Latest Folklore

This cairn has a grisly tale associated with it.Three men were working on the moor . One had a useless dog but his father said it was put on earth for a purpose. During the night three women arrived at the sheiling they were staying in. Two couples retired to a back room . The third man noticed that the woman he was with had a cloven hoof. He fled with the witch chasing him. He turned to his dog and pleaded with it that it had been no use up ‘til now, but to help him now. The dog turned back and the man fled to Nunton. He left a bowl of cream outside his house and next day found the dog dead beside the bowl without a hair on its body. The two other men were found dead and the Aird na h-Aon Oidche was never again used as a sheiling (See Benbecula Ray Burnett)

Unfortunately you probably won’t find much remaining of the barrow that was here. But it was surely carefully placed here at the source of the river Gamber – the Licat Amr – the eye of the Amr.

Nennius wrote about the grave:

There is another wonder in the country called Ergyng. There is a tomb there by a spring, called Llygad Amr; the name of the man who was buried in the tomb was Amr. He was the son of the warrior Arthur, and he killed him there and buried him. Men come to measure the tomb, and it is sometimes six feet long, sometimes nine, sometimes twelve, sometimes fifteen. At whatever measure you measure it on one occasion, you never find it again of the same measure, and I have tried it myself.

(John Morris (ed. and trans.) Nennius: British History and The Welsh Annals (Arthurian Period Sources vol. 8, Phillimore 1980) p.42, marvel no. 13) at Thomas Green’s Arthurian Literature site.

Another classic piece of megalithic folklore is attached to Long Meg. In 1740 John Wood (the architect who styled much of Bath) visited the circle and surveyed it. Afterwards a storm blew up, and the villagers (no doubt shaking their heads wisely) said that it was his behaviour that had prompted it.

(mentioned by Jennifer Westwood in ‘Albion’ p32)

Glastonbury Tor and some of the surrounding land used to be pretty much an island. You can get a glimpse of this sometimes when the Somerset Levels are sodden and the water reflects the sky. In ‘Celtic’ thought there was the idea of an Otherworld island. King Arthur was buried in Avalon when he died, but you don’t have to see the Underworld as being inhabited by the ‘dead’. Gwyn ap Nudd was the king of the underworld, Annwn. Later he was seen more as a fairy figure. One of the legends associated with the tor combines his non-christian and fairy characteristics:

St Collen had come to live as a hermit on the Tor. Glastonbury of course had been long associated with Christianity – Joseph of Arimathea was supposed to have visited and planted his staff, which blossomed into a thorn tree.

He overheard two men talking about Gwyn ap Nudd and told them off for talking such un-Christian nonsense. They warned him that Gwyn would not look kindly upon such an attitude, but Collen dismissed their remarks. A few days later a messenger appeared in Collen’s cell with an invitation to Gwyn’s court. Collen declined the offer. The messenger came back every day but each day was turned away. Eventually he lost patience with the saint, threatening that ‘it would be the worse for him if he did not go.’ Perhaps tired of being pestered, Collen at last agreed.

They entered a secret door in the side of the hill and Collen was led along tunnels, finally emerging into the grand throne room, which was filled with courtiers. Gwyn welcomed him warmly and invited him to eat at the feast that had been prepared in his honour. ‘If this does not please you there is plenty more of all sorts.‘

However, Collen wasn’t blinded by fairy ‘glamour’ and could see perfectly well what was on the table. He replied ‘I do not eat the leaves of a tree.’ A shudder of horror rippled through the court. Collen clearly didn’t care about the dangers of being rude to fairies. Next he laid into the dress-sense of the king’s pages: their clothes were ‘scarlet for the ever-living flames’ and ‘blue for the eternal ice of Hell’. Collen didn’t believe in fairies – to him they were the demons of the Christian religion’s Hell.

To top off his rude behaviour he whisked out a bottle of holy water he’d had stashed under his cloak and sprinkled it liberally in every direction. The palace disappeared and Collen found himself in the pale light of dawn on the summit of the Tor. To him this proved the point that they were demons – but maybe they were just fed up of their discourteous guest and ejected him.

(details from various sources, for example ‘Culhwch ac Olwen’ – see Lady Guest’s Mabinogion notes here at ‘sacred texts’..)

Of course it’s possible that the story has nothing to do with Glastonbury at all – St Collen and the story is comprehensively discussed in Bord’s 2004 ‘Fairy Sites’ book. The saint is far more associated with Llangollen. Perhaps early writers equated Annwn (Annwfn) the Celtic otherworld, with Avallon, and thus Glastonbury.

