Welsh Folk Tales

by Peter Stevenson

  He hung the glove by its string on a peg. Pryderi’s wife Cigfa asked him, ‘What’s in there, my Lord?’

  ‘A thief,’ replied Manawydan, and told her the story of his battle with the mighty army of mice. He added that he would hang the lot of them as thieves.

  Cigfa told him it was a little undignified for a nobleman such as himself to hang a mouse, better to let it go. But Manawydan was a proud man, and he stomped off to build a gallows. Cigfa shook her head, rolled her eyes, and washed her hands of him.

  Manawydan sat on a mound at Arberth, placed two sticks into the soil and began to build a small gallows. A scholar rode up, and asked, ‘What are you doing?’

  He replied, ‘Hanging a thief.’

  The scholar said, ‘Isn’t that a little embarrassing, a man of your rank, hanging a mouse?’

  Manawydan said the mouse was a thief, and thieves must be hanged. The scholar offered a pound to set the mouse free, Manawydan refused, the scholar shrugged his shoulders and rode on.

  Manawydan was placing the crossbeam on the gallows when a priest rode by, and asked, ‘What are you doing?’

  He replied, ‘Hanging a thief.’

  The priest said, ‘Isn’t it rather humiliating, a man of your breeding, hanging a mouse?’ and he offered three pounds to set the mouse free. Manawydan refused, the priest shook his head, smiled and rode on.

  Manawydan was tying a string noose from the crossbeam when a bishop rode up, and asked, ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  He replied, ‘Hanging a thief.’

  The bishop said, ‘Don’t you feel silly, a fine gentleman like yourself, hanging a mouse?’ and he offered twenty-four pounds to set the mouse free. Manawydan refused, and the bishop said, ‘Name your price?’

  Manawydan stared him in the eye and said, ‘The return of Rhiannon and Pryderi, the removal of the mist from Dyfed, and tell me who the mouse is?’

  The bishop replied, ‘The mouse is my wife and she is with child.’ The bishop explained he was Llwyd ap Cilcoed, and it was he who had transformed himself and his people into mice to eat Manawydan’s corn. It was he who had conjured the grey mist over the seven regions of Dyfed, and had enchanted Pryderi and Rhiannon, all to avenge the wrong Pryderi had done to Gwawl ap Clud for playing badger-in-the-bag (which is explained in the First Branch of Y Mabinogi).

  Llwyd lifted the mist over Dyfed, and as it melted away Pryderi and Rhiannon appeared, walking towards him along the road. Manawydan released the mouse and it transformed into a most elegant pregnant woman. And they all looked around and smiled, as the sun shone over Dyfed.

  And so ends this branch of the Mabinogi.

  The Muck Heap

  Back in the day, every farm had a muck heap. A pile of horse muck, cow dung and human manure that was left in the farmyard to ferment like a fine wine, before being scattered on the fields as compost. The sweet smell hung in the air and clung to clothes, and falling in the muck heap was all a part of growing up.

  At Nant yr Hebog, the old farmer had died and left the business to her son and his wife. One night the son came home and saw, in the fading evening light, an old woman sitting on top of the muck heap. She was wearing a beaver hat tied to her head with a spotted scarf, and looked exactly like his dead mother. He called her name, she turned and vanished. He ran inside to tell his wife that his mother was sat on top of the muck heap. His wife smelled his breath and told him to keep off the cheap beer.

  Next night he came home and there was his mother again, on top of the muck heap, kneeling down as if she was planting something. He hurried inside to fetch his wife, and this time they both saw the old woman before she vanished. Next day, they climbed up the muck heap, and found a little ring of hen’s feathers. They stared at each other. For this was a sign that there was something under the heap. They started digging with their bare hands, deep down into the muck, till they were smeared from head to foot, and what do you think they found? Yes, gold. The old woman’s savings.

  So they opened a woollen mill at Dre-fach Felindre and made lots more money, which they kept in the bank. And they say that every financial transaction to this very day still carries the smell of the old Carmarthenshire muck heap.

