The Royal Welsh Show 2026

    Back to Le Pays Des Galles Profond, and the Royal Welsh Show 2026.  This time, instead of taking the train, we drove over from the Infernal City, over the Brecon Beacons and down into the Usk Valley, past Brecon and down into the valley of the Wye to Builth Wells.

     The show site, lies, a great festal city of tents and caravans, over the Wye from the town.  For the farming community of the principality and beyond a place of pilgrimage - almost.  For the younger members of that community a passage rite.

     This was our second visit, and it was both busy and hot.  We must have spent about four hours there and yet I realise we barely skimmed the surface.  How could it be otherwise?  The show lasts for four days, and there are a good twelve hours of events each day.  Like all the other visitors we were merely spectators while the 'Great Work' of show, the judging of livestock etc continued around us.  Two worlds rubbing along amicably, but with some element of incomprehension.  Sadly for us, and a great many others, this is our one connection to the farming community.

     Lunch at Hafod a Hendre.  Where the exhibitors eat.

     But for me it was not always so.  I was raised between the Wars,   in a small market town in s Lincolnshire.  My grandfather was a local butcher (at one time, he had to slaughter the animals he bought to sell in his shop).  He had a flock of sheep and owned a few fields.  Chickens were kept.  The town then, in the Late 60/early 70s, had a weekly cattle market, and a busy twice weekly street market.  There were also a number of farm supply shops, places to buy tractors and other kit, a grain merchants and straw merchants, the later had a Royal Warrant.  And then, over a couple of decades or so, perhaps less, it all went.

    The livestock market was the first to go - the victim of what?  The EEC CAP farming policy, which in East Anglia and the East Midlands, at least, encouraged massive over-production of cereals, or a desire to tidy things up and centralise that sort of messiness?  It resulted, eventually, to a whole area, being redeveloped.  A long length of North St was demolished - smashing if domineering Victorian office block, Georgian shop and a long building - Judges - with a Georgian Gothick stone front concealing a Medieval timber structure.  Listed Grade II in 1977, and left to rot for a decade by the developer.  Gone.  All of it gone.  And in their place a cheap hideous shopping centre that has never really had a full occupancy except for the expediency of charity shops.

     Next to fall was was the twice weekly street market, for understandable reasons it was moved to a car park but within a month it had collapsed; the Saturday market often reduced to single stall.  And with it and the other changes the whole social life centred around the market collapsed too.  For people living in the villages life became smaller.

    I suppose one can understand some of the councils actions but the effect was deadening, a sort embourgeoisement of the public space.  It became 'safe', but I prefer the cabbage stalks, the straw, and the dung.