How to Become a Witch
Touch a Logan stone nine times at midnight, and any woman will become a witch.
Source: Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England; or, The Drolls, Traditions, and Superstitions of Old Cornwall (London: John Camden Hotten, 1871), p. 321.
According to Coflein this cairn, on the part of the mountain called the Llorfa, is nine metres in diameter.
A man who lived at Ystradgynlais, in Brecknockshire, going out one day to look after his cattle and sheep on the mountain, disappeared. In about three weeks, after search had been made in vain for him and his wife had given him up for dead, he came home. His wife asked him where he had been for the past three weeks. “Three weeks! Is it three weeks you call three hours?” said he. Pressed to say where he had been, he told her he had been playing on his flute (which he usually took with him on the mountain) at the Llorfa, a spot near the Van Pool, when he was surrounded at a distance by little beings like men, who closed nearer and nearer to him until they became a very small circle. They sang and danced, and so affected him that he quite lost himself. They offered him some small cakes to eat, of which he partook; and he had never enjoyed himself so well in his life.
This is from ‘The Science of Fairy Tales’ by Edwin Sidney Hartland
(1891), now online at the Sacred Texts Archive. sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/sft/sft08.htm
I can’t spot ‘the Van Pool’ using the map (and the possibly similar sounding Fan Foel is a long way off).
There are numerous remains on Carn Fadryn – the large Iron Age fort was overlain by a castle in the 12th century.
The fort is associated with Queen / Saint Madrun (supposedly the granddaughter of Vortigern). Maybe the name is also linked with the Roman mother goddess of Matrona..
“Ceidio, in the promontory of Lleyn, is under the remarkable isolated hill of Carn Madryn, which takes its name from Madrun. The local tradition is that on the burning of the palace of Gwrtheyrn, under Tre’r Ceiri, Madrun fled with Ceidio, then a child in arms, to the fortress on Carn Madryn, and that later in life Ceidio founded the church that bears his name beneath the mountain...” (from Baring-Gould’s section on S. Ceidio in ‘Lives of the British Saints‘).
Such a vantage point is also ideal for throwing stones from – Penllech Coetan Arthur originated up here.
‘Naboth’s Vineyard’ is an episode from the bible (which you can read online at the Electronic Text Centre , courtesy of the University of Virginia)
It’s a rather gruesome tale in which King Ahab hankers after the lowly Naboth’s nice vineyard, and because Naboth won’t sell it to him, he conspires to have him done away with.
Does this tale relate to some kind of similar legendary incident in Llanharry? Could the barrows even have been incorporated into a local story? And if not, why would the field be called this strange name?
When you sit at this lovely spot you can imagine the Irish king’s ships turning up – he was invited over to marry the British king’s beautiful sister Branwen. It looks like the ideal outdoor spot for camping and a feast.
..She was one of the three chief ladies of this island, and she was the fairest damsel in the world.
And they fixed upon Aberffraw as the place where she should become his bride. And they went thence, and towards Aberffraw the hosts proceeded; Matholwch and his host in their ships; Bendigeid Vran and his host by land, until they came to Aberffraw. And at Aberffraw they began the feast and sat down. And thus sat they. The King of the Island of the Mighty and Manawyddan the son of Llyr on one side, and Matholwch on the other side, and Branwen the daughter of Llyr beside him. And they were not within a house, but under tents. No house could ever contain Bendigeid Vran. And they began the banquet and caroused and discoursed. And when it was more pleasing to them to sleep than to carouse, they went to rest, and that night Branwen became Matholwch’s bride.
Quote from Lady Guest’s translation of the Mabinogion, online at the Sacred Texts archive:
sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/mab/mab22.htm
Of course it all ended badly, as you can find out at Bedd Branwen.