  20

  COURTSHIP, LOVE AND MARRIAGE

  The Maid of Cefn Ydfa

  In 1902, William Haggar, travelling showman, purveyor of kinematographs and projectionist at the Kosy Kinema in Aberdare, released a short film, shot around Pontarddulais, based on the old folk tale of the Maid of Cefn Ydfa. In 1914, his son Wil Junior reworked the story of the maid into a fifty-minute silent epic starring himself and his wife, Jenny.

  Anne Thomas was born in 1704 at Cefn Ydfa, a mansion at Llangynwyd near Maesteg. Her father died when she was two, leaving her in the care of her mother and Anthony Maddocks, a lawyer from Cwmrisca Farm. They agreed that when Anne was of age, she would marry Maddocks’ son, also named Anthony.

  One spring day in 1722, Anne heard singing. She looked up, expecting to see a lark, and there was a dark curly-haired young man thatching the barn roof. She was captivated, and invited him to share food with her. He was Wil Hopcyn, a poor lad who ran a smallholding with his brother and did odd jobs as a roofer, blacksmith and plasterer. Wil considered himself a poet, so naturally he fell in love with the maid.

  Mrs Thomas disapproved of her daughter cavorting with an impoverished poet, so Anne was confined to her room. She wrote passionate letters to Wil, which her maid servant left in a hollow sycamore tree for him to collect. The maid flew between the lovers with messages of desire, until Mrs Thomas discovered their secret and Anne was ordered to marry Anthony Maddocks immediately. In desperation, she wrote to Wil in her own blood on a sycamore leaf, but it never reached him. She married in 1725, Wil’s heart broke and he took to wandering the roads as an itinerant musician.

  One summer’s day, he was watching wheat ripening in a meadow, musing on how a seed so carefully planted by one hand could be harvested by another, when he wrote one of the most famous of Welsh folk songs, ‘Bugeilio’r Gwenith Gwyn’. Two years later, word reached Wil in Bristol that Anne’s marriage was loveless and she was wasting away. He returned to Llangynwyd, only for her to die in his arms aged twenty-three. She was laid to rest in the chancel at Llangynwyd churchyard, where many years later Wil joined her, buried beneath an ancient yew tree.

  None of Wil’s poems have survived, and few people left memories of him, apart from Iolo Morganwg, so it was left to William Haggar to seal Wil’s immortality in flickering celluloid.

  Rhys and Meinir

  At a ‘Horse Wedding’ the groom’s party would ride to the bride’s house at full speed, serenade her as only young Welshmen can, and invite her to accompany them to the church. The bride’s family sang back, explaining she was perfectly happy without a daft man. So the boys entered the house and searched for the bride, who was either hiding or disguised. If she had escaped on horseback, they chased her, and if caught, she was forced to drink a pint of beer before being led to the church. Some brides rode away and were never seen again, others fell from their horses and died, and the custom lost its popularity.

  There were only three farms at Nant Gwrtheyrn on Pen Llŷn, where Rhys Maredydd of Tŷ Uchaf was engaged to his cousin Meinir of Tŷ Hen. The wedding was set for the second Sunday in June at St Bueno’s Church in Clynnog, and as was the custom, Meinir ran and hid. The wedding party gave chase, Rhys searched for her, but she could not be found. All that day, all week, for months he searched, his dog by his side, through rain and storm.

  One evening, a bolt of lightning struck a hollow oak tree on the slopes of Yr Eifl. The tree split open to reveal a calcified skeleton picked clean by the birds, dressed in a frayed Haversham-white wedding gown. Rhys’s heart broke and he was buried at St Bueno’s, though his soul had died long before. Meinir was to be buried with him, but the horse and cart carrying her coffin slipped over the edge of the cliff into the sea and the lovers were parted forever. Since then, a couple have been se
en walking arm in arm along the beach, he with a long white beard and she in a frayed white wedding dress.

  You see, the Nant was cursed. Centuries earlier, three monks from Clynnog wanted to build a church there, but the locals threw stones at them and chased them away. The monks cast three curses: that no cousins from Nant could ever marry; the ground would be forever unconsecrated; and the village would slowly die and be reborn.

