Ballads, paintings, music, theatre, story. The cultural artefacts that civilisations leave behind, and the strange afterlives those artefacts have. A 1778 Northumbrian ballad about a princess turned into a dragon turns out to preserve, almost intact, a Brittonic substrate that the Anglo-Saxon takeover of Bamburgh in 547 AD never fully erased. A medieval Welsh prophecy keeps the memory of an unbroken kingdom alive for a thousand years. Art remembers what the chronicles forget — and sometimes remembers what the chronicles deliberately tried to silence. The work is to read these artefacts attentively: as evidence, not just as decoration.
A Northumbrian ballad first printed in 1778 by the Rev. Robert Lambe — a princess turned into a dragon by her wicked stepmother at Bamburgh Castle, rescued by her brother Childe Wynd on a ship of rowan-tree wood. Full 1778 text, plus the deep Brittonic gwyn root that connects the prince’s name to the kingdom of Gwynedd and the surname Wynne, and the Welsh dragon tradition from Vortigern at Dinas Emrys to the Red Dragon of Cadwaladr.