Listening
What three events are described?
When did these events start taking place?
Why did they decide to organise these events?
Speaking
Can you summarise the content of the video?
Can you write in pairs four questions to be answered with the content from the video?
Ask your questions to another pair? Have they given the information correctly?
Transcript
Narrator: Take a pagan festival chariots pulled by
bikes and a tiny Welsh town and you get…Whatever this is. This story takes
place in the Welsh countryside in the town of Llanwrtyd wells.
Lindsay: ‘Llanwrtyd wells’. We are the smallest town
in the UK.
Narrator: And this is Lindsay Ketteringham, he runs a
local hotel in town.
Lindsay: It's called ‘the Nevadd Arms hotel’. The town
today is a small farming community primarily everybody knows everybody else. Day-
to- day life is generally pretty quiet around here.
Narrator: Except on ‘Event day’.
Lindsay: The Mountain Bike Chariot Racing Championship
is an event that was conceived to be part of a Roman festival we hold each
January. The rules of the race are…to get round in the fastest time possible. The
course starts off on a short tarmac stretch then becomes a rough stony road
with puddles and bumps. And eventually it comes back to the finish along a
tarmac stretch which has speed bumps. It's not a simple task. We do encourage
people to dress up as the Romans did. As you can see people enter into the
spirit of it which is what it’s all about.
Narrator: Okay but ‘Ben-Hur’ styled bike racing isn’t
everything that this tiny town does.
Lindsay: We do the events such as ‘Man versus Horse’ ‘bog
snorkeling’
Narrator: And all started back in the seventies.
Lindsay: Llanwrtyd wells was the center of the pony trekking
industry in Britain. In the nineteen seventies unfortunately, the industry went
into serious decline. At that point the local business people started looking
for ideas to boost the economy and came up with the idea of running events,
things that were slightly different an unusual. It's great to see the success
of the events, see people enjoying themselves and it's great to be able to
share what this part of the countryside has to offer. The aim is to maintain
the great community that we have here, even to help it grow, but not too much. We
don't want to lose our smallest town status.
Narrator: Hey, I hear you Lindsay.