  In the 1950s, the Nant Quarries closed and the villagers left to search for work elsewhere. The empty cottages became a playground for Llithfaen children, a few wanderers slept there in frayed sleeping bags, and the quarry road turned into a popular suicide leap and car dump.

  But this fairytale has a happy ending, just as the curse prophesied. The houses were renovated and the Nant was reborn as a Welsh Language Centre, which is now a favourite venue for weddings, where couples can be photographed next to a sculpture of Meinir’s oak.

  The Odd Couple

  Let’s be honest, Gruffydd was a miserable old boy. He had few redeeming features. If you greeted him in the street he would grunt like a pig, swear to your face, and tell you to ‘Go to Tregaron’. And he smelled. He kept an old pig in a neglected orchard, but it wasn’t that. He just smelled. Some of the hippy ladies who moved into the village in the 1970s said that every soul had inner beauty and that Gruffydd was waiting for someone to love him, but it seemed he was just a miserable, smelly, foul-mouthed old man who liked a fight.

  So it was something of a surprise that Gruffydd had a wife. And they had been married for almost fifty years. And she was a dark Mediterranean beauty that nearly half a century of living with Gruffydd had not dimmed. There was smouldering passion in her eyes that grey cardigans and print frocks could not hide. Yet he treated her with disdain, and she always walked three paces behind him in the street.

  They had a smallholding, Tan y Castell, just a few sheep, chickens, a goat and an ugly pig. The house was spare and clean, for the chickens weren’t allowed in the kitchen. There was a lace tablecloth, lace across the mantlepiece, lace doilies for hot mugs of tea and a lace holder for the toilet roll. An empty wooden crib stood by the hearth with a notch carved in it, a sign there had been a death.

  She cooked handmade pasta with goat’s cheese and spinach, and Gruffydd grumbled before eating it. No one in the village understood what she saw in the old stoat. Surely she could have had the pick of men when she was an olive-eyed girl who combed her shining black hair a hundred and one times each morning. She was held in such esteem that she was showered with offers of help making the funeral sandwiches on the day he died.

  He’d been in the pub, grumbling about the beer, and was walking out of the door when he dropped down dead. One of the tin butterflies that was nailed to the porch fell off and landed on his head. And that was that. No one rushed to help him. Nobody important had died, there was nothing to laugh at. Mrs Gruffydd never shed a tear. She left the funeral arrangements with Mr Pritchard, Garage Mechanic and Coffin Maker, the flowers would be supplied by the chapel, and the reception tea by the ladies of the Merched y Wawr. No one blamed her for not crying.

  The village was excited with a funeral to look forward to. Bara brith was baked, ham sandwiches were decrusted and several crates of beer were donated by the landlord. They were interested to see if Mrs Gruffydd would cry, whether she had any family, and whether the preacher could find anything kind to say about the old misery in the coffin.

  They gathered outside the chapel early. A car pulled up, long and gleaming white, with the words Ferrari FF emblazoned on it. A man leapt out of the passenger seat and peered around. He had slick black hair, greying at the temples, an Armani suit and Gucci shoes. It was clearly Marlon Brando. Another man, a young Leonardo DiCaprio, leapt out of the driver’s seat, opened the back door, and held out a hand, which was taken by a black lace glove, followed by an elegant lady in a black sleeveless gown, her face concealed behind dark shades and a veiled wide-brimmed hat. It was Audrey Hepburn, fresh from Tiffany’s. With her arms linked to a man in black on either side, the woman swung her hips through the chapel gates and into the vestry without a word. At the graveside, she watched quietly before returning to the limousine. And she was gone.

  Next day, she walked into the village shop, black hair flowing behind her, a loose-fitting grey cardigan over a print frock with a plunging neckline. The two men were with her, in casual wear now. She bought three bags of pasta that the shop stocked specially for Mrs Gruffydd, and left with a beaming smile on her face.

  For this extra from a Fellini film was Mrs Gruffydd herself, looking twenty years younger. She continued to live in the farmhouse with the two young men, and elegant visitors called, all white flashing smiles and dripping with gold. Lamborghinis parked on the driveway. She never offered an explanation. But there was talk. Oh, there was talk. Some said she was in a ménage-a-trois with her toy-boys. Others said these were her sons from a previous marriage, who had never visited their mother because they couldn’t bear Gruffydd. The truth was that there were darker forces at work.

