14th January 2025 – Sarn Helen by Tom Bullough

Wales is the measure of all things in this time-shifting story of ecological change.

Just as the first lockdown was beginning to lift in late summer 2020, Tom Bullough set out to walk Sarn Helen, the Roman road that once cut through Wales from Neath in the south to Caerhun in the north. It still does, although there are places where you would be hard pressed to see it, places where it wobbles, turns a corner or generally behaves in a most un-Roman manner. The road gets its name from the fourth-century princess turned saint, Elen Luyddog, who, according to the Mabinogion, insisted that her Roman husband, Magnus Maximus, build her “a great road” linking her home town in the foothills of Snowdonia all the way to the Bristol Channel.

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