Welsh Folk Tales of Coast and Sea E-Book

Peter Stevenson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Folk Tales
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 245

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Just ask those mountains over there. They have heard these stories before. They have witnessed the floods. Through the travels of a Mesolithic Marsh Girl, Peter Stevenson tells the folk tales of the sea along the Welsh Coast Path. From bridge-dwelling bwbach and drunken mermaids, to swan girls, salmon children and the pirate Leekie Porridge of Tenby – follow Môrwen on a journey that blends past and present and explores the social and environmental change that is carved into the Welsh coastline.

Leseprobe

To Ailsa Mair, the Mesolithic Mermaid

First published 2025

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Peter Stevenson, 2025

The right of Peter Stevenson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 663 9

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents

Chwedl Dŵr/The Fairy Tale of Water

1.    The Mesolithic Mermaid and the Welsh Utopia

Bae Ceredigion/Cardigan Bay

2.    Siani Chickens and the Ceredigion Storycatcher

Llanina–Llanrhystud–Tanybwlch

3.    The Submerged Land and the Wise Old Toad

Aberystwyth–Borth–Aberdyfi

4.    Migration Tales and the Cambrian Line

Aberdyfi–Tonfanau–Abermaw/Barmouth

5.    A Train Journey to the Mabinogi

Harlech–Porthmadog–Abersoch

6.     Island Tales of the Kings of Bardsey

Aberdaron–Ynys Enlli/Bardsey Island

7.    Rockpools and a Giants’ Town on Pen Llŷn

Porthdinllaen–Nefyn–Yr Eifl

8.    Arianrhod and the Menai Strait Monsters

Dinas Dinlle–Caernarfon–Ynys Llanddwyn

9.    Riding a Mammoth Round Ynys Môn

Caergybi/Holyhead–Moelfre–Porthaethwy/Menai Bridge

10.  Down the Rabbit Hole With a Goat

Bangor–Conwy–Llandudno

11.  The Dancing Girl and the Headless Hermit

Llandudno–Dyfrdwy/Dee–Treffynnon/Holywell

12.  Sabrina and the Salmon Children

Casgwent/Chepstow–Hafren/Severn–Casnewydd/Newport

13.  Temperance Town and Tiger Bay

Caerdydd/Cardiff–Taff–Ynys y Bari/Barry Island

14.  The Lady of Ogmore and the King of Porthcawl

Llantwit Major–Aberogwr–Port Talbot

15.  Swansea Jack and Potato Jones

Abertawe/Swansea–Y Mwmbwls/Mumbles

16.  Swan Girl and Water Horse of Gŵyr

Gŵyr/Gower

17.  Amelia and the Hell Dog of Laugharne

Llwchwr/Loughor–Llansteffan–Talacharn/Laugharne

18.  Leekie Porridge and Betty Foggy

Dinbych-y-Pysgod/Tenby–Doc Penfro/Pembroke Dock–Aberdaugleddau/Milford Haven

19.  Skomer Oddy and the Smalls

Aberdaugleddau/Milford Haven–Yns Sgomer/Skomer Island–Bae Sant Ffraid/St Bride’s Bay

20.  The Old Fibber and the Last Invasion

Tyddewi/St Davids–Ynys Dewi/Ramsay Island–Abergwaun/Fishguard

21.  The Mermaid and the Swan Girl

Aberteifi/Cardigan–Cei Newydd/New Quay–Llanina

Bibliography

Mesolithic Site Map

Chwedl Dŵr/The Fairy Tale of Water

Ar lan y môr mae rhosys cochion,

Ar lan y môr mae lilis gwynion,

Ar lan y môr mae ’nghariad inne,

Yn cysgu’r nos a chodi’r bore.

On the seashore are red roses,

On the seashore are white lilies,

On the seashore is my love,

Sleeping at night and rising in the morning.