Well the story goes that the Devil was flying over Ireland trying to steal the souls of the people and tempt them. However good old St. Patrick had done such a good job that the Devil couldn’t tempt anyone so in a fit of rage he bit into the mountain here in Tipperary and spat it out all of the way down to Cashel in South Tipp. So this hunk of rock is said to be what makes up the Rock of Cashel.
Possibly this is a christained story of the usual giant story throwing rocks around.
Taken for Mythic Ireland
In legend the supernatural harper, Clíu, emerged from this mountain síd to make music on the stringed watercourses. He hoped thereby to attract a goddess of neighbouring Slievenaman, daughter of the pre-Celtic god Bodh Dearg.
This is a late variant on the myth where the Dagda comes from the síd to harp the seasons into being. His ‘finger breezes’ play across the gullet ‘strings’ where falling waters contribute to the melody.
There is a story that tells of how the henge was given its name.
In the book ‘Oxfordshire Folklore’, by Christine Bloxham (tempus 2005), it is said that the Devil was playing a game of quoits and was told off by God, because it was a Sunday and there was to be no recreation.
In a petulant fit of anger the Devil threw the quoits as far as he could and where they landed became the site we now know.
Just at the foot of the fort is the village of Llanaelhaearn, and its holy well of St Aelhaiarn. Aelhaiarn is one of those Celtic saints with a bizarre life story. He started off as a servant of St Beuno (see Clynnog Fawr). St B liked to commune with God outdoors. Actually he often liked to pray in the middle of rivers. I can appreciate the trance-like state this might induce – perhaps that’s why he liked it. Or perhaps he just thought he could get a bit of peace and quiet in the middle of a river. However, one day his servant followed him. St B was so incensed at being disturbed that he didn’t recognise his friend and rashly muttered that God should teach the man a lesson. Upon that, a pack of wild animals rushed up and tore the poor man to pieces. Beuno must have relented at this point and pulling himself out of the river, ran round collecting up all the bits he could find. Rather cleverly he reassembled them, but just couldn’t find a missing eyebrow. He may have considered a caterpillar, but eventually plumped for the iron tip of his staff. I wonder if the iron nature of the item has any bearing? He then brought the man back to life, and he was known as Aelhaiarn, or ‘iron eyebrow’. Aelhaiarn became a priest and tended the well at the foot of Tre’r Ceiri. The water consequently became renowned for its powers of bodily restoration.
I have based this on the story given by Nigel Pennick in his ‘Celtic Saints’ (1997) but it would be better to find the original ‘Life’.
You can also read a much better (and slightly more complex) version on p228-30 of ‘Select Remains of the Learned John Ray, with his Life’ by William Derham. Published 1760.
which I have found online at google books, and which is from a journey made in 1661.
In Nigel Pennick’s ‘Celtic Saints’ (1997) he says that “megaliths are plentiful around the church, in its foundations, and the adjoining chapel of St Bueno” (including one in the floor of the nave, apparently).
Near Clynog, in Carnarvonshire, there is a place called Llwyn y Nef, (the Bush of Heaven,) which thus received its name: In Clynog lived a monk of most devout life, who longed to be taken to heaven. One evening, whilst walking without the monastery by the riverside, he sat down under a green tree and fell into a deep reverie, which ended in sleep and he slept for thousands of years. At last he heard a voice calling unto him, ‘Sleeper, awake and be up.’ He awoke. All was strange to him except the old monastery, which still looked down upon the river. He went to the monastery, and was made much of. He asked for a bed to rest himself on and got it. Next morning when the brethren sought him, they found nothing in the bed but a handful of ashes.
sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/wfl/wfl06.htm
‘British Goblins’ by Wirt Sikes (1880), online at the Sacred Texts Archive. It’s a story usually connected with fairy goings-on, but this time has been polished up with the inclusion of a monk.
An earlier source of purejoy’s folklore is ‘Wiltshire: The topographical collections of John Aubrey’, corrected and enlarged by J E Jackson (1862). He writes: “At the top of the wood at Colerne Park there is said to be a large hillock called ‘The Dane’s Tump’ where tradition buries a Danish King.”
