I've not been to Conwy for years but the old town walls are remarkably intact and I remember walking round on family holidays back in the day. It doesn't get as much attention as places like Chester or York with their more famous walls.

Wales has a lot of castles. Like you say there’s the Norman and Edwardian ones but also castles built by the native Welsh Princes.

Well all of European royalty used purple because the Roman Emperors did for the reasons you outlined

Different empires had colourings that were regionally distinct.

When British Royalty were using purple as a regal colour, their explorers had come to meet first Nations people and discovered that we had used purple as a distinct colour as well!

We had used purple colourings in our wampum which came from quohog shells to make the beads.

(it escapes me at the moment about how else, and where else first nations had used purple)

This was a great article!

Thank you!

Yes. People have been illegally making alcohol to avoid paying taxes and governmental authorization for a LONG time (not just in America). Moonshine is just a catch-all term for any illegally distilled alcohol and was popularized in America. I guess the prohibition just caused the practice to become more widely known and romanticized.

https://drizly.com/article/education/liquor/what-is-moonshine/e-ab5e1266

>Anything found becomes property of the state, and is placed in the custody of the museum.

And this often leads to the exact opposite of what the museum wants: The people will then either keep it or they will sell it on the black market, when they know, that maybe there's some kind of problems and punishments by the law.

I think, the state and museum should pay the guy that finds something and turns it in, rather than punish him. We are talking about very rare historical artifacts sometimes, some collectors are paying a lot for certain things.

Like in my country, a guy found an original dagger from the Roman Empire, dated around 15 BC. I'd like to have such a dagger in my collection and i'd pay a lot for it.

Caernarfon is one we've been to numerous times, my partner visited there again on Wednesday so keep a watch on here or the blog site. A post on Caernarfon is going to be coming soon! A post on Flint castle is next one out.

That whole north stretch of Wales is one of my favourites places in the UK, Caernarfon is just around the corner and also boasts a stunning castle.

To my understanding people find something and then they contact the professionals. Can you add something to that?

They are both Anglicised version of the old Welsh name for the river, Cynwy. Conway was dropped for the more Welsh-looking Conwy.

Look at the Dutch auction website Catawiki. They regularly have auctions of ancient artefacts that appear to me to be from outside the normal channels.

Conwy specifically was, yes. There were some pre-existing castles in Wales prior to Edward I's conquest, but I believe they were all built after the Norman invasion to secure the Welsh border. Off the top of my head Castell Coch and Cardiff are both Norman castles.

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There is an interesting little anecdote along these lines that I learned from visiting the site museum at Buchenwald, Germany, provided by their federal government. There was a prison population of communists and Russian POW's housed there in the last year of WWI, and in the waning months of the war, when Buchenwald fell to the Allies, that the guards turned their weapons over to the prisoners, along with the keys to the gates and barracks, and simply traded places with the prisoners. It must have looked very weird at the time, and resonates the same today.

Significantly, the Germans of Weimar, after WWII, almost universally professed total ignorance of what was happening in the concentration camps of Germany and Eastern Europe. But....Buchenwald is approximately six miles from Weimar, and in the last two years of the war, as the work forces were rapidly depleted to replenish the military losses, prisoners in shackles were brought to the local factories, standing side-by-side at assembly lines with civilian workers. How those workers could ever claim ignorance is known only to them now, but yes, of course they knew. They all knew.

But as to why it was tolerated, once an extremist group in any country takes control of the military, the civilian sector is rapidly subdued, and understands that the only two responses to authoritarian behavior are tolerance or extermination. That is an extremely powerful motivation, be it in Nazi Germany, Egypt, Iran, China, Russia, or Uganda.

Oh, I DO know how it works!

as i said, the find is split 50/50 between them. So it depends on whether its something that can be split easily (like a bunch of coins) or if its like a single item that is co-owned.

Both are owners. They can do with it as they please.

In my country you are only allowed to keep things made after 1537. Anything before that belongs to the state.

I'd love to use that for my DnD campaign

We spent a morning there while touring Wales and really enjoyed it.

Look up how it works before bashing it ;)

Doesn't seem so in Denmark. Maybe people are just more honest (statistics imply this).

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The medieval treasure was taken to the National Museum of Antiques where it was cleaned and investigated. The treasure was dated back to around 1250, which made them assume the treasure was buried then.