The Rhysians had children, their numbers grew, they built more homes, and soon there was barely enough land to grow food. The mainlanders heard the distant rumble of empty bellies, although they mistook it for the anger of the Gods. The Rhysians took to crafts, they became quilt makers, wood carvers, and iron smelters, famed for their black cauldrons. They traded by sea like the Phoenicians before them, and visited the markets of Ceredigion where they traded their goods for corn. As soon as they were seen at the markets, prices went up. The poor folk of the mainland said the Rhysians were friends of Siôn Phil Hywel the farmer, but not friends of Dafydd the labourer.
They traded with a man named Gruffydd ap Einion, as his corn was fresh and his prices fair. Gruffydd was a libertarian, a free-thinker, intrigued by the stories of their idyllic life. As years passed, the Rhysians honoured Gruffydd by taking him to the clump of herbs, and in that moment he saw all the knowledge and wisdom in the world, kept safely in forests and books. Preachers and politicians were few. Sheep were plentiful. Choughs wheeled and kestrels hung in the air. The land was rich beyond dreams. It was the Utopia he had dreamed of.
Gruffydd asked how they kept themselves safe from crime, and they told him that Rhys’s herbs hid them behind a veil of watery mist and the rain kept the mainlanders away. Rhys had rid their world of those who lived only for personal gain in the same way St Patrick had ejected snakes from Ireland. The only memory they had was a curious drawing of a creature with horns, a bosom of snakes, the legs of an ass, holding a great knife, with bodies lying all around. No one wished to meet that creature.
When Gruffydd stepped away from the patch of herbs, he forgot how to see the land of Plant Rhys Ddwfn, though he still had his memory and dreams. The Rhysians never forgot their friend and traded with him all his life, until one day they came to the market to find Gruffydd had passed over to the Otherworld and the traders had increased their prices. The Rhysians walked away and never returned.
The land of Rhys the Deep, the Welsh Utopia, is still there, glimpsed from the window of the train as it trundles past Cors Fochno, hidden behind sea defences designed to prevent flooding, heard in the ringing of the bells of Aberdyfi, written in the storybooks about Cantre’r Gwaelod, the Welsh Atlantis. The sea keeps no secrets.
Oh, and Plant Rhys Ddwfn, in West Wales, is a colloquial name for those who lived here before, the marginalised, the dispossessed, the fairies.
The Ghost Island
Gruffydd ap Einion was visiting St David’s churchyard when he looked out to sea and saw a ghost island. Before he could reach his boat, the island vanished. An old woman who lived on the mountainside told him he had found the herb that allowed him to see the land of Plant Rhys Ddwfn. The next day he went to the churchyard, and as soon as he saw the island, he dug up the herb with a ball of soil round its roots, and placed it in his boat. With the island visible, he rowed towards it, and landed in a cove where he was welcomed by Rhys. He visited every evening until, one day, he never returned. Everyone agreed he had gone to live with the fairies, where he belonged.
The writer Jan Morris saw Rhys’s land from the doorstep of Llanon Post Office. As a child, I saw it from the shoulder of Yr Eifl on Pen Llŷn.
I still see it. No matter where I stand.
The Curse of the Verry Volk
The Norman Lord of Pennard Castle on Gower was celebrating his daughter’s marriage with feasting and orgy, when a guard reported seeing strange lights in the woods. The Lord, fearing the Welsh were attacking, gathered his soldiers and went to investigate. In a clearing, they found the Verry Volk, dancing in celebration of the marriage. The drunken Lord, thinking he was being mocked, ordered his soldiers to charge. The slaughter was unexpected and terrible. Standing amidst the carved bodies of her dancers, the Verry Queen pointed at the Lord and called him, ‘Coward’. She cursed him for his cruelty and stupidity, wailed into the wind, and vanished.
The following day the wind blew and the sea stirred, and sand poured over the land. For hours the storm screamed, until the castle and its people drowned in sand.
A wailing was heard in the wind, which was said to be a gwrach-y-rhibyn, a death witch, although a golf course has been built next to the castle’s remains so the wailing is more likely to be a frustrated golfer trying to chip out of a bunker.
