1st March: National Day of Wales

Today is St David's Day, the National Day of Wales. Here are 10 things you may not know about Wales:

1. Wales has three national parks: Snowdonia, Brecon Beacons and Pembrokeshire Coast. It has five Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, including Anglesey, the Clwydian Range and Dee Valley, the Gower Peninsula and the Wye Valley. The Gower Peninsula was the first area in the United Kingdom to be designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, in 1956.
2. It also has seven wonders, which are listed in a poem written in the 18th century. They are: Snowdon (the highest mountain), the Gresford bells (the peal of bells in the medieval church of All Saints at Gresford), the Llangollen bridge (built in 1347 over the River Dee), St Winefride's Well (a pilgrimage site at Holywell) in Flintshire, the Wrexham (Wrecsam) steeple (16th-century tower of St Giles' Church, Wrexham), the Overton Yew trees (ancient yew trees in the churchyard of St. Mary's at Overton-on-Dee) and Pistyll Rhaeadr – a tall waterfall, at 240 ft (73 m).
3. Wales is the only country in the United Kingdom whose flag is not represented on the Union Flag. The Welsh flag is a red dragon on a green and white background - Green and white being the colours of the Tudor dynasty. The Tudors originally came from hamlet of Penmynydd on Anglesey. Although the title of "Prince of Wales" is conferred on the heir apparent to the British throne, the Prince of Wales has no constitutional role in the country.
4. One of the things Wales is famous for is music, so much so that a nickname for Wales is "The Land of Song." This is possibly due to the eisteddfod tradition. Welsh emigrants took their musical traditions with them - in the US, Utah is one of the places where large numbers of Welsh people settled, and it was those people who began the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
5. It was a Welshman, Robert Recorde of Pembrokeshire, who introduced the common mathematical symbols we use today. He is responsible for =, + and - and also introduced algebra to Britain.
6. Wales also invented mail-order shopping. Welsh entrepreneur Pryce Pryce-Jones launched a mail order business from Newtown, Montgomeryshire, dispatching by post and rail throughout Europe. His 100,000 plus customers, included Florence Nightingale, Queen Victoria and many European royal households. The oft-cited US inventor, Aaron Montgomery Ward, did not hit on the idea until 11 years later. Another first Wales can claim is the first fare-paying passenger railway in the world, the Oystermouth Railway, established in 1807.
7. Wales is home to the smallest cathedral city in the world - St David's, Pembrokeshire, which happens to be the only city in Britain to be situated entirely inside a national park; and the smallest house in Britain (3.1 m high and 1.8 m wide) is in Conwy. At the other extreme, Wales has the longest railway station name and the longest internet domain name in the world. These both belong to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch, which means “The church of St. Mary in the hollow of white hazel trees near the rapid whirlpool by St. Tysilio’s of the red cave”. The Millenium Stadium in Cardiff has the largest retractable roof of any sports arena in the world.
8. The desert scenes of Lawrence of Arabia were filmed in Wales. In The Merthyr Mawr Sand Dunes, to be exact. These were once the largest dune system in Europe.
9. The letters K, Q, V and Z do not appear in the Welsh alphabet. Only about 20% of the population speak Welsh, but even so, most road signs are in both languages. It is up to the local authority of each place to decide which language is shown first.
10. On May 13, 1897, the first radio transmission ever took place in Wales, when Marconi transmitted messages, without the use of wires between Lavernock, near Porthcawl, Wales and the Island of Flatholm.