About
About
A community interest company working across Wales, based in Powys, doing the practical end of landscape access.
How the company works
Day to day we operate like any other small private company. We quote, we invoice, we work to a brief and a deadline, and clients get a supplier rather than a good cause. Nobody has to fill in a volunteer form to work with us.
The difference is structural rather than day to day. Cambria Sports Culture is a community interest company: a limited company with a social purpose written into it and an asset lock on top. There are no shareholders and no dividends. We do not make a profit in the sense of anyone taking money out. What is left after costs and wages goes back into the work, which is why two of our projects are free to use and always will be.
The work itself sits at the join between three things usually handled separately. Getting people onto the ground. Telling them what they are standing on. And making sure both of those exist in Welsh as well as English.
Steffan Roberts
Director
Steffan runs the company and does most of the fieldwork. He's a qualified Mountain Leader and has spent years on the Powys hills, which is a slow way to learn a landscape and the only one that really works.
The practical result is that when we say a route is walkable, someone has walked it. When we say the parking takes four cars, someone has counted. It's not a sophisticated methodology. It's just the one most people skip.
How we work
Say what you've checked
Surveyed and unsurveyed are different things and they get labelled differently. We'd rather publish less than publish a set of directions that walks someone into a bog in the dark.
Evidence, or say it's a story
Plenty of good local traditions have nothing behind them. They're worth recording as traditions. They're not worth passing off as fact, and readers can tell the difference if you let them.
Free at the point of use
Our own public resources carry no advertising, no accounts, no tracking and no paywall. Commissioned work is a different thing and is priced properly, but what we publish under our own name stays open.
Both languages, equally
Welsh isn't a translation layer over an English site. It's a version of the site. Same content, same structure, handled by a translator rather than a machine.
Build it to outlast us
Everything we make should still work if we stop maintaining it tomorrow. Static files, no subscriptions, source handed over. Nobody should be held hostage by a website.
Patch
Wales, all of it
Commissioned work goes anywhere in Wales and across the border where it makes sense. North, west, the valleys, the coast. Nothing about surveying a path or running a consultation stops at the Powys boundary, and a fair bit of what we do is a day's drive from home by design.
Where Powys does matter is depth. It is where we live, so it is where the local knowledge is thickest and where we can be on site at short notice. Somewhere like Llŷn or the Marches, we start the same way anyone honest would, by spending time on the ground first and saying so in the quote.
The two published projects lean towards mid Wales for the same reason. That is history rather than reach, and Wales Walks now covers the country.
Working with us
Tell us what you're trying to sort out.
Most of our work starts with someone describing a problem rather than a project. A community that has stopped answering consultations. A path nobody can find. A leaflet ten years out of date. A stretch of ground people do not feel confident going onto. Start there and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.