On the last day of the 19th century, two of the uprights of the outer Circle fell. There is an old saying that the fall of one of these stones foretells the death of a Sovereign. In January 1901, however, just before the seeming fulfilment of the omen in the death of Queen Victoria, the two newly fallen stones were raised and set up again. At the same time a worse thing was done amid the protests of all the old lovers of Stonehenge. The great Leaning Stone which for nearly three centuries had reclined on the top of a short bluestone in front of it, and in this posture was the central figure, so to speak, of the Stonehenge known to all who had ever visited Salisbury Plain and to the whole world beside through the drawings of Turner and Constable – this hoary monster, bowed under the weight of innumerable years, was dragged up from its recumbency, bolted, concreted, and stiffened into an unnatural uprightness and now stands rigid and awkward as an aged man stayed up into an affectation of youth.
From ‘Salisbury Plain’ by Ella Noyes (1913).
There are various traditions connected with it. I was told some years since, by an old man hoeing turnips near, that if anybody mounted to the top of it, he might shake it in one particular part. I do not know whether this is the case or not, though it is not unusual where the capstone is upheld by only three supporters. But another labourer whom I once interrogated informed me that nobody could ever pull off the capstone; that many had tried to do so without success; and that on one occasion twelve white oxen were provided with new harness, and set to pull it off, but the harness all fell to pieces immediately! As my informant evidently thought very seriously of this, and considered it the work of enchantment, I found it was not a matter for trifling to his honest but superstitious mind; and he remained perfectly unconvinced by all the arguments with which I tried to shake his credulity.
An atheist might find the latter section quite ironic, coming from the Rev. A C Smith as it does. It is part of his (excellent) ‘Guide to the British and Roman Antiquities of the North Wiltshire Downs’ (1884).
From ‘Wiltshire: the topographical collections of John Aubrey. Corrected and enlarged by J. E. Jackson (1862)’.
John Aubrey wrote:
Hubba’s Lowe: In the reign of King Ethelred, Hinguor and Hubba, two brothers, Danes, Leaders who had gott footing among the East Angles. These Pagans, Asserius saith, came from Danubius. Bruern, a nobleman, whose wife King Osbert had ravished, called in Hinguor and Hubba to revenge him.
Jackson, out to correct him, leaves the footnote:
There seems to be no authority for this tumulus having been ever called ‘Hubba’s Low’ (ie the burial tumulus of Hubba, the Dane). It is merely the name that Aubrey gave it, because his neighbour at Kington St Michael, Sir Charles Snell ‘told him so’. Hubba was most likely buried where the Chronicles say he was slain, in Devonshire. See Hoare’s Anc Wilts ii 99, and a minute account of this barrow by Dr Thurnam, in Wilts Arch Mag III 67. The common name is Lan Hill (Long Hill) barrow. It is three miles NW of Chippenham in a meadow on the left of the high road leading to Marshfield. It is a heap of stones about 60 paces in length, covered in turf. For the convenience of obtaining road materials it has been much injured.
One feels he was rather missing the point, shirtily pointing out that Hubba would have been buried in Devon. But you can see his disregard for barrows in his description of it as ‘a heap of stones’. Oh well.
Pieces trotted out by office workers who have been told to “write something about Gilsland” do not count as folklore. Almost without exception such accounts are uncritcal, unreferenced cut & paste exercises from the handiest guidebook. The content of most guidebooks to Gilsland can be directly traced back to the flurry of publicity and synthetic folklore which appeared around the 1860/70s.
The information about the midsummer expeditions is more interesting, but I would like to see a contemporary report, for instance from a newspaper.
The young son of the landowners, Charles Goring, planted the beech trees of Chanctonbury Ring in 1760. There are various romantic tales about their birth – that as a child he ran around the hill scattering their seeds, or that he often went up the hill with a little flask of water to tend to his little seedlings. A less sympathetic story tells of him sending his poor servants up the hill with buckets of water! A more pro-proletariat version has the lowly girls and boys of the village sowing the beechnuts.
