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6 Must-See Country Parks & Gardens in South Wales
While exploring the surrounding beauty, it's easy to settle into the comfortable ebbs and flows of the natural world. However, there's one thing that may cause a little stress – fitting it all in. If you're working with a tight timeframe, here are the best country parks and gardens in South Wales, to prioritise during your stay.
Home to Cardiff, South Wales is a vibrant hub teeming with activity from popular music festivals to major sporting events. However, while the allure of the thriving capital attracts over 20 million tourists annually, this is ultimately a wild landscape, best-known and much-loved for its rolling hills and abundant green space.
Manicured gardens, untamed wilderness and everything in-between – whatever your preference, South Wales has plenty of each. Wildlife watchers may prefer to stick to the coastal paths, where migrating birds nest in the rocky outcrops, while budding botanists peruse the region's treasure chest of lush gardens. For families, the breath-taking country parks offer plenty to do and see, to the backdrop of sweeping woodlands, rivers and moors.
Best country parks in South Wales
1. Gnoll Estate Country Park
Nestled to the east of Neath town centre is the Gnoll Estate Country Park – a 230-acre haven with a rich history.
The estate once belonged to the Mackworth family who built their fortune in metalworks during the 18th and 19th centuries. While some of the original features have since been demolished, the family's industrial influence remains strong.
Everywhere you look, there are remnants of the past including 18th-century cascades, ruins and tranquil ponds sunk deep into the earth. In the spaces between, the wild has reclaimed the land, with plenty of expansive green spaces, lakes, woodlands and grottoes to explore. Besides traversing the grounds, there's a range of activities on offer, from footgolf and fishing to playgrounds and picnics.
2. Margam Country Park
Situated in Margam, about two miles from Port Talbot, lies the 850-acre Margam Country Park, bursting with prehistoric, Roman, Norman and Tudor heritage. The estate is also home to three notable buildings – Margam Abbey, Margam Castle (an impressive neo-Gothic structure) and the 18th-century Orangery.
The Grade I listed Margam Castle is perhaps the crowning feature. The building has been kept in pristine condition since its construction in 1830, retaining its awe-inspiring octagonal towers and lofty interiors (it's also a popular location for paranormal investigators thanks to a grisly murder that took place in 1898).
The surrounding grounds are equally impressive and house a vast array of wildlife. The famous Margam Deer Herd roams through the parkland undisturbed, while buzzards, kestrels and red kites patrol the skies.
3. Dare Valley Country Park
Dare Valley Country Park lies near the village of Cwmdare and the town of Aberdare in Rhondda Cynon Taff. Something of a hidden gem thanks to its remote location within South Wales, the gardens are an ideal location for wildlife watchers and those looking to escape the business of modern life.
The park's 500 acres of untouched terrain is a hub of biodiversity, with the grassland, moors, bracken slopes, upland bogs, forests and lakes housing some of the country's most iconic plant and animal life. There are swallows and mighty peregrine falcons, cuckoos and kingfishers, slowworms, spiders and sticklebacks. Then, amongst clusters of native wildflowers, flash the multicoloured wings of pearl-bordered fritillary, purple hairstreak and grayling butterflies.
After walking the well-trodden trails, there's still plenty to do. The park features an on-site riding school, cycle network, accessible children's playground and café.
Best Gardens in South Wales
4. Dyffryn Botanic Garden
In the Vale of Glamorgan sits Dyffryn Gardens – a 55-acre National Trust site once voted one of the Top 100 Gardens in the UK by the British Tourist Authority.
It's an unusually peaceful oasis on the outskirts of Cardiff, contrasting the capital's modernity with Edwardian characteristics. Seasonal beds and rose gardens border the formal lawns, pools and fountains, while the arboretum includes a collection of trees from all over the world.
Dyffryn House stands in the heart of the gardens, yet not apart. Even here, visitors can find cacti and orchids lining the walls, and the kitchen gardens supply homegrown fruit, vegetables and herbs to the on-site cafés.
5. Wye Valley Sculpture Garden
The Wye Valley Sculpture Garden sits in a serene and sequestered setting on a gentle slope in the Lower Wye Valley. For the past 40 years, it's been managed organically and sustainably, encouraging the renewal of many indigenous plant and animal species.
