Episode 3

"You have to pay to get in. The current cost, if you're in a car, is £5.30. Pressing a note into a fleshy female palm, I deploy the lone word of conversational Welsh in my locker. 'Diolch'. Thanks. Then I push my right foot down and accelerate into the land of my fathers. I'm not reallly sure where I'm going."

Author and journalist Jasper Rees rises to the challenge of embracing his 'inner Welshness'. His grandparents on his father's side were Welsh. So it's partly in recollection of times spent at their house on a hill in Camarthen that he opts for full 'immersion'. This means learning the language and putting to paper to some of his grandparents vivid stories about Wales. It also means travelling around, setting himself various tasks - singing in choirs, sheep-shearing, coracling, coal-mining. Some tasks are accomplished with deftness, some not, in his wry travelogue, which is abridged for radio in five parts by Katrin Williams.

3. Embracing Welshness means you have to go underground, to greet
blackened faces lit by lamps, and all talk is about tunnelling and a
very big drill...

Reader Ben Miles

Reader Ben Miles.