The old town of Kenfig was also submerged by a sandstorm after the indulgences of the Normans; excessive feasting and indulgent orgies accounted for the flooding of old Tregaron which lies beneath Maes Llyn. Tegid’s palace is at the bottom of Bala Lake; Llys Helig was flooded by the sea off the Great Orme; King Benlli’s court was swallowed by Llynclys; and it is still a mystery how old Swansea came to disappear below Crumlyn Lake.
The Reservoir Builders
In 1881, work began constructing a dam across the Vyrnwy Valley to create an artificial lake to supply Liverpool with clean drinking water. The village of Llanwddyn was evacuated and demolished, and more than four hundred people were moved to a new village built by Liverpool Corporation further down the valley. Even the ancestors in the churchyard were exhumed and reburied. The dignitaries of the Vyrnwy Water Works Project were so pleased with their dam they erected a public monument to themselves.
In a peaceful place amongst the trees, there is another memorial. The Obelisk was paid for and built by the workers who constructed the dam, and lists the names of forty-four men who died. One of those men lodged with his family in the upstairs room at the Green Inn in Llangedwyn. His little daughter liked to sit in the front window and watch for her father walking home along the road from Vyrnwy. One day, he never returned, and for many years, a little girl was seen in the upstairs window, staring down the road, endlessly waiting for her father to come home.
A few years later, Birmingham Corporation began constructing six reservoirs in the Elan and Claerwen Valleys in Powys. Such was the scale of this project that they built a new village for the two-thousand-strong Midlands workforce, and a railway to connect the reservoirs and take the children to school. Eustace Tickell, the civil engineer on the Pen-y-garreg Dam, fell in love with the beauty of the valley and spent his leisure time drawing the villages before they were flooded. In 1894, he wrote and illustrated a book about the Vale of Nantgwyllt, which he described as ‘one of the most charming valleys in Great Britain. Scenes which are soon to be lost forever, submerged beneath the waters.’
This beauty also attracted the poet, idealist and revolutionary Percy Bysshe Shelley, who in 1811 as a nineteen year old walked from Sussex to visit his uncle Thomas at his mansion at Cwm Elan. Shelley had a small wooden boat with five-pound notes for sails, which he launched in the fast-flowing mountain streams, often with a cat on board, while he ran along the bank, guiding it through the rapids with a long pole.
He spent the summer of 1812 at Nantgwyllt with his sixteen-year-old wife, Harriet Westbrook. Within two years Shelley left her for Mary Godwin and Frankenstein. Harriet threw herself in the Serpentine, and in 1822 Shelley drowned while sailing off Tuscany. His home at Nantgwyllt was submerged during the building of the Caban Coch Reservoir. In 1937, the water level dropped by over fifty feet during a drought, and the ruins of Nantgwyllt reappeared, a ghostly reminder of Shelley’s watery life and death.
The Dambusters was filmed at Caban Coch in 1955, just as plans were afoot to build another reservoir to provide drinking water for Liverpool. In 1965, the Tryweryn Valley was flooded and the village of Capel Celyn near Bala was evacuated and submerged, causing a tidal wave that changed Welsh politics forever. During droughts, the spire of Eglwys Capel Celyn reappears from beneath the reservoir, another reminder that water, like languages and people, never keeps a secret. There is no word for ‘reservoir’ in Welsh.
The Lost Land Below Wylfa Nuclear Power Station
Wylfa Head on the west of Cemaes Bay, Ynys Môn, was once known as Millionaire’s Row, due to all its grandiose holiday homes. One was Glan Dŵr, bought in the 1930s by New Zealand opera singer Rosina Buckman, who worked with Thoma
s Beecham at the Royal Opera House. Rosina turned Glan Dŵr into a musician’s summer retreat for her students, and gave recitals at Cemaes Village Hall to support war charities. She was often seen rehearsing on a rock overlooking the bay, wearing flowing white gowns, long golden hair over her shoulders, and a Pekinese tucked beneath her arm.
