Urdd Gobaith Cymru - the Welsh League of Youth - was founded in 1922 by Ifan ab Owen Edwards to give Welsh-speaking children somewhere to play, sing, recite and compete in their own language. The Urdd National Eisteddfod, the league's annual festival, has been held every year since 1929 except 1941-1945. The Denbighshire 2022 festival was the centenary edition: 100 years of the organisation, the second time the event had been held with free admission, financed by GBP 527,000 from the Welsh Government to mark the milestone. It was also the first Urdd Eisteddfod since the Cardiff and Vale festival in 2019. The 2020 Denbighshire edition was cancelled because of COVID-19. An online Eisteddfod T was held in its place in 2020 and again in 2021 - the Welsh-language internet keeping the cultural thread unbroken while the physical festival waited. 118,000 visitors came to the Maes - the festival field - across the week of 30 May to 4 June 2022.

Maes is the Welsh word for field, and at every Eisteddfod the Maes is the temporary city the festival builds. The 2022 Maes sat on the working fields of Kilford Farm on the Whitchurch Road, a short walk from Denbigh's medieval centre. The nearest railway station was Rhyl on the north coast - Denbigh lost its rail link in 1962. Festival-goers came by car, by bus, by the chartered shuttle services that have become standard for Welsh-language gatherings in places no longer on the rail network. The Denbighshire Maes was differently organised than previous years. Three pavilions and several stages meant every competitor performed in front of an audience rather than being eliminated in preliminary rounds behind closed doors. The Cornel Canlyniadau - the Results Corner - was a podium where winners were announced live in front of crowds and television cameras. Nation.Cymru described it, with affectionate exaggeration, as 'practically the Hunger Games, but with harps instead of crossbows.' Welsh-medium schoolchildren came up onto the podium, found out their futures, and went back down into the crowd.

Shuchen Xie's composition prize was the centerpiece newsmaker. The Chair - the prize for free-verse poetry, traditionally one of the most prestigious in any Eisteddfod - went to Ciarán Eynon, a young poet who had been a school student in Penrhyn Bay before completing an MA at Cardiff University. He won for poetry on the theme of 'Thank you,' in which he explored his sexuality and the question of whether the Welsh language has adequate vocabulary to express queer experience. That a winning Urdd Chair entry could engage explicitly with sexuality and the limits of the Welsh language to describe it was itself a statement about what the festival had become - a youth gathering that handled identity, language, and difference seriously rather than nervously. The Crown, for chief prose writer, went to Twm Ebbsworth from Ceredigion, a postgraduate student at Aberystwyth, who submitted under the pen name Pysgodyn Aur - Goldfish - and won for a 2,500-word piece on the theme Llen / Llenni, the Welsh word for cover or curtain.

The Eisteddfod week opened with a parade from Prestatyn High School, led by the Cambria Band, down the seaside town's High Street, ending at Bastion Gardens. About 2,000 people gathered for an afternoon of music and dance - the Denbighshire coast turning out for the festival the county had nearly lost. The Eisteddfod's importance is not really visible to anyone outside the Welsh-language community. To children who grow up speaking Welsh in homes where it is the kitchen-table language and yet who watch English-language television, listen to English-language music, and read English-language books, the Eisteddfod is the week of the year when their language is the dominant one. It is the place where a 12-year-old composer from Cardiff finds out she has won a national prize, where a poet's coming-out poem wins the Chair, where the rules of competition apply across every primary school choir and every solo recorder from Anglesey to Powys. The 2022 Eisteddfod cost the Welsh Government most of GBP 527,000. By the standards of cultural recovery it was extraordinary value.