Don't fence me in

Sheep's wool blowing in the wind seems to me as good a symbol of Wales as y ddraig goch/the red dragon.
Caught on barbed wire or brambles, this particular sort of wire wool ubiquitous, marking the places where our notoriously nimble indigenous sheep have forced their way though to wherever the grass is greener, or just different.
One of my earliest memories is acting as a sheepdog  for my father rounding up our landlord's animals to drive them back though the gap (or 'glat' in our border dialect) they had used to escape their designated field.
I clearly remember my mother telling me that barbed wire was invented by a woman, "Isn't that strange?"
No, it wasn't. It was a couple of Frenchmen in the 1860s who first tried to reproduce, with twisted metal strands, the effect of a bramble's thorns (which can be seen to the left in my image)  but it was not until a decade later that a bunch of American farmers in the mid-West succeeded in creating the ultimate  'Devil's Rope'. Lucien B. Smith of Ohio is credited with the original invention but the winning design was patented  by Isaac Ellwood and Joseph Glidden of Illinois, who both made millions out of it.

Intended initially for agricultural fencing to control cattle, barbed wire has long been employed at the heart of murkier doings: to keep people in, and out, in wars, sieges and battlefields, concentration and internment camps, and as a deterrent to crossing borders or straying into exclusion zones. Anywhere there has been confinement or containment or no-go areas there has been barbed wire (or its more vicious off-shoot, razor wire): Mexico, Palestine and  Berlin spring to mind. The film Rabbit-Proof Fence famously concerns tribal people excluded from their ancestral lands in Australia.

I was intrigued to discover that barbed wire has its fans and followers.
Here, in Texas you can 'get hooked' on its history and lore;
Here, in De Kalb, IL, you can visit Isaac Ellwood's grand mansion;
Here, in Georgia a museum proudly offers a collection of 96 different sorts of the stuff.


I don't think barbed wire has a Facebook profile yet but I could be wrong.

Until then, you can listen to Gene Autry singing the title song here.