During the Second World War, the house was requisitioned as a radio location station and Rosina was evicted. She died in 1948 and the house fell derelict, until the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) bought it, demolished it, and began to build Wylfa Nuclear Power Station Reactor Two on top of the ruins. The ashes of Rosina’s mother-in-law, Emma D’Oisley, had been buried in the garden, and her urn was removed and reburied in Llanbadrig churchyard. The fury of the two ladies was soon evident.
In 1964, four workers on the night shift saw a woman dressed in a white evening gown, walking towards and over the cliff before fading away. A local electrician working on the building of Reactor Two heard melodic operatic singing. As he moved closer, the singing became louder, the temperature dropped, and she was standing next to him. He dropped his tools and ran. More and more workers saw her, and soon they were convinced Rosina Buckman had returned.
Volunteers for the night shift became scarce. Four Irishmen known as the Black Gang agreed to do the job, providing Father Taff, the local priest, carried out an exorcism. This done, they set off down the tunnel. As they walked along, they heard what sounded like ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, and in the lamp-light they saw a figure dressed in white. They dropped their tools, screamed with terror, and ran away as fast as their legs would carry them. They refused to return to work until investigations proved the singing had come from a reel-to-reel recorder, and the ghost was the tea boy, a mischievous local lad who had wrapped himself in a white sheet to play a joke on the laggardly Irishmen. The lad was sacked for wasting company time.
A woman in white with long blonde hair over one shoulder continued to be seen. Lights in Reactor Two switched themselves on after being switched off, there were cold spots and the sound of singing. Some said the ghost was not Rosina but her mother-in-law, old Emma D’Oisley, furious at being forced to leave her final resting place.
There is another restless spirit at Wylfa, a tall dark-haired man dressed in a white shirt and black waistcoat, buff-coloured breeches and riding boots, always accompanied by the sound of a cracking riding whip. A receptionist said it followed her home to Porth Amlwch, where she heard the cracking of his whip as she lay in bed. The Reception Centre at Wylfa was built over the stable block of a farmhouse called Simdda Wen, owned in the 1860s by a wealthy farmer and his two daughters. The farmer became involved with one of his serving maids, until one day she was found hanging by her neck from the clock tower on top of the stable. When the men who worked on the farm gently cut her down they found bruises on her neck that suggested strangulation. They were convinced she had been hung from the stable clock to hide a murder. Fingers pointed at the farmer, but nothing was ever proven. On his death, his daughters managed the farm until it was bought by the CEGB.
Some of the workforce at Wylfa had been employed at the farm when they were younger, and they remembered a portrait of the old farmer hanging in the hallway. They swore he was the restless spirit of the reception centre, forever tormented by thoughts of the murdered maid, cracking his riding whip in redemption and remorse.
4
MERMAIDS, FISHERMEN AND SELKIES
Mermaids
In 1603, a chapbook was published that told of an encounter between Thomas Raynold, yeoman of Pendine, and ‘a monsterous fish, who appeared in the forme of a woman, from her waste upwards’.
In 1782, Harry Reynolds, farmer of Castlemartin, spotted what appeared to be a merman with a tail like a conger eel, near Milford Haven.
In 1826, a mermaid with black hair, white skin and ‘blameless breasts’ was seen at Llanychaiarn, south of Aberystwyth, by another farmer who considered her modesty yet continued to watch for a further half hour.
And in 1858, Daniel Huws and a group of quarrymen from Porth y Rhaw, were at Trefin on their way from Fishguard to St David’s when they saw a lady with long silver hair and the body of a fish. They asked what she was doing, and she replied, in Welsh, ‘Reaping in Pembrokeshire and weeding in Carmarthenshire’. The west coast of Wales has spawned a shoal of fishy tails.
Pergrin, a fisherman from St Dogmael’s, was pulling in his nets near Cemaes Head at the mouth of the Teifi, when he saw a mermaid combing her hair. He caught her and hauled her into his boat. She began to weep and wail and pleaded with him, in Welsh, to release her, and she promised to give him three shouts if he was ever in danger from the sea. So he threw her overboard and she disappeared into the depths. Time passed, until one cloudless day, Pergrin was out in his boat when the mermaid appeared and told him to haul in his nets. Three times she spoke, so he sailed for shore, and as he passed Pwll Cam, a great storm gathered. Pergrin reached safety, though twenty-seven fellow fishermen perished at sea that day, 1 October 1789.