Traditional

Y Môr/The Sea

Folk tales wash up with the tide along the Welsh coast like streams of thought, waiting for passing beachcombers to spot them amongst the seaweed, crab legs and plastic bottles. They carry memories of flood myths, submerged forests, a Welsh utopia, sea monsters, water horses, fairy islands, love potions, drunken mermaids, starling murmurations, rockpool worlds, Welsh-speaking dolphins, healing wells, coastal schooners, sewage discharges and the sweet sadness of seaside towns in winter. Folk tales are looking glasses into the lives of those who hunted, foraged and lived in the forests and marshes after the ice melted and flooded the land.

Mesolithic people lived as nomads along the Welsh coast between 4,000 and 12,000 years ago. They navigated by the stars as they followed the seasons, and left flint tools, charcoal deposits, cores, flakes and limpet middens as an archaeological patchwork quilt of their ephemeral lives.

There are folk tales of lost lands in Cardigan Bay, Conwy estuary and Cynffig dunes, and submerged forests off Abergele, Amroth, Borth, Goldcliff, Llanrhystud, Lydstep, Newgale, Rhyl and Whitesands. Tree stumps on the beach at Ynyslas have been dated to 5,500 years ago, while those a kilometre away at Borth are around 4,000 years old, when the first indications of farming appeared in Wales. The inter-tidal strip at Whitesands reveals evidence of auroch, red deer and brown bear, while pig bones have been found at Lydstep, and a much older woolly mammoth’s jawbone at Holyhead.

Cartographers have tried to make order out of the chaos of mythology and memory, yet the history of early map-making contains ghost islands. A mid-thirteenth-century map of the British Isles given to the Bodleian Library by Richard Gough, who bought it from the antiquarian ‘Honest Tom’ Martin in 1774, shows two large islands off the Ceredigion and Meirionnydd coast. The romantic narrative suggests they may be a memory of the submerged land of Cantre’r Gwaelod (Chapter 3), or the green fairy islands that disappear when mariners sail towards them (Chapters 1,19 and 20). However, the map doesn’t show Pen Llŷn, and if you stand on Aberystwyth prom and stare at the horizon, the peninsula looks suspiciously like islands.

Lewis Morris, antiquary, literary scholar and self-taught hydrographer from Ynys Môn, produced a series of more accurate maps of the coastal seas between Llandudno and Milford Haven in the mid-1700s in order to make navigation safer (Chapter 9). Archaeologists and geomythologists have now mapped the layers of land beneath the Welsh seas to help understand the geography of river valleys and forests in the Mesolithic age.

As nomadic lifestyles gave way to farming, Iron Age hillforts appeared along the west coast. Romans built ports at Caerleon and Caernarfon, Normans settled along the Glamorgan coast, and Vikings left their names on the Western islands. People fished with seine nets, lave nets, lobster creels, crab pots and coracles, and traded using smacks, ketches and sloops. Water connected people in a land with poor roads and expensive tolls.

When Michael Faraday visited Wales in the early 1800s, he revealed the extent of industrial pollution caused by the copper industry in Swansea and showed how lead waste from mines in the mid-Wales hills flowed downriver and poisoned the sea. These issues may not be new, but the scale and pace of twenty-first-century damage is. Recently, Dŵr Cymru admitted pouring untreated sewage into Welsh rivers, while Merseyside Docks dumped spoil in a Welsh Marine Conservation Area. The sea is seen as a resource to be exploited for leisure, mining, industrial fishing and renewable energy, whereas she is asserting her natural, moral and legal rights. She is writing her own Mabinogi.

In this book, the folk tales of coast and sea are seen through the eyes of a 7,000-year-old Marsh Girl who will step through the veil between her Mesolithic world and ours on Calan Gaeaf, the first of November. This is not time travel. It happens in Wales on this one day of the year, when we tell stories of those who walked the land as spirits and ghosts before us.

