A pilot study of the speech errors of candidates of the WJEC Use of Welsh examinations

This article compares the renowned letters of Kate Roberts and Saunders Lewis with the correspondence of two leading nineteenth-century French authors, Gustave Flaubert and George Sand, considering the value and purpose of letters between authors. In addition to widening our understanding of Roberts and Lewis’s works, the article also places the Sand-Flaubert correspondence in a new context, and considers the development of authorial correspondence over the decades. It draws original conclusions by revealing that literary letters continue to play a key role for writers in the twentieth century: offering encouragement and advice, a means of escape from current circumstances, and an important tool in the struggle against the emptiness of modern society.

701 pieces of litter were collected per kilometre from a small rural road in Gwynedd. The minimum annual ‘hidden’ cost of this litter – uncollected by the local authority – was £11.81 per kilometre. The comparable annual cost of such litter on small rural roads throughout Wales is £230,000. A substantial proportion of these costs could be eliminated through introducing a deposit system for cans and bottles. 13 specific companies were responsible for producing more than one quarter of all the litter collected. The Welsh Government could arrange an annual mitigation payment of £58,000 from them in order to defray the hidden costs of litter associated with their activities.

The concept of glaciers as active ecosystems is strongly supported by evidence of significant contributions to global carbon and macronutrient cycles by extant glaciers. Regrettably, the roles of glacial ecosystems in past glaciations are generally overlooked.  Therefore we reconstructed glacial habitats and carbon fluxes on the last glaciers of north Wales at their maximum extent during the Younger Dryas chronozone glaciation. Net uptake of 30-180 kg C of CO2 and emissions of 265-1591 g C CH4 per annum are estimated for the palaeoglaciers. This emphasises the hitherto unexplored potential for the last Welsh glaciers as actors in biogeochemical cycles; however our understanding could be extended by linking our knowledge of contemporary glacial ecosystems with analyses of sedimentary biomarkers and thermomechanical models of Devensian ice mass dynamics.