4 Rifles first trip into Basra brought more than 15 hours of fighting that left a Pakistani driver killed, dragged away and never seen again by the British. Two British killed in action and many more wounded, a convoy of banged-up vehicles that ran the damage gamut from flat tire to complete destruction, and almost no break before it was time for Major Steve Webb to saddle up and move on again, his Welsh Warriors always taking point on another convoy. Major Steve Webb fought through those 15 hours two days before. Webb...

A 36-YEAR-OLD dentally challenged cellphone salesman wins a nationally televised talent contest in Britain, and suddenly, all sorts of questions are raised about the role of classical music in our world. That is because the winner, Paul Potts, from Wales, triumphed with a rendition of “Nessun dorma,” the tenor aria from Puccini’s “Turandot,” at a contest with the trappings and audience — seemingly — of the mass entertainment world. By the standards of music critics who ply their trade in opera houses and concert halls, it wasn’t a particularly earth-shaking performance. “Mr. Potts is the sort of bog-standard tenor to...

Saint David and Saint David's Day Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus! Happy St David's Day! Adapted from a talk given at OICCU Meeting Point, in Regent's Park College, Monday, 28th February 1994 If you were lucky enough to be in Wales on March the first, you would find the country in a festive mood. Every self-respecting man, woman and child would be celebrating St. David's Day in one way or another. But who was St. David, and why is he so important to the Welsh? And just how is St. David's Day celebrated in Wales today? Well, Saint David, or...

Sunday, 30 June, 2002, 15:31 GMT 16:31 UK English and Welsh are races apart Gene scientists claim to have found proof that the Welsh are the "true" Britons. The research supports the idea that Celtic Britain underwent a form of ethnic cleansing by Anglo-Saxons invaders following the Roman withdrawal in the fifth century. Genetic tests show clear differences between the Welsh and English It suggests that between 50% and 100% of the indigenous population of what was to become England was wiped out, with Offa's Dyke acting as a "genetic barrier" protecting those on the Welsh side. And the upheaval...

Unearthing Welsh history (Filed: 01/04/2006) An archaeologist digs deep in his pocket to find a medieval town, reports Jonny Beardsall That an amateur archaeologist was prepared to pay £32,000 for 4.5 unremarkable acres at Trelleck, Monmouthshire, must mean Welsh sons of the soil are salivating with glee. But so convinced is Stuart Wilson that the field is the site of a lost medieval town, he still insists it was money well spent a year after he bought the land. Broken but valuable: archaeologist Stuart Wilson holds a roof tile dug up at the site Mr Wilson, 27, and friends at...

New research has identified the first genetic evidence of Africans having lived amongst "indigenous" British people for centuries. Their descendants, living across the UK today, were unaware of their black ancestry. The University of Leicester study, funded by the Wellcome Trust and published today in the journal European Journal of Human Genetics, found that one third of men with a rare Yorkshire surname carry a rare Y chromosome type previously found only amongst people of West African origin. The researchers, led by Professor Mark Jobling, of the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester, first spotted the rare Y...

Brussels bureaucrats wipe Wales off their annual statistical mapBy Richard Savill(Filed: 06/10/2004) Wales was wiped off the map yesterday when it failed to appear on the cover of the annual yearbook produced by Brussels statisticians. The map shows a line from Chester to the Severn Estuary along the English border, but Wales has vanished. Glenys Kinnock, the Welsh MEP and wife of the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, said it was "quite a shocking omission", but added: "I can assure you they will not forget us again. "Maybe with computerised drawing this can happen and someone who isn't aware of...