The South Wales garden's 4-acre landscape boasts formal lawns surrounded by herbaceous borders, woodlands (including a snowdrop wood) and an orchard. Flowers are abundant and eclectic, with Mediterranean plants thriving in the unique climate. This lush setting also features a pond and sculptures by artist Gemma Kate Wood, who uses materials from the surrounding areas in her work.
6. Llanover House Garden
Llanover is a listed garden set in the beautiful Usk Valley, looking towards the Black Mountains and Brecon Beacons National Park. The Llanover family has cared for the garden since 1792, and their emphasis on preserving Welsh traditions, language and culture has influenced the garden's rustic, wild design.
200-year-old trees remain unearthed, and the Rhyd-y-meirch stream tumbles, as it always has done, beneath historic 18th-century bridges until it bleeds into the River Usk. The family left meadows to rewild, and now they're bursting with wildflowers in deep purples, azure blues and earthy reds.
Attractions, Carmarthenshire, Parks & Gardens, South Wales, South Wales Valleys, Things to do, Tywi Source Sea, West Wales
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6 of the Best Must-See Museums and Attractions in Wales


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NASA astronaut Jerry Carr, who led final Skylab crew, dead at 88
By Storm Gifford
NASA astronaut Jerry Carr, shown in this 1973 photo, has died at the age of 88. (Keystone/Getty Images)
Former NASA astronaut Jerry Carr, who led the final mission aboard the first American space station, is dead at 88.
Carr's family confirmed he died in Albany on Wednesday. No cause of death was revealed.
"Throughout his life and career, Jerry Carr was the epitome of an officer and a gentleman," read a statement by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. "He loved his family, he loved his country and he loved to fly. We are all enormously proud of his legacy as a true space pioneer."
Three years prior to Apollo 11′s 1969 lunar landing, NASA selected naval aviator and aeronautical engineer Carr, reported Collect Space.
His lone spaceflight occurred in 1973, helming the first American space station Skylab 4.
In addition to leading solar observations, conducting photography experiments and collecting physiological data, one of Carr's greatest achievements was performing a Christmas Day spacewalk.
The Skylab crew spent 84 days in space — a record at the time — before returning to Earth on Feb. 8, 1974.
"We proved, I think, just absolutely, positively that the human being can live in weightless environment for an extended period of time," said Carr during a 2000 interview. "But medically, we gathered the data that I think gave the Russians and other people the understanding and the courage today to say, 'OK, we can stay up for longer periods of time.'"
Power Trip frontman Riley Gale dead at 35 »
Skylab famously fell from orbit in 1979, disintegrating in the atmosphere. But chunks of it did fall to Earth, mainly in Western Australia and its surrounding Indian Ocean.
Carr was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1997.
He is survived by his wife, Pat Musick, and six children.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


When Michael Fried, in his essay 'Art and Objecthood' (1967), disparaged Minimal Art's promiscuous 'theatricality' and its erosion of Modernist autonomy, he cannot have known the extent to which the recontextualization and re-creation of contemporary art objects would make that erosion the rule rather than the exception. A mini-retrospective of Robert Morris's work at Sprüth Magers in Berlin made it clear that art's passivity to a viewer's interaction is now part of a larger passivity to the context in which it is displayed and trafficked.
As has been common practice since they were first exhibited, Morris's mid-1960s plywood sculptures were recreated here according to his original specifications. These re-fabrications are not seen as editions or as copies of an original, but as equal manifestations of a sculptural concept. Floor Piece (Bench) (1964) is a 7.5-metre-long plywood block with one of its long upper edges bevelled to a curve, and sealed in the same yellowish mid-grey emulsion that coated all the 1960s works in the show. Rather than a generic neutral grey, the shade suggests aestheticized interior design, conferring on these objects the replicant aura of ghosts of a lost specificity. What Donald Judd called 'specific objects' prove to be only as specific as a set of measurements and a number on an RAL colour chart – that is, not objects, but ideas for objects.
That aura was heightened by a gallery which implicitly asks Morris's art to function as a precursor of the work of younger artists who have exhibited here, whose art is pitched as a subversion of what Fried described as Minimal Art's 'risk [...] of seeing works of art as nothing more than objects'. Last year, for example, Sterling Ruby showed plywood benches graffitied with spraypaint – a dressing of Morris's neutral forms in the tattooed skin of pop culture and an attempt to evoke what Bruce Hainley has called 'the private life of Minimalism'. Consequently, Morris's grey semi-originals displayed in the same space acquired the air of inverted déjà vu, as though they recalled what they themselves have spawned.
