Here's another tale from Wales from one of my Welsh guest bloggers, the extremely talented (and mega intelligent ! Like Stan she's a Professor Doctor Author Etc etc!) Gwenllian. We are awaiting the publication of the next book, The Wolf's Shadow. The wee blurb says that the body of Thomas Seymour is found in a tree, nine years to the day, after he was beheaded on Tower Hill!
Reading this blog, I think you see where the inspiration of this book came from. Or is it true? Will we ever know? Read on for the spooky history of a cursed village.
PS At some point we should do a wee video blog, just to hear Gwenllian's accent and the Welsh pronunciation...
Mysterious Wales – The cursed
village of Nant Gwtheyren
Thousands of feet below you will see the ancient village
nestled in a ring of mountains. It looks idyllic. But this peaceful hamlet has
a very dark past of curses, fairy folk, tragedy, spies and ruin. Today it is still
defying a curse made centuries ago.
There is evidence that people have lived in this mountain
hollow since the dawn of man. It first entered the literature as the claimed
hiding place of Vortigern – a Welsh prince who made the mistake of falling in
love with a Saxon princess and, in his attempt to marry her, subjected his men
to bloody slaughter. Some legends say he crawled down the winding path to the
sea and spent his life in madness, wandering the mountain sides. Others say he
leapt from a cliff in the shame of betraying his people. Indeed, the cliff to
the North of the village is still called Vortigern’s leap.
Another belief is that the Nant is the land of the Twllwch
Teg – the fair people or fairies. I recall my grandmother telling me that you
must never shout in the Nant or walk the mountain paths alone at night – for
the fairies would be angered and you would not come home.
In the fifth Century, the hollow had become a fishing
village, living well of the sea-stock of the Welsh waters. The people were
close, suspicious of strangers and had little to do with the outside world. One
day, three monks, following the pilgrimage path of North Wales, asked for food
and a place to stay. They also asked to build a church. They were pelted with stones and told to keep
walking. In their fury, three curses were cast upon the village and the people
– that the village would die and rise three times before falling to ruin
forever; that no two young people from the village would marry; and that no
villager would be buried in the ground.
It was not long before the curses started to manifest. Soon
after the monks had gone, the men went fishing as usual but were struck by a
raging storm. Every man drowned, leaving a village of widows and children.
Grief-stricken and unable to carry on village economy, every woman left and the
village died for the first time.
In the mid-1700s the second curse came true when a young
couple, Rhys and Meinir, were engaged. Their love had grown as they walked the
hills and sat under an oak watching the sea. The day of the wedding arrived and
the young men around Rhys readied themselves for the traditional chase of the
bride – where the bride would run away and hide only to be chased by the groom
and his men and carried back. When Meinir ran laughing from her father’s house
it should have been the start of a joyous day. But hours later she was still
not found. The hunt went on for days and weeks. Rhys never stopped looking for
his sweetheart. Years later, a great storm cleaved the old oak in half. Inside,
they found a skeleton in a wedding dress.
Some years later Elis Bach (Little Elis) was born – a child who never grew to the size
of a man with legs no longer than the length of a hand, and yet was able to run
faster than others, herd sheep and battle against thieves. He was believed a
changeling left in this realm by the fairies.
The second rise was in the 1800’s when Hugh Owen realised
that the granite of the cliffs was perfect to make sets for the roads being
built across Wales and England as the industrial revolution gathered pace. The
stone of Nant Gwtheyren paved and cobbled the roads of Liverpool, Manchester,
Birmingham, and other developing cities. Soon there were three working
quarries. The village seemed to have a long future. The population grew and a
chapel was built – just as the monks had requested. But within a few decades,
engineering moved on and discovered tarmacadam. Granite steps were no longer
wanted. The curse came true again. In the early 1900s the last quarry closed,
the quarry families left, and the village slowly died again. It was a place
chosen by people who wanted life away from others – like mysterious Margaret
Fisher who was believed a spy and died, or maybe just disappeared, in a strange
house fire. The valley quietened year by year and the last family climbed out
of the village in 1959.
The village became a place of transient dwellers – the worst of them were the hippy colony calling themselves the New Atlantis Commune. They wrecked the dwellinghouses, burned the woodwork, fouled the village as they had no sewage system and vandalised at will. Nant Gwtheyren was left in ruins and a third rising seemed impossible. It was considered dead.
Gwenllian Williams
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