Lloyd's Art Info

The griffin (also spelt gryphon, griffon or gryphin) is a legendary creature with the body of a lion, the head of an eagle and the ears of a horse or a donkey. The griffin is generally represented with four legs, wings and a beak, with eagle-like talons in place of a lion's forelegs and equine ears jutting from its skull. Our Griffin is a burnt orange and it's standing on a base - the front of which says, 'Wales' or 'Cymru'.

Cardiff, as capital city of Wales.
Where is Wales?
It is a double peninsula of the largest island in the archipelago off the north-west coast of France. It is bounded in the north by Liverpool Bay and the river Dee, to the west by the Irish Sea, to the south by the Bristol Channel and the river Severn, and to the east by a fairly arbitrary administrative boundary essentially dating back to the thirteenth century and very roughly following the boundary between high ground (in Wales) and fertile plains (in England).
So what exactly is Wales? A country? A district?Well, that rather depends what you mean by country.
There is a geographical entity, essentially the hilly bits between the rivers Dee and Severn. There is also an administrative entity which is in British English terms a country, but not a state; some people have been known to describe its governance as giving it the status of an internal colony of the United Kingdom. There is also a people, who to the extent that they identify themselves as Welsh, are what some people would call a nation. There never has been a single state, in the modern sense of the nation-state, exactly coinciding either with the geographical or with the cultural Wales.


The Welsh people have an interesting history.
Wales was once ruled by a king . Then rulrd by local Princes which were subjects of the king pf England. Their language was once outlawed.