But Morris was never the cut-and-dried Minimalist of legend or the reliable purveyor of non-referential boxes that neatly confirm the revisionist narratives of artists like Ruby. Rather, he predated their critiques, conflating phenomenological materialism with the Freudian unconscious. Seen in overview, his career is characterized by its resistance to being reduced to any single narrative, whether empirical, political or formalist. Untitled (Ring with Light) (1965/6), like a mammoth grey Polo mint that has been surgically bisected, reveals an inner light that might be directing a beam of the finest critical irony in the direction of Fried's yearning for Modernism's air of harbouring secrets it couldn't bring itself to impart. (Fried, however, interpreted the work's intimation of 'an inner, even secret, life' as an example of the 'anthropomorphism' he found objectionable in Minimal Art.) Even the hanging felt work Untitled (1976), one of a series with a reputation for the purest materialistic exposition, is an oblique sexual metaphor. Fabric peels back, like the petals of a great black flower, to reveal a narrow vertical slit.
Scatter Piece (1968), a chaos of metal and felt off-cuts, is the entropic disintegration of these formal geometries and the most radical manifestation of Morris's challenge to the viewer to project order onto dumb material. The fragments themselves are relatively recent – produced for a 1980s presentation – so his gambit now asks us to register them as 'specific objects' and not approximating cyphers. This was always the trajectory of Morris's method: to intimate the unfathomable nature of interpretation required by even the most rudimentary of forms, and ask the viewer to plumb its depths. It is a challenge that can make his art seem manipulative, as though we were puppets tugged to and fro on a stage of his devising. The sound installation Voice (1973–4), for instance, comprises eight door-sized speakers in a windowless room, each seeping a male voice's stream of consciousness. Narratives merge as the viewer drifts into the orbit of one speaker after another. The installation claims the room as a metaphor for the dimensions of a mind inundated by a torrent of inchoate thoughts. The box speakers are Minimalist objects with an audio component, like Morris's earlier Box with the Sound of its own Making (1961), which denies their present-tense singularity by implying the past in which it was recorded. Paradoxically, this resembles the back-to-the-future air of temporal displacement that the gallery context foists upon Morris's work: perhaps we should see him as capable of wresting a passivity to the manipulations of context, and converting it into positive content. The reconstructed work's spooky aura of bucking natural historical sequence may well be his intention.
This fertile tension between ideally centred perception and its entropy – through psychic dissolution or the atomizing of mediation – was conspicuously diffused in recent pieces. A circle of eight children's chairs (Chairs, 2001), each covered by a sheet of crumpled lead, seemed a sentimentalized outpouring of the repression glimpsed though the geometric interstices of the earlier work. In order to become present, the elusive materiality of Morris's work from the 1960s and '70s has had to re-emerge on the other side of his imitators and detractors, only to find the present is a place in which it is as corrupted for him as it is for them.
Mark Prince is an artist and writer living in Berlin.


Workplaces are complex social environments involving people and risk. Does the typical approach of more procedures, rules and checklists really prevent accidents? Is a safety culture just about getting everyone to comply with safety procedures and rules, or are we deluding ourselves to simply achieve legal compliance?
Human dynamics related to safety and risk.
Mistakes, errors, omissions, luck and how accidents really occur.
Dangers in relying on safety documents and LTI rates for safety assurance.
Creating and maintaining a "Safety Culture" that recognises and values people.
Enhanced strategies for better workplace safety.
Following the presentation the presenter will be joined for the Q&A by Candy Choo, Manager Workforce Risk Services and Ben Galvin, OSH Team Leader both from LGIS WA and Rachael Lincoln, Senior Safety and Risk Consultant, CCI WA.
The event will be chaired by Tim Lethbridge, Partner, Kott Gunning Lawyers.
Michael originally trained as a specialist paramedic serving with the Australian Army, Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment. Following military service Michael moved to corporate business roles in Safety & Health and Human Resources, including management roles with the Department of Health, Western Australia; Marsh (the global insurance broker); and Pfizer (the US pharmaceutical company).