  Gruff met her when she was seventeen, wooed her away from her family who ran an Italian cafe in Cardiff, having fled poverty in Sicily. The family came after her, but she refused to return, preferring this dark young Welshman with sloe-black eyes and a rich Burton voice. Her family disowned her, and as they grew older, she alone understood that Gruff’s anger was borne of the frustration of never being able to satisfy her in the way he wished. She would never stop loving him, no matter what, because she saw only that quiet, strong young man who rescued her from an arranged marriage with the Cardiff Mafia.

  The Wish

  On a farm in Llangadog lived an old couple whose hair had turned to snow. The old man stared at his wrinkled old wife and wished she was as beautiful as the day he first met her. On his way home from market in Llandeilo he stopped by the ruins of Castell Carreg Cennan and followed the underground passage to the wishing well. He prised a rusty old nail from an oak beam, dropped it into the dark water and made a wish.

  He arrived home to find a beautiful raven-haired young woman waiting on the doorstep for him. He blinked his eyes and realised this was his wife, on the day he had fallen in love with her. He gazed at her all evening, although rheumatism and arthritis prevented him from doing what he longed to do. After a winter of this, she grew tired of his dog-eared old face, and ran off with a handsome young artist she met at the fair in Carmarthen.

  21

  FIDDLERS, HARPERS AND PIPERS

  The Gypsy Fiddler

  An old Romani folk tale tells of a girl named Mara, who made a deal with the Devil to exchange her family for a handsome man she desired. The Devil made a box from her father, a bow from her mother, and four strings from her brothers, and gave the fiddle to Mara. As she played, her lover began to dance, round and round, till the Devil carried them both away, leaving the fiddle lying on the ground. One day, the Gypsy King passed by and picked it up.

  Abram Wood, the Gypsy King, was said to have brought the first fiddle into Wales in the mid-1700s, when he walked here with his family and a few possessions strapped to donkeys. Abram was a fine fiddler and storyteller, tall and middling thin, with a dark complexion, rosy cheeks and a face as round as an apple. He wore a three-cocked hat, an embroidered waistcoat with shillings for buttons, a silk coat with half crowns for buttons, white stockings tied with silk ribbons, silver buckles to his shoes and two gold rings on his fingers. When he died in a cowshed at the foot of his beloved Cadair Idris, he left behind a huge family of fiddlers and storytellers.

  Ffarwel Ned Puw

  A fox had been pursued by a pack of hounds through the Ceiriog Valley and up Llanymynech Hill, and had almost reached the safety of a cave when it stopped, stared into the darkness, turned round and ran straight towards the dogs. The pack parted and allowed old Reynard to pass through unharmed, for his coat had turned snow white.

  The itinerant fiddler Iolo ap Hugh, known as Ned Puw, was having a beer at the Lion I
nn at Llanymynech, when he found himself embroiled in a discussion with the local choir. Ned told the choir that their singing was weak and feeble, and even his little fiddle could drown them out. He made a bet that if he stood on top of Llanymynech Hill on Sunday morning, the congregation in the church would hear him louder than the choir. Ned’s challenge was accepted, although they told him it would not be wise to go near the mouth of the old cave on the Sabbath.

  By Sunday morning Ned had sobered up, and he set off up the hill, taking with him bread and cheese, a bottle of home-distilled gin and seven pounds of candles. He settled himself down in the mouth of the cave, took a swig from the bottle, belched with pleasure and took out his fiddle. As he began to play, he heard a voice. He turned and thought he saw someone inside the cave. He stood up and peered into the inky blackness.

  Ned was never seen again. They said he had gone to Annwn, where he exchanged his fiddle for a bugle and played for Gwyn ap Nudd’s Spectral Hunt. Others said he’d gone to the Devil where he belonged, while a few searched the hedgerows, ditches and ponds, where old itinerant fiddlers were often found curled up frozen.