From Llandudno to Cardiff Bay, the A470 twists and turns for almost two hundred miles stretching from North to South, providing a link to Wales’ past, present, and future.
So much of the country’s culture, history, and language leads back to this blacktopped backbone yet defining exactly what it means to be Welsh in Wales has never been more difficult.
As one of the nation’s leading music-focused organisations and through the support of funding provided by the Arts Council of Wales’ Create scheme, in March 2022 Community Music Wales set out on this iconic road to explore people’s connectivity to Wales, its varied landscape, to reveal notions of ‘Welshness’ through the power of music and sound.
Working closely with ten groups from areas spanning the length of the A470, the Ffordd Sain Project has compiled the sights and sounds of this astonishing sonic highway into this interactive map. Featuring audio, video, photography, and the spoken/written word, it aims to send visitors on a historic, topographic, and sociological journey into the heart of Wales using music as its vehicle. From the capital onto the historic valley towns of Pontypridd and Merthyr Tydfil, through the rural farming villages of Mid Wales to the dramatic summits of North Wales and back into the Victorian seaside town of Llandudno.
"Ffordd Sain, our participatory project engaged with 10 different communities living along the A470, to celebrate the diversity, bilingualism and different demographics of people who live along this famous route through Wales,” explains CMW Director, Hannah Jenkins. “Over the past year, we have engaged with over 300 individuals and 17 different groups, starting in Cardiff ending in Llandudno. Each group celebrated its own unique area and told the story of their own community through songwriting, performance, animation and video making. It has been a fantastic project and we are proud to publish an A470 Sound map, showing all of the work created. We'd like to thank the Arts Council of Wales' Create scheme, all of the partners, tutors and participants who made this project possible."