I began with the same slight trepidation I felt 26 years ago in Lampeter, that at some point I would be told: "Butler, English-speaker, you have no right to be at the National Eisteddfod."

It didn't happen in Ebbw Vale. In fact, on Sunday, when every family in Blaenau Gwent seemed to turn up, the sounds of: "I don't speak Welsh myself, Ed, but my children do ..." became one of the refrains of the week.

Just behind the 10th tee at the West Monmouthshire Golf Club, the highest and most hospitable golf course in the UK, I had a moment to stare down on the multitude of tents at the northern end of the old steel works. It struck me that since that visit to Lampeter in1984, the year of the Miners' Strike, much has obviously vanished, never to be replaced: an entire deep coal-mining industry; steel-making on a grand scale.

And yet, Wales seems more self-assured now, less on the defensive. We live in troubled times in the short-term, with cuts threatening everything. You know it must be bad when Westminster dares to take scissors to the tail of the S4C dragon.

Over a 25-year cycle, however, perhaps S4C - and in a shorter time scale, devolution - have succeeded in providing a channel and a chamber for a new Wales.

I don't know. In fact, I'm not sure if feeling reassured as an English-speaker at the National Eisteddfod is entirely appropriate. This is cultural competition of the highest order, expressed in a single language that is anything but English. The Eisteddfod by definition is Wales at her most Welsh.

I suspect that my sense of helplessness on the Maes is healthy, an inversion of the threat to Welsh by an all-invading English language, a reminder of bad times past. I appreciate all that, but I am equally grateful that nobody made the point at the National Eisteddfod by prodding me in the chest with the nozzle of an ethnic cleanser.

On the contrary, everybody wrapped me in a warm embrace, and that may be a true sign of Wales, ancient, modern, in any language.

In my family, thanks to my father's job at ICI Fibres in Pontypool, our industrial talk was confined to the properties of nylon. Could a human body levitate, we wondered, on a force-field of static electricity after sliding at full speed between two sheets of said fabric?

It means that the processes of making steel remain a mystery to me. The stack annealer basement has nevertheless become a little underground haven for a head scorched overground by the sun ripping through the thin air above the old Ebbw Vale works. The SAB has been transformed into Y Lle Celf, a home for delicate art on walls thick enough to make China's Three Gorges dam look like tissue paper.

I say that only to be able to use the only long Welsh word I know, in admiration of the gwrthgyferbyniad between concrete and canvas. And I love the lle, especially the long ramp going past the trio of canvasses by Manon Awst and Benjamin Walther. "On the Way to History" is my favourite, although I am still spooked at the point by the Paper Chain Dolls by Wendy Mayer. In any language these are troubling figures.

Next door to the Lle Celf is an even quieter spot, the community garden. On Saturated Sunday, when 25,000 poured gloriously through the dust storm, I found myself alone in the garden with a local woman and her dog. "He's misbehaving," she said, sitting her mutt down and giving him a hug.

I reached out a hand and he growled. I returned to the photos of the works in their heyday and in decline. They made nearly 17 million tons of steel at Ebbw Vale before they tore down the blast furnaces. I found out what they did in a stack annealing basement: heat great coils of steel to soften them before rolling.

Now it's an art gallery that pulls me back, past the disturbing paper chain dolls.