Welsh Folk Tales of Coast and Sea, page 12
A hundred thousand tides have ebbed and flowed across the marsh since then, so the Woolly Rhino of Whiteford may soon reappear to chase the 4x4s that the cockle gathers now use, having pensioned off the donkeys.
Pony walks slowly into the fast-rising water near the cast-iron Whiteford lighthouse, and stands still as the tide races in around her. Soon she is asleep with Môrwen on her back and only her head above the high tidewater.
17
Amelia and the Hell Dog of Laugharne
LLWCHWR/LOUGHOR–LLANSTEFFAN–TALACHARN/LAUGHARNE
Amelia
Môrwen slides off Pony’s back and swims across the Loughor Estuary towards the coal town of Burry Port, when a small orange Fokker F.VII seaplane named Friendship flies over her head and lands on the water, scattering the wintering wildfowl. The cockpit door opens, a woman throws out a rope and motions to Môrwen to tie it to a floating buoy.
‘Thanks, sweetie. Where are we? Southampton?’ asks the woman.
‘Pwll. Wales. Croeso i Gymru. Môrwen i fi.’
‘Thanks honey. Sorry, I don’t speak your language. I’m Amelia from Kansas. We’ve flown from Newfoundland and these guys are Bill and Slim.’ The two pilots wave cheerily.
Môrwen has never seen a plane before, but she wants one.
It’s 18th June 1928 and Amelia Earhart has become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, though Bill did the driving.
A man in a coracle rows out to help, and the plane is towed to Porth Tywyn, where a huge crowd has gathered. Amelia and her companions spend the night in the town while Friendship is refuelled and they continue to Southampton in the morning.
Almost a century passes. Môrwen is standing outside the Neptune Hotel opposite Pembrey Burry Port Railway Station, thinking about catching the train along the estuary to Ferryport, when she hears a voice behind her, ‘Honey? Thanks for your help back in 1928. I guess it’s still Halloween? Spirits and mischief, huh? Can I buy you coffee? There’s a diner named after me, and I wanna go.’
Amelia hugs Môrwen and they walk through Penbre dunes between the railway line and the estuary, leapfrogging the groynes and climbing the skeleton ribs of La Jeune Emma that poke through the mudflats like the Rhossili sea serpents. Emma was wrecked here in 1828, after being lured to lights placed on the beach by Gwyr y Bwyelli Bach, the Little Axe Men, the Cefn Sidan wreckers. Adeline Coquelin, the 12-year-old niece of Napoleon Bonaparte, was on board, and is buried in St Illtyd’s Churchyard in Penbre.
Amelia relaxes with a cappuccino at Amelia’s Vintage Tearoom near Penbre airport. ‘Y’know, when I landed here in 1928, women over 21 had only just got the right to vote? Yet I flew solo across the Atlantic just four years later. Crazy, huh?’
Môrwen nods, ‘I was born 7,000 years ago, and men think they’re boss. Yet women can fly like birds.’
‘I love you, babe. Tell me a story?’
‘Sure will, ma’am.’ Môrwen is learning Amelia’s language.
The Water Horse of Tywi
On the banks of the Tywi lived a dapple-grey Ceffyl Dŵr with eyes of fire, a snort like dynamite and hooves that faced backwards. If anyone tried to ride her, she jumped into the water and drowned them. A farmer managed to bridle her and fasten her to his cart, so she dragged them into the water.
One day she rescued a coracle fisherman and gave him a ride home on her back. She loved coracles.
Spookiness Near Llanelli
Two miners from Cydweli, one scarred and one lame, were dangling their feet in the waters of Pistyll Teilo, when the stream spoke. ‘It is cold and lonely waiting, waiting, waiting for the sons of William, William, William ...’ They hadn’t a clue what this meant, but one thought it was a bwca while the other said it was ysbrydion. Either way it was scary and ghostly so they ran. When they reached home, they realised the lame man could run and the scarred man had skin soft as a baby’s.
The Headless Princess
Gwenllian was born in 1097 in Aberffraw, Ynys Môn, daughter of the King of Gwynedd. She married Gruffydd ap Rhys, King of Deheubarth, and they lived at Dinefwr, where they led the rebellion against the Norman invaders. When Gruffydd travelled to Ynys Môn to invite Gwenllian’s father to join the rebels, the Normans attacked. Gwenllian raised a Welsh army and marched on the Norman stronghold of Castell Cydweli, but in the battle both of her sons were killed and she was beheaded.