The weather on Dartmoor can be very changeable. Make sure you pack a jumper and some waterproofs if you look for Childe’s Tomb – or you may end up repeating this ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ moment:

“It is left us by tradition that one Childe of Plimstoke, a man of fair possessions, having no issue, ordained, by his will, that wheresoever he should happen to be buried, to that church his lands should belong. It so fortuned, that he riding to hunt in the forest of Dartmore, being in pursuit of his game, casually lost his company, and his way likewise. The season then being so cold, and he so benumed therewith, as he was enforced to kill his horse, and embowelled him, to creep into his belly to get heat; which not able to preserve him, was there frozen to death; and so found, was carried by Tavistoke men to be buried in the church of that abbey; which was so secretly done but the inhabitants of Plymstoke had knowledge thereof; which to prevent, they resorted to defend the carriage of the corpse over the bridge, where, they conceived, necessity compelled them to pass. But they were deceived by guile; for the Tavistoke men forthwith built a slight bridge, and passed over at another place without resistance, buried the body, and enjoyed the lands; in memory whereof the bridge beareth the name of Guilebridge to this day.”

(Thomas Risdon’s Survey of Devon, early 17th century, quoted by Jennifer Westwood in ‘Albion’).

‘Childe’ apparently comes from the Anglo Saxon ‘Cild’, meaning ‘young lord’. Obviously the tomb, if you follow the story, can’t be where he’s buried. Because that’s Tavistock. Oh well.

Carew entertainingly wrote in his 1602 Survey of Cornwall:

“.. a gentleman, dwelling not far off, was persuaded.. that treasure lay hidden under this stone: wherefore, in a fair moonshine night, thither with certain good fellows he hieth to dig it up.. a pot of gold is the least of their expectation: but... in the midst of their toiling, the sky gathereth clouds, the moonlight is overcast with darkness, down falls a mighty shower, up riseth a blustering tempest, the thunder cracketh, the lightning flasheth: in conclusion, our money seekers washed, instead of laden.. and more afraid than hurt, are forced to abandon their enterprise, and seek shelter of the next house they could get into.”

Another example of the bad weather and trouble you can expect if you mess with the monuments of our ancient forefathers.

at
gutenberg.org/dirs/etext06/srvcr10.txt
(scroll down to 137)

* * *

Daphne du Maurier lived near where the Tristan stone stood before it was moved (crossroads at sx1051), and she wrote her own version of the Tristan and Iseult story, with which it has legendary connections (see also Castle Dor.)

In 1016 King Edmund Ironside fought and lost to the Danish invader Cnut at a place called Assundun. This was traditionally taken to be Ashdon, just south of Bartlow Hills .

In the parish of ASHDON, sparated from Bartlow, in Cambridgeshire, only by a small rivulet, are four large contiguous Barrows, called the BARTLOW HILLS, from their situation being not very distant from Bartlow Chuch. These are vulgarly regarded as the tumuli raised over the slain in the battle fought between Edmund Ironside, and the Danish King, Canute, in the year 1016; but as this tradition is not supported by any historical authority, it cannot be considered as deserving of credit.

(p380 of ‘The Beauties of England and Wales, Or, Delineations, Topographical, Historical, and Descriptive’ by John Britton and others, 1801. It’s online at Google Books.)

Cnut rather kindly built Ashdon church over the graves of the English, and created Bartlow Hills as the resting place for his own fallen warriors.

It’s true and if you want further proof, Camden reports in his ‘Britannia’ of 1610 that:

“Dane-wort which with bloud-red berries, commeth up heere plenteously, they still call by no other name than Danes-bloud, of the number of Danes that there were slaine, verily beleeving that it blometh from their bloud.”

The tradition is rather like the one we have of poppies growing on the WW1 battlefields. Danewort is thought to be dwarf elder (Sambucus ebulus).

(Actually the battle is now thought to have been in Ashingdon, some way away. And of course, the barrows aren’t Danish. They’re generally referred to as (shh) Roman – you can’t deny the wealth of Roman artefacts discovered there! but to be fair they were probably rich native people who were buried in the traditional British style through their own choice).

(info from ‘Albion’ by Jennifer Westwood, p103)

John Hewitt wrote a poem about this site. It was originally called “Oisin’s Grave: the horned cairn at Lubitavish, Co Antrim,” later in his collected works as “Ossian’s Grave, Lubitavish, Co Antrim.”

Ossian’s Grave, Lubitavish, County Antrim

We stood and pondered on the stones
whose plan displays their pattern still;
the small blunt arc, and, sill by sill,
the pockets stripped of shards and bones.

The legend has it, Ossian lies
beneath this landmark on the hill,
asleep till Fionn and Oscar rise
to summon his old bardic skill
in hosting their last enterprise.