A mermaid was caught in a fishing net at Conwy. She implored the fishermen to release her before she drowned in the air, but they refused. She dipped her tail in the tide to feel the water on her skin one last time, and cursed the people of Conwy to be forever poor. So poor, that if they were paid with a gold sovereign, they had to cross the estuary to Llansanffraid for change.
Early in the 1800s, a farmer from Treseissyllt found a mermaid stranded on the shingle beach at Aberbach. He picked her up, she wriggled and writhed, but he carried her back to the farmhouse, filled a bathtub with water, sprinkled it with a little sea salt, and dropped her in. She wept and pleaded to be released but he rubbed his hands and told her he had other ideas. So she cursed the men of the farmhouse to be forever infertile, so no child would ever be born there. When he grew old and alone, he rented the farm to a young farmer, told him about the curse, and said he was a lucky lad. The young farmer asked why, and the old man said, well, at least he’d never be able to get into trouble with his wife through flirting with mermaids.
The Llanina Mermaid
Mr Lewis Henbant, an old man from Llanarth, told the tale of a mermaid who lived on the rock at Carreg Ina. She became entangled in fishermen’s nets at Llanina and implored them to release her. They cut her free, and in return for their kindness, she warned them of an approaching storm and saved their lives. There are many more stories about the Llanina mermaids.
In a rush-floored cottage at Traethgwyn lived a fisherman called Gronw, and his daughter Madlen. On a warm heavy day in August, with a terrible storm brewing, Madlen was locking up the pigs and goats when she saw a ship flying a Saxon flag about half a mile offshore. She watched as it was struck by lightning and began to sink. Madlen ran and told her father, and while Gronw had no love for the Saxons, he would not see fellow fishermen drown. Madlen went with him and soon they were rowing towards the sinking ship. They pulled seven men from the sea, returned to save five more, while two swam ashore, although many more drowned.
Gronw took the twelve survivors to his cottage, gave them warm food and drink and dried their clothes by the fire. A tall, elegant man seemed to be their leader, but he spoke in a language Gronw could not understand, so Madlen fetched a monk from Henfynyw, who spoke Anglo-Saxon. The monk explained that the tall elegant man was Ina, King of the Saxons. In gratitude for saving his life, the King built a church on the spot where he was rescued, though he named it, not after Gronw or Madlen, but after himself, Llan Ina.
Time passed, the church flooded, a new one was built on the clifftop, and the story was forgotten. Now, when the tale is told, the King was rescued not by Madlen, but by a mermaid who lived on the rock at Carreg Ina.
Myra Evans, who told Madlen’s story, was born in Ceinewydd at midnight between 1 and 2 November 1883, the night of All Souls, when the veil between this world and the Otherworld was at its thinnest. She collected fairy tales, gathered mostly from her father, Thomas Rees, a fisherman and sea capt
ain who lost all his brothers at sea. Myra persuaded him to write down the stories and she kept them in a biscuit tin under her bed, so she could read them beneath her sheets when he was away.
Here is another of Myra’s stories …
Another Llanina Mermaid
In long ages past when the sea between the Rush Fields of Llanon and Ogof Deupen was land, on a poorholding named Tangeulan lived a widow woman, Nidan, and her son Rhysyn. They earned their living from the sea, he as a fisherman, while his mother salted and dried the herring and mended his nets after the seals bit holes in them to eat his catch.
Rhysyn had dark curly black hair and sloe-black eyes, he could sing and rhyme and tell a tale, and all the girls of Ceinewydd loved him. Quite a few of their mothers, too – and one lusty old grandmother. But Rhysyn had a taste for the exotic and he was engaged to Lowri, the new maid at the big house, Plas Llanina. She was from the south, hair of spun gold, buttressed of bosom, plump as a puffer fish, with a laugh like a fishwife, and he worshipped the very ground she walked upon. They were to be married on the next Gŵyl Mabsant, and the bidder had been sent from door to door to announce the wedding.
Welsh Folk Tales Page 3