Marsh Girl has a name: Môrwen. White Sea. She has been raised on stories that contained fragments of the imaginations of the people who told them, like tool-marks on a microlith, a footprint in the peat or a carving on a tree. Flood myths are real to Môrwen. They happened in her lifetime.

Just ask those mountains over there.

They have heard these stories before.

They have witnessed the floods.

1

The Mesolithic Mermaid and the Welsh Utopia

BAE CEREDIGION/CARDIGAN BAY

The Welsh Utopia

Amser maith yn ôl/A long time ago.

The shallow sea in Cardigan Bay, from Pen Llŷn in the north to Ceredigion in the west, was once a mix of forests, lakes, rivers, swamps and saltmarsh. The nomadic people who lived there cared for their land, yet never thought they owned it. They foraged and hunted, treated animals as equals and left offerings in exchange for anything they took. This was the land of Plant Rhys Ddwfn, the Children of Rhys the Deep. Not deep below the sea – Rhys was a thinker, a dreamer, a philosopher.

He reasoned that if the mean giants who lived in the mountains ever saw his land, they would destroy it. So, he devised a cunning plan. He planted a hedge of herbs along what is now the west Welsh coast, to hide his land from their prying eyes. Only if the giants stood on the one small clump of this herb that grew away from the coast would they see Rhys’ world, but as they had no idea where this piece of turf was, all they saw was rain. Rhys’ children cared for each other, their numbers grew, food became scarce, and the giants heard the distant rumble of empty bellies, although they mistook it for the anger of the gods.

They turned to crafts, became toolmakers, wood carvers and basket makers, and travelled by sea to the markets in Ceredigion to trade their goods – but as soon as they were seen, prices went up. They traded with Gruffydd ap Einion, a radical free-thinker who dreamed of a fairer world. After many years, they took him to the clump of herbs, where he saw Rhys’ land with all the knowledge and wisdom in the world archived safely in forests and books. Preachers and politicians were few. Choughs and kestrels hung in the air. The land was rich beyond dreams, the utopia he had long dreamed of.

Gruffydd asked how they kept themselves safe from crime, and they explained that Rhys’ herbs hid them from an angry creature with horns, snakes and a sword that spewed toxic venom at anything it disagreed with.

When Gruffydd stepped away from the herbs, he lost sight of Rhys’ land, though he never forgot there was a better world out there in Cardigan Bay. Rhys’ children traded with their friend all his life, until one day they came to the market to find Gruffydd’s hair had turned to snow and he had passed over to the Otherworld.

As the floodwaters lapped at their feet, Rhys’ children turned to a nomadic life, following the seasons and tracks of animals along the water’s edge, fishing and foraging, carrying the bones of their ancestors to remember their stories. For pity the people who have forgotten their myths.

Marsh Girl

Seven thousand years ago, Môrwen was born into this world of rising floodwaters as one of Rhys’ children. She fishes for salmon, forages for hazelnuts, scavenges for honey, digs for celandine tubers, carves wooden spoons from holly, weaves baskets from rushes, draws animals on stone with charcoal and makes pigments from crushed rock. She knows the movements of the deer herd and follows their tracks and scents through the forest. She collects antlers shed by the old stags and sharpens the points into axe-heads with flint tools. She has no need to keep deer in enclosures – they come when she calls. She is sharp as flint, moulded from the dust of time. She has spent so much of her life up to her waist in water, friends call her Marsh Girl.

In the evenings Môrwen huddles at Nan’s feet to hear stories of the mean giants of the mountains, the mischievous old women who make potions from the herbs of the forest, the green man of no one’s land, and the girls who transform into fish, birds and wolves. She draws mammoths chased by little stick men who glory in the spilling of blood and praise themselves in poetry and song. She has never seen a mammoth, but Nan’s words paint them in her imagination. They become real when she sketches on rocks, until the rain and floods wash them away.