This, stricter scholarship denies,
declares this megalithic form
millennia older than his time –
if such lived ever, out of rime –
was shaped beneath Sardinian skies,
was coasted round the capes of Spain,
brought here through black Biscayan storm,
to keep men’s hearts in mind of home
and its tall Sun God, wise and warm,
across the walls of toppling foam,
against this twilight and the rain.

I cannot tell; would ask no proof;
let either story stand for true,
as heart or head shall rule. Enough
that, our long meditation done,
as we paced down the broken lane
by the dark hillside’s holly trees,
a great white horse with lifted knees
came stepping past us, and we knew
his rider was no tinker’s son.

Sydney Bell, a local poet, wrote:

Ossian’s Grave, Lubitavish

They say
It was here where Ossian died:
I wonder if bright-haired Niamh cried?
Whose lonely fingers piled the cairn
And heaped it high with maiden fern?

They say
That only the plovers know
The feet that track the drifted snow,
And the peeweets cry
Though they’ve never seen--
The name of one who loved Ossian.

I hope and I hope
That he found somewhere
His slender Niamh of the yellow hair
For theirs was a song too brief to scan
With a rickle of bones
And a blind blind man.

(note: blind is also the meaning of the River Dall, part of the name of the village nearby of Cushendall, “at the foot of the Dall”--water emerging unseen from the barren and dignified hillsides north of Glenaan.)

Sources:

Maureen Donnelly. The Nine Glens. rev. ed. Coleraine & Ballycastle: Impact Printing, 2000. (for Bell poem.)

John Hewitt. Collected Poems. ed. Frank Ormsby. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1991.

Traditionally Edward The Martyr was killed here by his wife Elfthryth, before the castle (that we see now) was built. So most likely it became a place of pilgrimage. Or perhaps the story pre-dates the event and so does the site.

Geoffrey Grigson, in his fascinating miscellany ‘The Shell Country Book’ gives the name ‘Thunor’s Stone’ (Thunor is the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Thor, fair enough).

Five barrows lie in a line from SE to NW: there are two bowl barrows and three bell barrows. These are in the woods of Mortimer Common. There are also a couple of outlying barrows – one now amongst the houses of Mortimer.

Jeremy Harte, in his ‘Alternative Approaches to Folklore‘ cites that a phantom army was seen on Mortimer Common in 1778, the soldiers being assumed to be real until they vanished!

According to local Tales, the Shearers are associated with a tale of Roman military misfortune.
A general recorded in his journals that he was having not recurrent problems with deserters. Many of the Levied troops from far flung roman provinces would regularly go AWOL. These troops were usually rounded up and punished. However, one group is recorded as having never been found, bar one individual. The chap was incapable of relating the whereabouts of his comrades however, as he had apparently lost his sanity at some point during his unsanctioned holiday. It was “As though he had gazed into the face of Orcus(the Roman god of death and the underworld, similar to Hades in Greek mythology), and his mind struck asunder by the horrors that he saw.”

This is more juicy than the other account for the name, which is that the stones are crop shearers who were petrified for working on the Sabbath. At least they weren’t dancing.

Local information courtesy of Kelspook. (Thanks dude!)

The barrow is in a field called ‘Giant’s Ground’ and is said to be the grave of Giant Gorm (who appears in various local tales – eg that of Druid Stoke). The field is said to be the site of a great battle (- perhaps that refers to the demise of the giant?).

The barrow was also formerly known as Charleborow, whatever the derivation of that may be – perhaps the name of another purported occupant?

(information from the Somerset Historic Environment Record)

According to the Orkneyinga Saga Earl Thorfinn Skullsplitter was buried here.

The chamber was once demolished by the farmer and the stones carted away, but the cows grazing in the field were so distressed by this vandalism that they bellowed incessantly until the tomb was rebuilt.

Frances Lynch in “Gwynedd” for CADW

Legend has it that the Roosdyche was a Roman chariot race track with banks for spectators to sit and watch the spectacle

My Grandfather has been a regular visitor to the vale for most of his life and he recently recounted this tale to me:

Wayland had a young apprentice called Flibberdy Gibbard whom he sent to Uffington to by some nails, sometime later Flibberdy returned with the wrong size nails and Wayland was so angered that he started throwing rocks at the poor apprentice, as each rock came they doubled in size ‘til he threw one giant rock which landed just next to the now whimpering Flibberdy who was forced to stay there sobbing ‘til the ends of his days.

This final rock, and the spot where Flibberdy Gibbard was banished to, can still be found down towards the farm and is now reffered to as Snivelling Corner.

