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The Brecon Beacons National Park has announced it will use its Welsh language name from today onwards.
The change to Bannau Brycheiniog National Park has come on the 66th anniversary of it being designated a national park.
Pronounced “ban-aye bruch-ein-iog”, the name translates as “the peaks of Brychan’s kingdom” and references King Brychan, who lived in the fifth century.
Catherine Mealing-Jones, the park’s CEO, told the PA news agency: “Given that we’re trying to provide leadership on decarbonisation, a giant burning brazier is not a good look.
“Our park is shaped by Welsh people, Welsh culture, and as we looked into it we realised the brand we’ve got and the name we’ve got, it’s a bit of a nonsense, it doesn’t really make any sense – the translation Brecon Beacons doesn’t really mean anything in Welsh.
“We’d always had the name Bannau Brycheiniog as the Welsh translation and we just felt we needed to put that front and centre as an expression about the new way we wanted to be celebrating Welsh people, Welsh culture, Welsh food, Welsh farming – all of the things that need to come with us as we go through this change in the management plan.”
Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, which attracts around 4 million visitors a year, covers around 1,347 sq km (520 square miles) of south and mid Wales.
The park has also revealed a new management plan to improve wildlife habitat and reach carbon net zero by 2035.
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