Welsh Folk Tales of Coast and Sea, page 1
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.
