Mike Parker: 'Marcher echoes on the Welsh Border'

Ancient polities always leave their mark in ghostly shapes and residual identities. In researching my recent book All the Wide Border: Wales, England and the places between, it became increasingly obvious as I explored the borderland quite how much the Marcher identity survived still, five hundred years after its official abolition. Even as someone from Worcestershire, who has lived in Powys for the past twenty years, the extent and magnitude of this survival surprised me greatly.

My talk will flesh this discovery out, looking at the patterns of settlement, belonging, identity and culture from the years of the Marcher lordships that can still be discerned today. The talk will be fully illustrated with maps and images, including many of the photographs taken on my research trips.

Mike Parker has written numerous books. These always take his sense of place as their starting point, but mix in memoir, history, identity, politics and belonging. They include the bestselling Map Addict, republished in a new edition last year, its critically-acclaimed follow-up The Wild Rover and the cult Neighbours From Hell?
Another bestseller was his Mapping the Roads, a lavishly illustrated history of our roads and their mapping, going back to Roman times and earlier.
Mike has also written and presented numerous TV and radio series. These included On the Map for Radio 4, and for ITV Wales, Coast to Coast and the ever-popular Great Welsh Roads, when he toured the country in a campervan, with his dog Patsy.
For the past seven years, he has been working on a loose trilogy. Two books have so far been published: On the Red Hill (2019), an evocation of the queer rural, won the 2020 non-fiction Wales Book of the Year, and was shortlisted and Highly Commended for the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing. Following it in spring 2023 was All the Wide Border, an examination of the England-Wales frontier as a line on the map, a line through history and a line in our heads. Discussing it on Times Radio, Ayesha Hazarika said “No-one maps the secrets of the UK quite like Mike Parker.” It was named by Waterstones as one of the ten best travel books of the year.
www.mikeparker.org.uk