One day Môrwen is foraging along the riverbank when a storm gathers out to sea, waves crash over the beach, and the forest fills with floodwater. She runs for high ground but slips into the swamp and sinks up to her shoulders. She grabs hold of a clump of tough reeds and bends her knees to stop herself being sucked further into the wet peat. She hangs there for what seems like hours until the wind abates and she hauls herself on to the dry forest floor, where she lies breathless, staring at the stars.

Thoughts swish round her mind like waves. Is the sea having a laugh? Why are Rhys’ children losing their way of life to the floods? Will the sun set fire to the trees? Do her descendants have answers in the future? She knows there is a future, for she has stepped through the veil on Calan Gaeaf before.

The Cardigan Bay Mermaids

Amser maith yn ôl/A long time ago.

In the Old Welsh Dreamtime, when people were people and fish were fish, three brothers lived in a yellow stone farmhouse overlooking the forests and swamps of Cardigan Bay. Eldest Brother ploughed the land and had honey on his bread, Middle Brother farmed the sea and had salt in his porridge, whilst Little Brother wandered the old Welsh Tramping Road with a tune on his lips, head in the clouds and feet in the mud, and when his belly rumbled he asked his brothers for food. The two hard-working brothers grumbled.

‘Little Brother?’ said Eldest Brother, holding a small pig on a rope, ‘Take this enchanted pig, sell it for money – and don’t swap it for anything that makes wishes come true! You know what happens to wishes in fairy tales?’

Little Brother nodded and set off along the Old Welsh Tramping Road with a tune on his lips, an enchanted pig on a rope and no thoughts about wishes in fairy tales. He walked until he came to a deep dark wood, and in the middle of the wood found a crooked lime-washed house with a red door. In the doorway stood an old woman with a thousand wrinkles round her eyes and a single yellow tooth wobbling unnervingly in the breeze from her breath.

‘Would you like to buy an enchanted pig?’ asked Little Brother.

The woman pulled on the one grey hair in the middle of her chin, and drooled. ‘Mmm, roast pork! I’ll swap your pig for my enchanted handmill. It will make your wildest wishes come true.’ The pig hid behind Little Brother’s legs.

Little Brother completely forgot about wishes in fairy tales, and the deal was done. He set off back along the Old Welsh Tramping Road to the shores of Cardigan Bay with a tune on his lips and an enchanted handmill under his arm, and as the red door closed, he heard the squealing of a pig.

Little Brother returned to the yellow stone farmhouse overlooking Cardigan Bay, and thought, ‘I’d like a cottage of my own.’

‘Little mill, little mill, grind me a handsome house.

‘Little mill, little mill, grind it without a mouse.’

And the handmill ground out a pink-washed longhouse with a table, a chair, a bottle of wine and a roaring fire. Now he would never need to ask his brothers for food again.

Eldest Brother looked out of the window of the yellow stone farmhouse and saw a pink-washed longhouse that wasn’t there yesterday. He knocked on the door and there stood Little Brother.

‘Little Brother, last time I saw you, you were poor as a church mouse, now you’re rich as a lord. Where has all this money come from?’ and Eldest Brother poured out a bottle of home-brewed beer. Before Little Brother passed out, he told Eldest Brother all about the handmill.

Eldest Brother took the handmill home to the yellow stone farmhouse, placed it on the kitchen table and made a wish.

‘Little mill, little mill, grind me maids and ale.

‘Little mill, little mill, grind them dark and pale.

Oh – and a little fish for my tea.’

Eldest Brother was a simple man.

The handmill began to grind out strong beer till it covered the floor, then a dark girl with the tail of a fish, followed by a pale girl, also with a fish tail. Soon the beer covered Eldest Brother’s feet, his knees, waist, belly, chin, and mermaids were frolicking in the sea of ale, so he shouted ‘Stop!’, but the handmill continued grinding ‘til the door burst open and a river of beer and mermaids flowed down into Cardigan Bay, flooding the forests and swamps until Eldest Brother drowned, as he would have wanted to go, with a drunken fish-girl on either arm.

