Mametz Wood Memorial

The Mametz Wood Memorial commemorates an engagement of the 38th (Welsh) Division of the British Army during the First Battle of the Somme in France in 1916.

It was commissioned by the South Wales Branch of the Western Front Association following a public fund-raising appeal.

On 12 July 2013, the Welsh Government announced that it was helping to fund refurbishment of the memorial in time for the 100th anniversary of the Battle in 2016.

[4] Infuriated by what he saw as a distinct lack of "push" Sir Douglas Haig with Lt-General Henry Rawlinson visited the HQ of the Welsh Division to make their displeasure known.

The war poet Siegfried Sassoon, of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, recorded in his memoirs that he had made a single handed attack on the enemy trenches in Mametz on 4 July 1916.

Not a single tree in the wood remained unbroken.The poet and visual artist David Jones, who took part in the battle, wrote a vivid description of the fighting in Mametz Wood in his long poem In Parenthesis (1937), including[7] And here and there and huddled over, death-halsed to these, a Picton-five-feet-four paragon of the Line, from Newcastle Emlyn or Talgarth in Brycheiniog, lying disordered like discarded garments or crumpled chin to shin-bone like a Lambourne find.The Welsh poet Owen Sheers commemorated the battle with his poem Mametz Wood (2000), including the words:[8] This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave, a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm, their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre In 2014, National Theatre Wales performed Mametz, a recreation of the battle in a wood in rural Monmouthshire, scripted by Owen Sheers.