(collected together in Westwood and Simpson’s ‘Lore of the Land’ (2005).)
Westwood and Simpson (’Lore of the Land’ 2005) mention an early version from 1774 about the tunnel which runs from the south side of the hill to the centre of town. Variations continue to thrive: “A man who wanted to test its truth put a duck into the hole, and a few days later ‘the duck emerged, looking slightly confused, in the centre of Dorchester’.” (Don’t go shoving any more ducks down holes or I’ll have to call the RSPB.)
They also mention Jeremy Harte’s researches into Maiden Castle(s) in which he mentions ‘ghostly Roman soldiers’ and ‘a strange force capable of rocking a parked car’. Sounds intriguing. Such a big hillfort has plenty of room for plenty of weirdness. You’d better see their bibliography in ‘Lore of the Land’ (2005).
Following on from the information about “Molly the Dreamer” at Gatcombe Lodge:
“Molly is also supposed to have dug at the Longstone, where she did find gold, but lightning flashed just as she was about to lift it out; ‘after that she was never the same again’.”
From an article in ‘Folklore’ (1912), mentioned by Westwood and Simpson in their 2005 ‘Lore of the Land’.
Watch out for the big cats, if this tale of schoolboys on ‘Farshores’ is to be believed.
100megsfree4.com/farshores/c_dart.htm
woodland-trust.org.uk/broadleaf/leaffirst.asp?aid=533&issue=60
This page at the Woodland Trust suggests that people chipped bits off the stone to pop them under their pillows – that way they’d dream of their future lovers. Or spouses, as the page so primly puts it.
The Spa at Gilsland obviously got popular in Victorian times, but could chalybeate and sulphurous springs have gone unnoticed before this (you doubt it). This extract from ‘Northumbria’ (1920) tries to suggest the fad was a survival of the past.. though who knows. Gilsland Spa was obviously used as such before the Victorians (Kentigern’s website says it was on a map from the 1770s).
Gilsland Spa has long been a noted resort, and an account is given even within recent times of the yearly pilgrimage to the chalybeate and sulphur waters as a modern survival of well-worship. On the Sunday after old Midsummer Day, called the Head Sunday, and the Sunday after it, hundreds if not thousands used to assemble from all directions by rail when that was available, and by vehicles and on foot otherwise. From North Tynedale and the neighbourhood for many miles round these unconscious adherents of heathen rites visited the wells.
oldandsold.com/articles32n/northumbria-21.shtml
[With regard to the ‘synthetic folklore’ derided in the post above, I would say that folklore is being created all the time (think urban myths) and even if it is made up on the spot it is clearly to fill a certain gap that is perceived to require some, and generally draws on ideas of what folklore should be about (midsummer meetings etc). I don’t think I should only be recording ‘genuine folklore’, whatever that’s supposed to be – if ideas get told, believed and retold, then that IS folklore, surely.]
Stukeley was told by local people that there had been seven churches here originally, but that six had vanished entirely.
