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City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
One London Welsh dairy owner, among the first to go
forgo horses for motor vehicles, used their expertise in
motor mechanics to set up London’s first tourist coaching
business in 1930. Today Evan Evans is the largest
sightseeing company in London doing its own daily milk
run of the major London hotels to collect tourists.
A Spanner in The Works
I’m going to end by throwing a rather big spanner into
the works. We’ve long been taught that when the Romans
came here they found a uniformly Celtic people spread
throughout the British Isles who would, after the Roman’s
left 400 years later, suffer a terrible genocide at the hands
of the Anglo-Saxons. The few Celts who survived, we are
told, retreated to the coastal fringes in Scotland, Ireland
and Wales. This long held historical orthodoxy is being
rather shaken up by advances in genetic research. Oxford
Professor Stephen Oppenheimer, a leading expert in using
DNA to track Pre-historic migrations, believes that the
Anglo-Saxons, while contributing a great deal to our
language, (you might recall from last month’s Kettle that
all of our 100 most used words are Anglo-Saxon) they
contributed only a tiny amount to our gene pool. In other
words their genes did not replace what was already here.
Professor Oppenheimer believes that 75% of English
people can trace an unbroken line of genetic descent from
settlers who arrived not only long before the Anglo-
Saxons but also long before the introduction of farming –
not 1500 years ago then but more like 6000. And if that’s
so where does it leave the Welsh who, claims orthodox
history, are the survivors of a Celtic nation exiled to the
fringes by the Anglo-Saxon hoards? Are they not Iron
Age folk from Central Europe either then? Apparently,
and it should be said still controversially, no they are not.
The professor believes that these
Atlantic fringe people
(it gets a bit tricky if you have to stop calling them Celts)
trace their ancestors to
refugees
from the last Ice Age who
survived in the Basque country and elsewhere in pockets
on the Iberian Peninsula. The Celtic languages, says the
professor, only arrived with later migrations in the
Neolithic Age. If you’ve got a moment play with Professor
Oppenheimer’s
Journey of Mankind Peopling the World
Map
on the Bradshaw Foundation website which is
As the science
of DNA analysis develops it is challenging the conclusions
we have drawn from historical records and linguistic
research and we are all going to have to be open to having
our beliefs about our past overturned.
Your group can learn a little about the story of the Welsh
in London as part of our
Cosmopolitan London Tour
.
The day also investigates Little Italy, Chinatown and the
East End – the destination for new arrivals for centuries
starting with the Huguenots, the Irish and Jewish families.
Lunch is spent around Spitalfields Market and Brick Lane
- group lunch in Banglatown anyone? In the afternoon we
visit the incredible Hindu Mandir at Neasden. See page
16 for a description of the Cosmopolitan London.
Would you like to take your group on a day trip to Cardiff? It’s about 2 hours fromAbingdon,
Newbury or Salisbury. If there is enough interest we’ll go forward with developing a tour.
Yes or No? Let us know either way and we’ll enter you for the book draw. Click
.
A Day Trip to Cardiff?
Tell us if you’d be interested for your group or not and we’ll enter you in a
free prize draw for the new photo-book
My Lost London
by
Strictly Come Dancing’s
Len Goodman