there’s a hike that follows the old border known simply as the ‘offa’s dyke trail’ from chepstow to prestatyn, i’ve done it twice it’s a challenging yet stunning hike which shows some beautiful corners of wales
Great vid. Am trying to track down my Ancestor "Titta" who I believe was of the same people as Offa. (Titley is the eng name. Titley is also a village in Herefordshire and theres a Tittenley in Shropshire I believe). Where we are from is close to the Dyke in a few places. P.s Have Welsh also in the family so a fair bit of intermarrying.
Souls has Arabic, Eastern and Classical influences. The decaying and morbid landscape is very accurate, constant warfare really made Welsh lands barren and eternally focused on fighting. Smaller kingdoms and terrain dictated this.
Great stuff! The thing that bothers me about Mercia and its origins, is the lack of information. We are told that the Mercians are simply Angles that eventually drifted west. But the old histories say something completely different. Firstly Bede castigates the Welsh for not converting the Mercians to christianity........odd ...as if these guys were Angles surely the Northumbrians would do it??? Also the old histories before 1714ad show a vast army coming into Britain in the mid to late 6th century from Ireland.......via.....Africa!!! This matches the Welsh tradition in the Mabinogi. So its quite obvious that these 'Africans' were the expelled Vandals, disappearing into the ether of history. Yet the king of these Africans 166,000 strong was someone called Gormund, descended from the likes of gaiseric gellimer, thrasamund and gibbermund. The only germanic people in north africa in the early part of the 6th century were the Vandals. So it would be exciting to think that along with Saxons and Angles, Vandals would have been part of the shaping of what would become England from the 8th century on.