As time passed, a ghostly headless woman was seen on the slopes of Castell Cydweli, searching for her head along the estuary. After three days without luck, she picked up a large stone, held it under her arm and placed it on her grave. The hillside was never haunted again, until the mid-1970s when King Arthur appeared at the gates of Castell Cydweli and oppressed a peasant, but that was in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Friendship
‘What happened to you?’ Môrwen asks Amelia. ‘People say you disappeared.’
‘Yeah, lots of books have been written about me,’ says Amelia.
Môrwen is silent for a moment. ‘I can’t read. I like picture books.’
‘Didn’t you go to school?’
‘We have no schools in the Mesolithic. I learnt from my nan. Now I’m studying archaeologists,’ says Môrwen.
‘You mean archaeology?’
‘No, archaeologists.’
‘Well I’ll just have to learn you to read, honey. I went to Columbia in 1919, majored in literature. I love books.’
Amelia writes the word ‘Aeroplane’ and draws Friendship in Môrwen’s sketchbook.
‘Amelia?’
‘Honey?’
‘Could we fly over the Tywi?’
‘Well, Friendship was sold to the Colombian Air Force, and in the early ’30s she disappeared. But hey, we’re spirits, we can do anything!’ and Amelia claps her hands, curses three times and they are flying over Carmarthen Bay in the spirited little seaplane. Môrwen sees the shape of an old ferry boat under the water and thinks, ‘There must be a story there.’ Amelia drops her near Llansteffan and vanishes, leaving a grin in the sky like a Cheshire cat.
The Ferryman’s Coffin
Jacob the Ferryman owned a boat called Rhondda that carried people across the Tywi estuary, from Ferryside to Scott’s Bay near Llansteffan. One of his regulars was a farmer called Ann Fawr, who had a son named Ben Bach. Ann was a widow, so Jacob helped her on the farm, and soon a romance developed.
One day in the sweltering heat of July, Ann thought she was going to die, so she sent Jacob to buy her a coffin. When the carpenter saw the measurements, he said there was no box big enough to accommodate her. It would have to be custom made, and that would be expensive.
Well, Ann wanted only the best coffin, so Jacob asked the carpenter to customise a solid oak box with brass handles. When Ann climbed in, it was too small, so Jacob blamed the carpenter for getting his measurements wrong and the carpenter blamed Ann for growing bigger since he measured her. So a few extra oak planks and a couple of iron supports were added, but it was still too small. Jacob accused the carpenter of incompetence and demanded a new coffin or his money back. The carpenter agreed to make another one provided he was paid in advance to cover the cost of felling a forest. They were about to come to blows when the carpenter agreed to delay payment until after the funeral, which according to Ann was getting closer by the day.
Years passed, and the feud continued until one day Jacob dropped down dead with the stress of it all, followed shortly afterwards by the carpenter, who had no one to argue with.
So Ann’s little son Ben Bach, who was now Ben Fawr with four children of his own, took over the carpenter’s job. He added more planks to his mother’s coffin and said he would tie a rope around it after she was nailed in. Then one day Ben’s children were playing hide and seek in the coffin when it collapsed. Ann was inconsolable without a box to be laid in to rest, and Ben was convinced his mother would probably outlive him and his children.
Then he had a brainwave. His mother was the perfect size to fit inside Rhondda, his father’s old ferry boat. So when the day finally came, Ben placed Ann in the ferry, rowed out into the Tywi estuary, and sank it.
The Mock Mayor
During Fiesta Week in Llansteffan, the locals built a temporary stage in a clearing known as The Sticks for the Mock Mayor to make a speech. The custom had its roots in the irritation people felt at paying expensive tithes to the town Mayor, so they decided to elect their own. The contenders for Mock Mayor were hauled round the village in a gambo, making speeches that contained unachievable wild promises like those made in Westminster. One Mayor, Paddy Trench, promised to stock Carmarthen Bay with mermaids, but was defeated by the suffrage candidate long before women were allowed to vote in Wales.