It’s also where the term “Flibberdy Gibbard” cames from meaning one whom could not organise a p**s up in a brewery, Which Ironically was a favourite insult of my Great Grandmother!

Saint Illtyd was King Arthur’s cousin and helped out with his funeral arrangements, according to the medieval writings of Nennius.

You can read about his rather eventful life at Mary Jones’ page:
geocities.com/branwaedd/illtud.html

One of his deeds involved turning two robbers into standing stones. Perhaps he did use this tomb as a hermitage – all the crosses carved on it suggest a lot of people believed he did.

He himself is supposed to be buried on Mynydd Illtud in the Brecon Beacons (apparently close to the visitor’s centre :)

This is one of the Dancing Stones of Stackpole.

This is one of the Dancing Stones of Stackpole.

I saw this stone alone in its field on a beautiful warm summer’s day. However, it’s not always alone. It is one of the Dancing Stones of Stackpole (the other two are here and here, the central one being in a field called ‘Horestone Park’, according to Sikes in ‘British Goblins’ – 1880). Sometimes they meet up and go to Rhyd Sais where they dance until they’re too tired to dance any more. Sometimes their music is provided by the Devil himself, who plays for them on his flute.
(folklore from Barber’s More Mysterious Wales)

Janet and Colin Bord specifically state (in ‘Secret Country’) that the stones dance ‘The Hay’ – a country dance.

William Howell, in “Cambrian Superstitions,” (1831) says that anyone witnessing the stones dancing is granted exceptionally good luck. He mentions that witches are also said to have conducted their ‘revels’ at the stones (presumably while they are standing still – it could get a bit dangerous dancing with them).

Rhyd Sais means ‘ford of the English’ – or Saxon, which Sais originally meant. (Where the ford actually is, I don’t know – do you?) I wonder whether this part of the story links with the fact one of the stones is called the Harold Stone. Harold is (according to the information on Coflein) Harold Godwinson – the Anglo-Saxon loser at the battle of Hastings, who had earlier successfully beaten Grufudd ap Llewelyn (who had control of the whole of Wales). Pembrokeshire has been known as the ‘Little England beyond Wales’ so maybe ‘Rhyd Sais’ wouldn’t have the negative connotations it might have elsewhere in Wales. It’s all very confusing.. do you know more?

Coflein even suggests there should be another stone, at SR97309530. The three are somewhat in a line, but the entry doesn’t suggest why there ‘should’ be another – I suppose it would make the gaps between the stones equal. If the line of the stones is important – could that imply that we’ve lost the site of Rhyd Sais? Bosherston lakes are artificial (made to go with the now demolished house) so are they covering where the ford would once have been – in line with the stones? Or am I really entering the realms of fantasy now.

Ok so these are ‘Roman’ and they do run alongside a Roman road. But keep it quiet, keep it quiet. It is suggested in the smr that they are the graves of native British aristocrats who “chose to perpetuate aspects of Iron Age burial practice” so I think they’re kind of allowable.

By the way – the earth in them comes from neaby Whormerly Wood (TL247236):

Near Stevenage are six barrows by the roadside. My father, John Emslie, was told, in 1835, by Mr. Williams, baker, of Stevenage, that in an adjoining wood are seven pits and one barrow. The devil, having dug out six spadefuls of earth, emptied them beside the road, thus making the six barrows. He then returned to the wood, dug another spadeful of earth (thus making the seven pits) and, walking along with this spadeful, dropped it and thus made the solitary barrow, which, I was told in 1883, had long since been cleared away.

(from Scraps of Folklore Collected by John Philipps Emslie, by C. S. Burne, in Folklore, Vol. 26, No. 2. (Jun. 30, 1915), pp. 153-170. )

If you’re passing through Stevenage on the train you’ll be able to see them if you look east through the buildings just south of the station.

This fort is one of the traditional sites of the last stand of Caractacus, ‘King of the Britons’, against the invading Romans. He was also known as Caradoc. Having regrettably lost the fight he was taken with his family to Rome – but apparently not to the unpleasant fate you might imagine for him: it seems the Emperor respected his reputation and spared him.

(Reader’s Digest ‘Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain’)

Twyn-y-beddau means ‘mound of graves’. It is said to be the site of a terrible battle between the Welsh and Edward 1st’s supporters. So grim was the bloodshed that the nearby stream was said to have run red for for three days.

(from the trusty Reader’s Digest ‘Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain’!)

This ring of stones is said to be the haunt of willow the wisps and scary black dogs, according to Paul Bennett in his ‘Circles and Standing Stones of West Yorkshire’. In his ‘Megalithic Faults of Rombalds Moor and District’ article in Earth 14 he even includes fairies in this menagerie.