SENIOR politicians from Birmingham were in Barmouth over the weekend to place ceremonial wreaths honouring the dead.

On Sunday, 21 August, Lord Mayor Carl Rice and Cllr Ian Ward, deputy leader of Birmingham City Council, visited Barmouth to pay their respects to Birmingham soldiers of the First World War and to the two young boys from Birmingham who recently lost their lives off the town’s beach.

High above Barmouth at a point overlooking Cardigan Bay, popularly known as ‘The Peak’, is a plaque erected to remember ‘soldiers of Birmingham district who fell at the Somme on 1 July 1916’.

Not many know of this monument, but it is believed to have been placed there by the family of Stanley Ellison of Sutton Coldfield who died at the Somme and commemorates the plethora of links between the Midlands and the Meirionnydd coastline.

During the Lord Mayor’s visit the party laid wreaths at The Peak and at the War Memorial Cenotaph in Park Road and later visited the lifeboat station to thank the RNLI volunteers involved in the search for Waseem Al-Muflehi and Yahya Mohammed, the two teenagers who tragically drowned on 7 August, and also left a wreath in their memory as well.

See this week’s Meirionnydd edition for the full story