Môrwen takes the ferry from Black Scar across the River Taf to Laugharne. The only other passengers are sheep from the Trefenty livestock sale. She arrives smelling of ewe poo and makes her way past the boathouse and ferryman’s cottage up the steep tree-lined track to Brixtarw farm. There was another weird custom here, a sort of ‘beating the bounds’, which involved walking round the boundaries of Laugharne while someone from the crowd was held upside down or bent over as their names were recited at locations along the route such as ‘Blinds Well’.
The Hell Dog
A woman was walking home alone from Laugharne at night when she stepped over a pothole by the roadside at Pant Madog and came face to face with a Cŵn Annwn, a Hell Dog. It pawed at the pothole and howled so horribly that the earth shook. Being a practical woman and unafraid of the dark, she glared at it until it vanished. She told her story in 1767 to Prophet Jones, who reasoned that someone had been murdered on this spot and the dog was trying to find their money, which had fallen into the pothole.
Years later a fisherman was walking home at night past the crossroads where the Laugharne town gibbet stood, when he saw a large white dog, growling and baring its teeth. The man ran, stumbled and fell, and the dog stood over him, drooling saliva. He closed his eyes and prepared to be torn to pieces, when the dog faded away.
During the Mesolithic, hyenas lived in nearby Coygan Cave, where food remains of mammoth, woolly rhino and brown bear, have been found.
The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait
Môrwen walks along a muddy path, pausing only to chat with a herd of heifers on her way to St Martin’s Churchyard, where Dylan and Caitlin are buried beneath a simple white cross. They lived in Laugharne for only four years, but Brown’s Hotel is full of visitors searching for souvenirs of the poet, unaware his spirit is watching them from the bar and scribbling notes on the back of his cigarette packet.
Dylan spots Môrwen through the window. ‘Mesolithic Girl, come in.’
‘I have a name, it’s Môr...’
‘Landlady, a brown ale for this young lady, she’s travelled a long way. Further than you could ever imagine,’ shouts Dylan.
‘You haven’t paid last month’s tab yet,’ replies the landlady.
Môrwen grabs Dylan by the arm and ushers him away from Brown’s before an argument begins. ‘Can we go to your writing shed?’
‘Yes, I have beer and Welsh cakes and questions to ask you.’
They stroll along ‘The Walk’ to a wooden shed by the waterside. It’s not as tidy as the expensive Arts Council replica that toured round Wales on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. And it smells weird.
Dylan pours a bottle of brown ale into two glasses and gives one to Môrwen with an unbuttered Welsh cake. ‘What’s the Mesolithic like? How do you travel through time? Do you make a wish? Or have you got red shoes? Or a flying saucer? I’m writing a story about time passing in a small seaside town, seen through the blind eyes of a sea captain.’
Môrwen takes a breath. ‘It only happens on this day when time moves in circles. You have to jump across when the lines meet. Have you heard of the Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait?’
‘Is it about fishing for mermaids?’ Dylan is hooked.
‘Sort of. It’s about my world. The graveyards below the sea, the miracles of fishes, the sun shipwrecked west on a pearl, old as water and plain as an eel, time bearing another son when there is nothing left of the sea but its sound. My people have been reeled in across time and space from a submerged land caught in the net of a thousand and one stories.’
Dylan frantically makes notes while a halo of cigarette smoke wraps round his head. ‘A fisherman winds his reel with no more desire than a ghost, he catches a girl alive with hooks through her lips.’
Môrwen blows him a kiss, ‘See you in Cei Newydd, lovely boy.’
18
Leekie Porridge and Betty Foggy
DINBYCH-Y-PYSGOD/TENBY–DOC PENFRO/PEMBROKE DOCK–ABERDAUGLEDDAU/MILFORD HAVEN
Babs and the Flying Sweethearts
Môrwen is barefooting across Pendine Sands when a custom-made racing car called Babs hares past in an attempt to break the World Land Speed record in 1927. It doesn’t end well, as the driver, John Godfrey Parry-Thomas of Wrexham, is killed when Babs overturns. She is now on display in the nearby Museum of Speed, and is commemorated by the hot rod races on the sands each year.
The Flying Sweethearts Amy Johnson and Jim Mollison, set off from Pendine to fly round the world in 1933 in a de Havilland Dragon called Seafarer. However, they crash-landed in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and became the first couple to fly the Atlantic, were entertained by President Roosevelt and met Amelia Earhart. Pendine has inspired strange things.