Little Brother awoke with a headache to the sound of rowdy mermaids frolicking in the floodwater. At that moment, Middle Brother, the one who ploughed the sea, sailed into Cardigan Bay in his red-masted ship with a cargo of salt from a faraway land, to find a sea full of mermaids singing rude sea shanties and impolitely inviting him to remove his trousers and join them. He dropped anchor, waded ashore and went to the yellow stone farmhouse, where he found Little Brother holding a handmill that was still grinding out beer and mermaids.

‘Little Brother, when I left, this was all land and now it’s water. And where have all these drunken mermaids come from?’ Middle Brother produced a bottle of smuggled Jamaican Rum and before he passed out, Little Brother told Middle Brother about the handmill.

Middle Brother took the handmill back to his ship, placed it on the deck and made a wish.

‘Little mill, little mill, grind me salty salt.

‘Little mill, little mill, grind it without a halt!’ for with an endless supply of salt, he would never have to sail to faraway lands, live on mouldy biscuits or be looted by pirates.

The handmill began to grind until the deck was covered in salt, and soon it covered his feet, knees, waist, belly and chin, so he climbed the red mast but the salt climbed higher and under its weight, the ship sank to the bottom of the sea, where Middle Brother, like Eldest Brother, drowned in the arms of rowdy mermaids.

Little Brother woke with another headache and went to the seashore for a drink, but the water tasted of salt, beer and mermaids, and now he remembered. ‘Is this what happens to wishes in fairy tales?’

So he set off along the old Welsh Tramping Road with a tune on his lips, head in the clouds and feet in the mud, in search of fresh water and food from the forests.

And the handmill? Well, it’s still there on the wrecked deck of the ship on the seabed in Cardigan Bay, forever churning out salt, beer and mermaids, who are often mistaken by the environmental services for dolphins. And that’s why a swim in the Salty Welsh Sea leaves you feeling as if you have been swimming with drunken mermaids.

Calan Gaeaf

It’s Calan Gaeaf, the first of November. Mischief night, the first day of winter in the Welsh calendar, when the veil between this world and the Otherworld is at its thinnest and spirits from the past are able to pass through and haunt our dreams with scary stories of forgotten ancestors. A bit like a Welsh Day of the Dead, or Halloween when people wear bedsheets and pretend to be ghosts, or witches in green make-up with fake blood dripping from their mouths. Time isn’t linear on this day. It travels in endless circles, swirling through space. You can travel around the coast of Wales in one day at any time in history.

Môrwen hauls herself out of the swamp and stands up, dripping mud on to the mossy forest floor. She remembers Nan’s stories about the ice mountains melting and filling the valleys with floodwaters where her people live. She wonders if it will ever stop? And what happened to the mammoths? Did they drown? Môrwen can hunt like a wolf, swim like a mermaid and speak the language of birds, so she will escape the inundations – but what will happen to her people? She places a sprig of rowan in her pocket, faces the sea, sweeps back her hair, curses three times, and steps through the veil into her future.

Time passes in a moment.

Years, hundreds of them. Thousands. Millennia.

Môrwen hasn’t enough fingers, toes, tails or limpet shells to count them all.

2

Siani Chickens and the Ceredigion Storycatcher

LLANINA–LLANRHYSTUD–TANYBWLCH

Myra the Storycatcher

Seven thousand years have passed in the blink of an octopus’ eye, and Môrwen is on the same spot where she had stood after hauling herself out of the swamp, although she is now floating up to her nose in seawater. She swims through the jellyfish to a sandy beach, where a young woman with long black hair and a fringe that covers her sea-green eyes wraps her in a red and black Ceredigion quilt, and rubs her vigorously as if she were a toddler shivering after a cold bath. It’s Calan Gaeaf.

‘Aw diolch,’ Môrwen’s teeth chatter.

