Yma: Public asked to share their memories of Wales on interactive digital map

Stephen Price

An interactive map of Wales has just launched, inviting people from Wales and across the world to share their memories for others to see.

The brains behind Yma is Mike Gwynne, who is also the founder of  Made in Cymru – a clothing brand “for Welsh people who carry Wales with them. People for whom Wales is not a place they visited but a thing they are, wherever they happen to be standing”.

He hopes to bring to life the map of Wales in a new and interactive way for everyone to get involved with, where every street, every village, every mountain and beach, every away end and school field sings with memories of the people who once walked, played or worked there.

Anyone anywhere in the world can find a location on the map and leave a memory. One paragraph. The place, what happened there, what it meant.

The memories are public. Anyone can read them. Anyone can add their own. There is no catch. No purchase required. No membership. Just a Welsh person, a place that shaped them, and one paragraph about why.

And within days of launch, the map is already filling up, with eight memories in the first day.

Kev in Nefyn. Deb cleaning gravestones with dock leaves as a child. And according to Mike, “people who found Yma and immediately knew what to do with it because the feeling it was built around what was already there waiting to be named”.

He shared: “Every Welsh person has a place.

“It might be the street they grew up on. A rugby ground. A chapel or pub. Somewhere that would mean nothing to anyone who was not there at the right moment with the right people.

“The away end in Bordeaux in 2016. The Racecourse Ground in Wrexham when your grandfather took you to your first game.

“The beach at Nefyn before the road existed and the world was small enough to hold everything you needed.

“These places do not diminish with distance. They grow. A Welsh person in London carries Nefyn more vividly at forty than they did at ten because now they understand what they had. The compression of it. The specific quality of light and cold and belonging that only exists in that place, in that life.

“Yma is where those places go.”

Made in Cymru

Made in Cymru is a Welsh identity clothing brand based in Llandudno, rooted in Welsh history, culture and sport. The designs reference specific moments and movements rather than generic dragon-and-daffodil imagery, covering Welsh football, Welsh rugby and Welsh identity, each one built around a real story.

1958. The Red Wall. Yma O Hyd. Gary Speed. Each one a shorthand for something Welsh people carry without needing to be told to.

Mike shared: “The thing we kept coming back to was the feeling behind the brand. Welsh identity that does not diminish with distance. The Welsh people in London who cry at the anthem more than the ones who never left.

“The Welsh communities in Patagonia who have kept the language alive for a hundred and sixty years in a valley on the other side of the world. The Welsh person in Sydney who cannot explain why it matters so much but knows absolutely that it does.

“You can leave Wales. Wales never leaves you.

“That is not a slogan. It is something Welsh people know to be true before they can put it into words.”

Inspiration

Mike told Nation Cymru: “The main reason I set up Yma is because I watched a video on Anthony Hopkins talking about how he misses Wales and the pull it always has on him to go back”

“It resonated with me and I start to think about how true it was and how Wales isn’t somewhere you live, being Welsh gives you a bigger attachment to the country.

“I’m hoping over time, people will write in depth memories of what they remember about certain places, what it reminds them off, who they were friends with, I think it will start with people leaving a short memory but overtime as people leave a few longer ones, others follow, you might read a memory from a childhood friend. I added the opportunity to add photos to the site last night. I think once it starts to populate people will want to come back to it and read new reviews. It’s a website that can give you good feelings.

“As with everything though it will take time to get off the ground, we will see a snowball effect, 5-20 reviews doesn’t add much, but once we have 50+ memories, it starts becoming something more.”

Get involved

He added: “Eight memories today. We hope for eight thousand. Eighty thousand. We hope the map fills up with real, unromanticised memories of Welsh people everywhere. Block 123 when it got too dark to see the football. The view from Yr Wyddfa on a clear morning. The street in the Valleys where three generations grew up in the same terraced house.

“We hope Welsh people who have never heard of Made in Cymru find Yma first. Read a memory from their hometown. Leave their own. Come back a week later to see if anyone else remembered the same place the same way.”

“We hope it becomes something that belongs to Welsh people everywhere. Not a marketing tool. A genuine record of what Wales means to the people who carry it.

“And we hope that somewhere in that record is the answer to the question every Welsh person away from home is always trying to answer.

“Why does it matter so much?

“Because it does. Because Wales never leaves you. Because Kev from Nefyn had the best mates in the world and the beach in the morning and the mountains and the football in the school field and that was everything and he has never forgotten it and he never will.”

Leave your mark at yma.madeincymru.com

---

Get more trusted Welsh news

Choose Nation.Cymru as a preferred source in Google News to see more of our journalism.