(mentioned by Westwood and Simpson in ‘Lore of the Land’ 2005 p215)
Castle Hill is an Iron Age fort, later reused in medieval times. You can see the remains of a tower on top, and this has a legend attached which is more often associated with the siting of churches (but without the fake boar – it’s usually the devil or some other supernatural interferer. Could this be a ‘rationalised’ version of a previous tale?):
A lord of Callaley in the days of yore commenced erecting a castle on this hill; his lady preferred a low sheltered situation in the vale. She remonstrated; but her lord was wilful, and the building continued to progress. What she could not attain by persuasion she sought to achieve by stratagem, and availed herself of the superstitious opinions and feelings of the age. One of her servants who was devoted to her interests entered into her scheme; he was dressed up like a boar, and nightly he ascended the hill and pulled down all that had been built during the day. It was soon whispered that the spiritual powers were opposed to the erection of a castle on the hill; the lord himself became alarmed, and he sent some of his retainers to watch the building during the night, and discover the cause of the destruction. Under the influence of the superstitions of the times, these retainers magnified appearances, and when the boar issued from the wood and commenced overthrowing the work of the day, they beheld a monstrous animal of enormous power. Their terror was complete when the boar, standing among the overturned stones, cried out in a loud voice--
“Callaly Castle built on the height,
Up in the day and down in the night;
Builded down in the Shepherd’s Shaw,
It shall stand for aye and never fa’.They immediately fled and informed the lord of the supernatural visitation; and regarding the rhymes as an expression of the will of heaven, he abandoned the work, and in accordance with the wish of his lady built his castle low down in the vale, where the modern mansion now stands. --George Tate, F.G.S., in Alnwick Mercury, August 1, 1862.
From the Denham Tracts, which also has a bit on weather forecasting using the site:
When the “Callaly pot is boiling” it indicates bad weather. A mist in a ferment rises straight up from the ravine between the Castle Hill and Lorbottle Moor, and clings to the top of the hill. This is a sure sign of rain, both as seen from Biddleston on the west and Shawdon on the east. The “Callaly pot” was boiled by the Clavering owners, who were a Catholic family, to provide a dinner for the poor people who on Sunday and holidays attended the services at the chapel attached to the mansion.
In the late 19th century (according to the Magic record) several Bronze Age stone coffins were discovered during quarrying on the north side of the hill. On the south side there are quite a few round cairns. One is near Macartney’s Cave (’In one of the huge fantastic rocks among the heather is Macartney’s Cave, a little oratory hewn out of the sandstone by a former chaplain of Callaly Castle’*), and at least five are near ‘Hob’s Nick’ – a deep fissure in the rock.
*taken from ‘Northumbria’ (1920 – no author mentioned?) online at
oldandsold.com/articles32n/northumbria-32.shtml
The Denham Tracts say of the waterfalls in Callaly Crags close by:
The pot-holes... are Robin Goodfellow’s or Hob-Thrush’s Mills, wherein he grinds his visionary grain. The mills are set going by spates, which bring down stones that rattle in the pot holes, like the grinding gear of a mill set in motion.
Visionary grain eh?
Local folklore had it that Nympsfield was originally built as a shelter for lepers, and locals avoided it. Someone clearly overcame their fears in the end, judging by the ruinous state in which the barrow now lies.
Mark Richards also suggests (in ‘The Cotswold Way’ 1984) that the name Nympsfield could be derived from ‘open country belonging to a place called Nymed’.. and nymed possibly coming from the Welsh ‘nyfed’ – a shrine or holy place (a grove?). Nympsfield the village is not really next to the barrow – it’s more equidistant from this long barrow and Hetty Peglar’s Tump. It’d be nice to think such a romantic explanation were true though.
In his excellent book, The Book of the Cailleach, Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer, Gearoid O Crualaoich tells the tale of how Emain Macha got its name.
There were three kings , Dithorba, Aed Ruad and Cimbaeth who took it in seven year stints to rule over Ireland. When Aed Ruad died his daughter, Macha Mongruad demanded her fathers turn of the kingship. The remaining two kings refused to surrender the kingship to a woman, so Matha defeated them in battle and took her seven year turn.
When Dithorba died his five sons claimed the kingship. Macha fought and defeated the sons and banished them to Connaught. Then she married Cimbeath.
Matha went to visit the five sons disguised as a hag. The sons try to trick Macha with lies but one by one she ties them up and brings them back to Ulster, where she orders them to dig a ring fort as a capital for Ulster and marked out the boundaries of the fort with a pin from her golden brooch.
The fort was founded four hunderd and five years before Christ and lasted until four hundred and fifty years after Christ.