‘Croeso nôl, cariad,’ says the woman. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

‘Where am I?’

‘Llanina, halfway along the Welsh coast. Where better to start a fairy tale than in the middle? There are more stories here than anywhere else in Wales, and I should know because I’ve gathered them like cockles off the beach. Have some octopus salad. Myra i fi.’

Myra was born Elmira Rees in Cei Newydd, just before midnight on Calan Gaeaf, the first of November 1883, a child of the Otherworld, although the doctor arrived late and wrote her birth date as 2nd November, allowing her a foot in both worlds. Her father Thomas was Captain of the Rosina, a fisherman who lost all five brothers at sea. Myra wrote down the family fairy tales and stories told by the old sea captains of the town, and kept them in a biscuit tin beneath her bed so she could learn them while her father was away. They tell of the Otherworld, that dark enticing place filled with spirits, mermaids and y bobl bach, where you can vanish as easily as a small language beneath water and caravan parks.

‘Tell me a story?’ Môrwen asks Myra as she nibbles at the octopus salad, which is a tin of cheap luncheon meat cut into tentacle shapes.

Nodon’s Well

A mean giant named Nodon lived at Llanina, next to a freshwater well covered with a slate slab that his daughter Merid slid aside whenever her father needed a bath, which was often. One day a gentleman rode up and demanded a drink. Merid explained it was her father’s well, but the gentleman said water could not be owned, and he moved the slate slab and took a drink. The water overflowed and flooded the land, and as Merid was washed out to sea, she grew a beak and wings and turned into a gull. In time she gave birth to chicks, the ancestors of the gulls in Ceredigion today. And Nodon’s well is still there on the seabed, forever pouring water into Cardigan Bay.

Chwedl Llanina

A fishergirl called Madlen lived with her father Gronw in a rush-floored cottage on the cliff at Traethgwyn, where they caught herring, crabs and lobsters and ate the straw from their mattresses, they were so poor.

One day, Madlen was locking up the chickens when she saw a bolt of lightning strike the mast of a ship flying a Saxon flag. Gronw had no love for the Saxons, but these were fellow fishermen, so father and daughter rowed out to the sinking ship, pulled seven men from the sea, and returned to save five more, although many others drowned.

Gronw and Madlen took the twelve survivors to their cottage and gave them warm mead while their clothes dried by the fire. One was a tall elegant man who spoke Anglo-Saxon, so Madlen fetched a linguistic monk from Henfynyw, who introduced the man as Ina, a Saxon King. In gratitude for saving his life, the King built a church on the spot where he was rescued, which he named after himself, Llan Ina. Though perhaps it should be Llan Madlen?

As the sea level rose the church was flooded, and a new one built on the clifftop, where it still stands today.

Fishergirl

As Môrwen and Myra tiptoe through the stranded jellyfish on the beach at Cei Bach, a fishergirl walks past on her way to sell a couple of lobsters to a pub in Cei Newydd where visitors demand freshly caught seafood. She once caught a beautiful electric-blue lobster, but the family who ate it never noticed the colour because it turned red when cooked. Fishergirl watched them eating, but they never noticed her either.

Siani Chickens

On the beach at Cei Bach in the early 1900s stands a ramshackle mud-walled cottage, with windows stuffed with rags and smoke steaming through the thinly thatched roof. In the doorway sits an old woman smoking a clay pipe, with a red shawl over her shoulders, a red and yellow spotted handkerchief tied round her face, and clogs on her feet. She looks for all the world like Mrs Tiggywinkle. This is Siani Chickens, who earns a penny or two telling fortunes and selling postcards of herself posing outside her cottage with her hens.

