The National Eisteddfod is a cultural festival which lasts for eight days at the beginning of August every year.

Normally, it attracts over 170,000 visitors and some 8,000 competitors and costs approximately $4m. It is, in fact, the largest popular festival of competitive music making (including composition) and poetry and prose writing in Europe. For thousands of Welsh people it is also a compelling and convivial gathering of the clans, many people regarding it as their annual holiday.

This year, part of Kilford Farm in Denbigh was transformed for a week into a cultural capital. At its centre was the main pavilion with seating capacity for approximately 4,000. It is in this pavilion every year that singers, dancers and choirs compete against each other; the colourful ceremonies of awarding a Crown, a Chair, and a Prose Medal are staged by the Gorsedd of Bards; concerts are given by international soloists and orchestras and by a specially formed local choir of 500 voices and music and dance extravaganzas by local schoolchildren bring the house down.

But the main pavilion, although central, is only one amongst many centres of activity on the Eisteddfod ground. Around it are located smaller satellite pavilions - an art and crafts exhibition, a theatre, literature studio, science and technology pavilion, pop and rock centre, dance hall, sports corner, lecture theatre, societies' centre and a learners' centre, each with a full programme of exhibitions, performances and discussions. The learners' centre hums with activity aimed at helping the learner to acquire the Welsh language and provides advice and information on learning Welsh.

Around and about the main pavilion and its satellites there are some 350 stands. Some are large and impressive. Others are little more than stalls in a street of canvas alcoves. Booksellers and craft shops are there and pretty well every cultural, political and voluntary organisation in Wales. Disperse amongst all this some 20,000 daily visitors and you have a vibrant, happy-go-lucky bazaar of culture which is unique to Wales.