Welcome to the Welsh Marches.
The Welsh Marches (Welsh: Y Mers) is an imprecisely defined area along and around the border between England and Wales. It is a beautiful and sparsely populated area, steeped in history and full of interesting people. Marches.tv brings you a slightly different outlook on the area, using video to showcase the stunning countryside and the amazing people that make up this extraordinary part of the world.
The precise meaning of the term, Marches, has varied at different periods. The closely related terms The Welsh March, The March of Wales or (in Latin) Marchia Wallie, were originally used in the Middle Ages to denote a more precisely defined area, between England and the Principality of Wales, in which Marcher lords had specific rights, held to some extent independently of national kings or princes. Even prior to that, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia (Old English: Miercna) took its name from the root word (Miercna), which, in this instance, referred explicitly to the territory's position on the frontier between the Romano-British in the west and the Anglo-Saxons in the east, and would have meant "border people".
There is no modern legal or official definition of the extent of the Welsh Marches. However, it is a term still commonly used to describe, in particular, those parts of the English counties which lie along the border with Wales, particularly Shropshire and Herefordshire. But visit any border town on either side and identification of being border, or Marches, is very evident. For that reason, we include Powys, which, in turn, includes the original Marcher counties of Montgomeryshire, Radnorshire and Brecknockshire. Over time we hope to extend to include the entire border and some of the older Marcher counties such as Flintshire, Glamorgan, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire.
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