For most people wandering through the beautiful landscape of the Brecon Beacons is pleasure enough, but sooner or later you may ask yourself, what is that little bird or flower that you see on most of your walks? The problem with most guides is that many of the animals, insects, rocks or plants in them are rarities, and therefore probably not the one you have just seen. This guide will help you to identify the ones that you are likely to see on your walks in the uplands of the Brecon Beacons. Don't throw your comprehensive guides away though! Once you can easily identify the things you are familiar with, the rarities will stand out and be much easier to pin down. Also in this series: Nature of Snowdonia by Mike Raine.

This guide for carving an intricate, three-dimensional dogwood branch sculpture in butternut lends itself well to wood carvers at most skill levels and will inform and inspire carvers to create future 3D relief projects. The book includes advice on power carving and back-cut techniques, and the step-by-step process is easy to follow. These simple but innovative methods can be applied to flat-plane furniture or multi-depth relief and implemented with themes from nature, the arts, or anything else the carver can imagine. The biggest challenge for many may be taking the opportunity to reflect and hone wood-carving skills and to anticipate a Best-of-Show quality by slowing down technique. Carvers can control the level of difficulty by modifying the depth levels. The guide includes invaluable tips on specific chisels, router types and transfer methods, as well as chapters on sealing, painting, and building a frame, and an inspiring gallery.

Kevin sums up his approach to navigation as follows: "Successful navigation should be simple and straightforward, and when done correctly, it will enhance the pleasure you get from the outdoors, not detract from it." His book reflects this view and is a concise and practical explanation of how to find your way in mountains and moorland. Everything you need to know is here, from map reading to navigating in poor visibility. Simple descriptions alongside clear illustrations help the reader to put Kevin's advice into practice, and master the knowledge and techniques needed to navigate in all conditions.Kevin Walker lives in the Brecon Beacons area of mid Wales, and has been a professional mountain leader and hill guide for almost four decades. A self-confessed mountain addict, he ran Mountain Leader training courses for several years, and has written many books including Mountain Hazards, Wild Country Camping, The Essential Hillwalkers' Guide, and Undiscovered Wales. He runs a wide range of navigation, hill skills and mountaincraft courses, as well as offering personal tuition, 1:1 coaching, and private guiding.

Buddhist Folk Tales is a wonderful collection of ancient and modern stories from the Buddhist tradition. From short, snappy tales to longer narratives, they will entertain and tantalise the emotions. Laugh, sigh and cry at stories about previous lives, why the Monkey King wanted to be Master of the Universe, the grimace that comes with the phrase 'out of the mouths of babes', and ever-endearing mother love. This is a book to treasure, and read time and again.

The prince no longer kisses the princess, Cinderella helps her new husband to pick a new dress and the relationship between Mr Wolf and the three little pigs is a bit more complicated than you might have thought. In this collection of delightful, empowering and often magical tales, Kevin Walker creates and adapts a host of stories for the LGBTQ+ community. These sometimes traditional and sometimes modern tales show queer people that they belong not only in today's world, but also in a storytelling tradition going back centuries, if not millennia. This is a wonderful collection for LGBTQ+ readers of all ages to enjoy and continue to tell for years to come, introducing characters who are romantic, brave, mysterious or fantastical - but always authentic.

This book describes an invariant, l, of oriented rational homology 3-spheres which is a generalization of work of Andrew Casson in the integer homology sphere case. Let R(X) denote the space of conjugacy classes of representations of p(X) into SU(2). Let (W, W, F) be a Heegaard splitting of a rational homology sphere M. Then l(M) is declared to be an appropriately defined intersection number of R(W) and R(W) inside R(F). The definition of this intersection number is a delicate task, as the spaces involved have singularities.

A formula describing how l transforms under Dehn surgery is proved. The formula involves Alexander polynomials and Dedekind sums, and can be used to give a rather elementary proof of the existence of l. It is also shown that when M is a Z-homology sphere, l(M) determines the Rochlin invariant of M.