The Stonemason Bard
Tom Morris was born in a watermill in 1804 and lived with his wife Jenny in a cottage on the clifftop, where he sang ballads and played his cello to passers-by. He was a master stonemason who specialised in carving and engraving Snowdrop Marble, a grey limestone seen on many gravestones, memorials, fireplaces, churchyards and walls in South Pembrokeshire. His work is in Gloucester Cathedral, Tredegar House and St Mary’s Church, Tenby.
Mesolithic Marros and Amroth
On Marros Sands are stumps of Mesolithic alder, oak and willow forest, alongside craters caused by exploded First World War mines, and the wooden outline of the schooner Rover wrecked here in a gale in 1886. On the beach at Amroth are groynes built from wooden sleepers from the Maenclochog Railway, which closed in 1949, and a row of cottages which were washed away in a storm in the 1930s. Môrwen picks up some plastic bottles and drops them in a bin, while a naturist paddles along the water’s edge holding a bottle of Chardonnay.
Wally the Walrus
A huge walrus hauled out on the Tenby RNLI slipway in May 2021 and blocked the launch of the lifeboat. A crew member tried to move him with a broom while making noises with the air siren and waving his arms around. Eventually Wally flopped into the harbour, and set off on a grand tour of France, Spain and the Scilly Isles, where he sank a dinghy, tried to climb on to a fishing boat and made headlines in newspapers round Wales. After three months the orange giant swam round southern Ireland on his way home to Iceland.
Jane’s Sublime Feelings
On a wrought-iron bench overlooking Wally’s Slipway in Tenby Harbour sits a girl busily writing in a notebook. Môrwen peers over her shoulder. ‘What you doing?’
‘I am writing a diary of my travels in 1802. Listen: Wales is not really somewhere to live; it is somewhere to have sublime feelings about, like a Gothic ruin or a mountain crag.’
‘I live here and I’m not a Gothic ruin. What’s sublime?’
The girl closes her notebook and looks conspiratorial.
‘The diary is merely a front to conceal that I am writing a novel about a girl who has run away to Wales to escape a man who wants to marry her. I confess it is somewhat autobiographical.’
‘Is there a walrus in it?’
‘My heroine is a matchmaker who refuses to marry.’
‘Does she fall into a swamp?’
‘The young man I am avoiding might be more interested in you. He prefers wild girls to the bookish.’ And she scribbles out the words ‘Sense and Sensibility’, and writes ‘The Marsh Girl and the Walrus’, unaware that a once promising novelist has vanished from the literary and historical timeline.
Barti Ddu and Leekie Porridge
In the early 1800s, the captain of a cargo ship thought the Tenby harbourmaster’s silver shoe buckles looked familiar. They were stolen when his ship was plundered by the Scots-American pirate John Paul Jones, who often hid on Caldey Island. In court, he discovered the harbourmaster had deserted from the navy to join John Paul Jones’ crew, and his pirate name was Leekie Porridge, presumably due to the quality of his cooking. Porridge was found guilty of stealing the silver buckles and sentenced to serve on a British man o’ war throughout the Napoleonic Wars.
Porridge wasn’t as bloodthirsty as Welsh pirate captains like Henry Morgan of Llanrhymney, who plundered Spanish ships in the Caribbean, tortured his captives and ran slave plantations in Jamaica, before drinking himself to death in 1688. When Howell Davies of Milford Haven was shot dead in 1719, a vacancy opened for another young Welshman, Bartholomew Roberts of Casnewydd Bach. Black Bart.
For three years Barti Ddu was the most feared pirate in the Caribbean. He employed a band to play his theme tune when he appeared on deck dressed in extravagant crimson clothes. Despite his showmanship, he never drank, banned gambling and prostitution on board, and ordered his crew to be in bed by eight o’clock. In January 1722 he was shot by a British navy officer and dumped overboard in his finery, so ending the short colourful reign of the first pirate to fly the skull and crossbones.
The Paddle Steamer
Môrwen has slipped on board the Waverley, the world’s last seagoing paddle steamer, about to embark on a cruise from Tenby Harbour to Milford Haven. They paddle past Lydstep, where a 7,000-year-old skeleton of a pig was found with two broken flints in its neck, squashed beneath a fallen tree trunk on the beach surrounded by footprints. Môrwen loved that pig. It lives in Tenby Museum now, amongst Gwen John’s paintings.