Michael founded RiskLink in 2005 providing Safety & Health and Workers' Compensation services. Over the past 10 years he has been involved in hundreds of serious accident investigations including 25 fatalities. Michael holds a Bachelor of Health Science degree, an Associate degree in OHS, a Grad Dip in HR, and is currently undertaking a Master's Degree in Social Psychology with a focus on human factor safety and risk, and safety culture.
Michael and RiskLink has a strategic partnership with Dr Robert Long and Human Dymensions in providing risk and safety related psychology services including culture and leadership training.
Rachael has attained many years of hands on occupational safety and health (OSH) experience from working in WA's resources sector. Now working as the Senior Safety and Risk Consultant at CCI, she spends much of her time at CCI member's businesses assisting them to provide a workplace that is safe for their workers.
She has worked successfully to assist CCI members to reduce incidents, and build positive corporate safety cultures. Rachael's main strength is her enthusiasm and passion about safety helping. This extends to the up and coming safety professionals and as such, is currently mentoring a tertiary OSH student through The Smith Family. She holds a Master in Occupational Health and Safety, a Bachelor of Business, Certificate IV in Training and Assessment and a Diploma in Teaching English as a Foreign Language.
Candy joined LGIS in 2010 and is the Manager of Workforce Risk Services overseeing the consulting services of HR, OSH and Health & Wellbeing delivered to LGIS Members. She is also the acting portfolio manager of the Workers Compensation Team at LGIS having the responsibility of overseeing claims management and strategy development to minimise claims for the local government workforce of over 17,000 employees.
As a registered psychologist specialised in the area of Organisational Psychology, Candy has worked with a wide variety of organisations and dealt with employees across all levels over the last 10 years. Candy has extensive experience and an in-depth understanding of some of the most common workforce related issues in the workplace. Her key areas of interest include general HR risk management, conflict resolution, performance management, safety and health, change management, organisational climate and culture and employee engagement.
Candy is a highly skilled group facilitator, trainer, coach and mediator and has successfully transformed organisational culture and mitigated organisational stress with these skills for a number of organisations in both private and public sectors.
Ben joined the OHS profession in 2003, after completing a Master's degree in Occupational Health and Safety Management. Ben's career has seen him work in a variety of roles in varying jurisdictions including NSW, London and now Western Australia. Previous roles include working as an OHS Consultant in the construction industry and as the Network OHS Advisor for the Nine Network Australia before joining WorkCover NSW.
After 4 years as a Senior Inspector, Ben moved to London for a 6 month stint as an Advisor for City West Homes. Returning to WorkCover NSW, Ben joined the Self Insurers Auditing Unit, progressing to Lead Auditor and to managing the Unit.
Ben joined LGIS in March 2015 to lead the OSH resource in developing safety programs and solutions for local government in WA.


justice Quotes. justice Quotations Interactive Database.
"Injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured." Martin Luther King Jr.
"True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice." Martin Luther King Jr.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Martin Luther King Jr.


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Many of your patients with OA knee pain may also have other comorbidities.2-8 For these patients, consider if adding another oral medication to their list of treatments is right for them, or if a topical could be an appropriate option.
What's your treatment strategy for patients with OA knee pain?
GI=gastrointestinal; NSAID=nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug; OA=osteoarthritis.
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Schmittdiel JA, Raebel MA, Dyer W, et al. Prescription medication burden in patients with newly diagnosed diabetes: a SUrveillance, PREvention, and ManagEment of Diabetes Mellitus (SUPREME-DM) study. J Am Pharm Assoc (2003). 2014;54(4):374-382.
Black JA, Simmons RK, Boothby CE, et al. Medication burden in the first 5 years following diagnosis of type 2 diabetes: findings from the ADDITION-UK trial cohort. BMJ Open Diabetes Res Care. 2015;3(1):e000075.
Gu Q, Burt VL, Dillon CF, Yoon S. Trends in antihypertensive medication use and blood pressure control among United States adults with hypertension: the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2001-2010. Circulation. 2012;126(17):2105-2114.
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PENNSAID (diclofenac sodium topical solution) 2% [package insert]. Lake Forest, IL: Horizon Pharma USA, Inc; May 2016.
Hochberg MC, Altman RD, April KT, et al. American College of Rheumatology 2012 recommendations for the use of nonpharmacologic and pharmacologic therapies in osteoarthritis of the hand, hip, and knee. Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken). 2012;64(4):465-474.
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