Siani waves her arms around like the hands of an old clock and shoos the girls inside her cottage. She sits Môrwen by the fire to dry her clothes in a fug of steam and makes a pot of Tregaron tea so thick she can stand her spoon in it. The cottage is full of chickens. Siani calls them fy mhlant, ‘my children’, and they all have names, Bidi, Ledi, Kit, Ruth, Beti, Marged, Charlotte, Cynddylan, and Jonathan the cockerel, who struts around as if he owns the place. On the table is a bowl of eggs dyed in Tregaron tea, which Siani sells from door to door. Everyone buys them because they love Siani, although no one can eat them because the eggs taste of saltwater.

When the shopkeeper in Llanarth was nasty to the poor children, Siani marched in and told him he was a miserable grumpy old man who should be kind to those less fortunate than himself.

Siani sings her favourite hymn, Ar fôr tymhestlog teithio’r ryf, while Myra warbles a verse of an old Catholic hymn, Min Mair, learned from Grandfather Daniel Williams of Glyngolau. Siani says she was born illegitimate, fled the workhouse, was poorly treated in love and ran away with the Welsh Romany. Myra laughs and tells Môrwen that Siani is really Jane Leonard, born in 1834 at Bannau Duon in Llanarth. She looked after her mam in Aberaeron until 1883, when she moved to the no-man’s-land between the low tide and the cliff at Cei Bach, where she pays rent to no man. There are no boundaries in Siani’s world, only the ebb and flow of the tide.

Môrwen asks, ‘Aren’t you lonely, Mrs Chickens?’

Siani laughs and points her pipe at the sea. ‘No, no, no, there were five cottages here until the storms blew four down. Mrs Longcroft of Plas Llanina brings me food parcels, the Bardd Gwlad write poems about me, children visit to hear my stories, and Mr Môrgan visits me twice a day.’

Sometimes, Mr Môrgan bursts through her front door without invitation, so she climbs the ladder into the crog-loft and waits in her four-poster bed, sawn-off to fit under the rafters, with her chickens until he leaves. Mr Môrgan. Y Môr. The sea.

One day in 1917, Siani’s neighbour on the clifftop noticed the smoke wasn’t pouring through the roof. He found her lying peacefully in bed with her chickens and a biscuit tin containing £120 in threepenny bits with a note bequeathing her fortune to the poor children in Aberaeron workhouse. She is buried with her mother in Henfynyw Churchyard, and Mr Môrgan still visits Cei Bach every day in search of his beloved Siani Chickens.

Bwbach

Myra gives Môrwen a sketchbook and a few pencils so she can draw people on her travels. They will meet again in Swansea.

A hoar frost covers the ground. Skeletal spider’s webs spread across the gorse. At Gilfach yr Halen, Owain Lawgoch sleeps in a cave waiting to save Wales in its hour of need. Môrwen wonders why he hasn’t already woken up?

Calan Gaeaf swirls in all its weirdness around the pastel-sweet terraces of Aberaeron. A bwbach leaps out from under a bridge, sticks out its green furry tongue and bites through the rope carrying Captain John Evans’ gondola across the harbour. The town is full of ghosts, apparitions, demons, skeletons, werewolves, zombies and vampires, and a few children in fancy dress carrying a giant mackerel. The spirits of the ancestors walk in the present. Môrwen should know. She is one of them.

Mesolithic Llanrhystud

The traffic noise hurts Môrwen’s ears more than shrieking monsters, so she hurries down to the sea and paddles past the medieval fish traps off Aberarth, which supplied the monks at Strata Florida Abbey. At Llanrhystud, a forest stretched out to sea where she fished for salmon with a flint-topped spear along a mighty river formed by the Rheidol, Ystwyth, Dyfi, Leri and Wyre.

As she hops across the seaweed-covered tree stumps, the water level sinks and rises in front of her eyes. It turns from vapour to ice and back again, dogs transform into otters, falcons into black chickens, red deer drink at the water’s edge, beavers build dams in the marsh, a forest of alder, pine, oak, hazel and beech grows from below the sand and rots into black peat. Time is whirlpooling and Môrwen feels seasick. She curses three times, wriggles her webbed toes, and everything calms.