Antarctica 100 Memorial on Cardiff Bay

The ‘Antarctica 100 Memorial’, which commemorates the crew of the ship ‘Terra Nova’, who died on the Scott expedition to the South Pole. This beautiful, flowing sculpture shows a sledge being man-hauled across an ice floe, the faces of the of men trapped in the ice, the tent, and the ice cave. The sculpture was created by Cardiff sculptor Jonathan Williams and is close to the Roath dock gates, from where the ‘Terra Nova’ set sail at the outset of the fateful expedition.

Even on a sunny day, this is a chilling memorial to the men who died and I shivered as I remembered seeing one of the sleds taken by Scott to the Antarctic. The sled weighed 75 pounds on its own and was made from solid oak – imagine hauling a fully laden sled from Scott’s Hut on the north shore of Cape Evans on Ross Island, across the Ross Ice Shelf, before climbing nearly 8000ft on the Beardmore Glacier to the Antarctic Plateau and then onwards to the South Pole. That is a journey of 900 miles and then they had to come back the same way.