On A Clear Night...

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Did you know that Wales is special? It is special for many reasons, and one of them is that if it is a clear evening, when there is no cloud cover and the conditions are right, and one goes to a good point where one has a clear view, that here from Wales in the UK one can see further than America?
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Yes. I can see the moon!

And did you know that here in Wales there have been some amazing discoveries and world first events. We had the first steam locomotive. We had quite a lot of things... Science! We have had science before most countries knew what it was as back many years ago one of our ancestors wanted to know where the sun went at night. He climed the long trek up the Brecon Beacons carrying a lantern and being very careful, he climbed up the ridge right up to the top of Pen-Y-Fan. And there he sat in that natural little curved hollow normally occupied by sheep and waited... And then, just when he was about to give up his quest to find where the sun went at night, it dawned on him!

https://youtu.be/m4r7UE3phM0

Last edited by Mountain Goat on 13 Jun 2022, 5:51 pm, edited 3 times in total.

But, in what might be a bit of irony, one in America can not see content from Wales,

The video is giving,

Oh. We often get USA video links people put up in here blocked in the UK. Usually for important news items where it never comes on our news and all youtube or other links are blocked from view on the subject so we have to take your words on it, but I have no idea why this one is blocked because other UK people can see it. No idea.
Would it be because I posted it? Can UK people see it? Could be a country thing?

I only knew the commedian by name but never actually heard him but now I have for the first time. (I never paid attention to TV when I was young unless it involved trains or cars or something like that. I will see if I can ammend what I put and put something else amusing about Wales instead. Wales has some really tallented commedians along with some other nice people so I will see who I can find instead).

You do know this was intended as a joke.

Was it? I changed it to something else.

oh that was too clever! made me laugh out loud. I am going to steal it to share on another page. <3 Thank you

I think Wales is the most obscure country in the world. Most people from outside the UK seem to think it's just a province like a county, in 'the UK' or England.

I was there. I was in the part where they speak Welsh. I was able to get there on my own so I suppose I knew where it was at the time.

Steal away!

Which part was funny?

Getting there is no problem, it's just that most people don't seem to know it exists. It's a quantum country.

People ask me if I can speak Welsh. I say yes, but I don't know what I am saying when I speak in Welsh.

I thought Wales was not a country but something like a state in the UK. Wales, N. Ireland, Scotland and England make up the UK, don't they? The UK is the country and those four parts are not countries, are they? The UK is the officially recognized nation, isn't it? So, maybe, Wales in the UK is like California in the USA, isn't it?

They are seperate countries run by the same overall government, though some less important decisions are made in their own countries. Though one could also say the country of Great Britain. We have countys instead of states so if you hear us talk about a county it is roughly the same as a state. They are sometimes also known (Mostly in England) as "Shires". Example is Cambridgeshire which is the county of Cambridge which is names as Cambridge is tbe main town (City). Example from Wales is Carmarthenshire where Carmarthen is the main town in the county.
I hope this makes sense?

Regarding the four countries that make up Great Britain, only England can really survive on its own because Wales, Scotland and N.Ireland do now have the industry and financial wealth to survive alone unless we start to manufacture again like we used to. That is the problem when one is not allowed on enviromental grounds to use what we have as just Wales alone has an incredibly rich and varied amount of natural minerals here. We have what the entire USA has in minerals all squashed into one little country. Whether it is viable to mine them is another thing as some minerals are either in thin veins or hard to get to. The only real "Useful" mineral we lack is tin. Nearby Cornwall has tin but while tin has been discovered here, it is in such small amounts it is not even worth trying to find more!
Some of the best minerals found here in Wales which are amongst the highest quality one can find anywhere in the world are anthracite and iron ore. We also have some of the finest gold and Wales is one of the rare places where one can find (With luck) pure white gold. The Romans created a whole new valley in their hunt for gold here, as they used gigantic rushes of water on a truely massive scale to gauge out the soil to get at the gold. They were very clever people!
Gold is found in small specks in with the anthracite coal in the Carmarthenshire coalfield area, and the only reason why it wasn't abstracted is due to past laws which came in with the early forms of unions where one mine would be made to get at one material (Lets say coal) and another company would make a mine to get at another mineral (Lets say limestone), and the first company may need to remove some limestone ore to reach through into a nearby coal seam and to this company the limestone is "Spoil" (A waste product to a coal miner) so they would sell it off cheap, but the company mining for limestone (Or another mineral ore) will not be able to compete as their ores will be sold at rock bottom prices, so a law was made that one was only allowed to sell the one ore or mineral that one was trying to reach. Therefore the mines in the antracite coal belts in Carmarthenshire that also contained large amounts (Though in speck dust-like form) had to make a choice. Do they go for gold or coal? They decided coal as it was (Due to the volume and the prices etc) more profitable though apparently not by a lot, and in far greater demand. So us householders were burning coal containing gold in the past when the mines were open and we did not know it!
One of the few minerals that was allowed to be split as the two minerals were contained together and had to be separated by a special process (Invented by a man who ran a factory (The only factory for many years to do this)) in Burry Port (Carmarthenshire) was lead and silver. Prior to this invention to separate the ores, lead contained silver foe use wherever it was needed. Many really good lead mines in Mid Wales. (Half way up Wales).

Thank you for the explanation.

So, it goes like [UK]-->[Wales]-->[Carmarthenshire]-->[Carmarthen], whereas [USA]-->[]-->[California]-->[Sacramento]. There's no equivalent of [Wales] in the USA. I still wonder why it has to be called a "country" when it's part of a country. I guess it must be for historical reasons. Is there such a thing as a "Welsh passport", if it's a country?

The bits about mining is interesting because my job has a bit to do with mining. I look at the data from machines and quantify the amounts of minerals. But anthracite has never been in the samples I look at. What I see mostly is iron ore samples with hematite etc in them. So, Wales could be a major sources of minerals if they can come up with a viable way of mining. Here in Australia the mining industry is quite active but I keep seeing lots of petitions against mining due to environmental concerns.