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that far from Plynlimmon where H. J. Fleure was convinced from his work on skull shapes that he
had found a relic population, and where there was also a very high frequency of blood group B. I
wonder, as I write this, whether the great anthropologist ever tasted Conti’s ice-cream on his
travels.
Of course, we must not forget the clan of Oisin. This is far and away the most common clan in
all the three regions of Wales, which it also is in the whole of the Isles. In fact, at 86 per cent, mid-
Wales has the highest proportion of Oisin in the Isles outside Ireland. Interestingly, the Pictland
region of Grampian is only just behind, with 84 per cent. Only Munster and Connacht in the west of
Ireland have higher proportions of Oisin. The Atlantis chromosome, the prevalent Y-chromosome
in the clan, is very frequent in Wales, more so even than in Ireland, as a proportion of Oisins as a
whole.
There is one other interesting thing to point out. The diversity, that is the variety, of different
Oisin Y-chromo-somes is lower in Wales, especially mid-Wales, than anywhere else in mainland
Britain. Geneticists usually put that down to a recent arrival date, there having been less time for
mutations and diversity to have arisen. But to find the lowest diversity in mid-Wales of all places
seems very peculiar to me, since all the other historical indicators suggest that mid-Wales has been
among the most stable and longest settled of any region in the Isles – even if I did not find any
evidence of Neanderthals. The lower than expected amount of accumulated mutations in the Y-
chromosomes is beginning to be a recurrent feature of most of the Celtic regions of the Isles.
Whether this is also true of England, we are about to discover as we push east over the hills.