Folklore, and What to Do With It

There is a story that a city lies beneath Llangorse Lake, drowned for its wickedness, and that on a still day you can see towers under the water and hear bells.

Giraldus Cambrensis was told something like it when he passed through in 1188. It was current in the nineteenth century and people still repeat it.

There is also a crannog in that lake, an artificial island built for a king of Brycheiniog, its oak palisade felled between AD 889 and 893, burned by a Mercian army in 916 with the queen carried off. The legend is not a memory of that. But a lake with a royal hall in it that was violently destroyed is a plausible place for a drowned-palace story to attach itself to, and the two things are worth holding in the same hand without confusing them.

That is the whole problem of folklore in a heritage resource, in one lake.

How this site handles it

Folklore goes in. It is recorded, it is attributed where the source is known, and it is flagged so that nobody mistakes it for evidence.

The reason it goes in is that it is real. People believed these things, told them, acted on them, and in a good many cases the tradition is the only surviving trace of a place's meaning to the people who lived there. Excluding it produces a thinner and less honest picture, not a more rigorous one.

The reason it is flagged is that Victorian antiquarians routinely wrote legend and record into the same paragraph, and a great deal of what circulates as Powys history originated as somebody's guess in about 1880.

Recurring types

Drowned settlements. Llangorse is the main Powys example. The type is common across Wales and Ireland and is almost always moralised: the place was wicked, or the well was left uncovered, and the water took it.

Sleeping heroes and hidden treasure. Caves that contain armed men waiting, generally under a hill with an obvious earthwork on it.

The tylwyth teg, the fair folk. In Powys they are frequently associated with lakes and with specific farms, and the stories are usually about exchange gone wrong: borrowed goods, a stolen wife, a bargain broken.

Saints and their springs. Almost every llan in the county has or had a well associated with its saint, and a good many had curative reputations that survived the Reformation by centuries.

Grass that will not grow. The Robber's Grave in Montgomery churchyard, where John Davies was buried after being hanged in 1821 protesting his innocence. The story is later than the execution. The execution is documented.

Customs

Distinct from legend and better evidenced, because people were still doing them when folklorists arrived with notebooks.

The Mari Lwyd, a horse's skull on a pole carried house to house at midwinter with a party demanding entry in improvised verse, is a Welsh custom that reached parts of Powys and has been revived in several. Plygain, the pre-dawn Christmas carol service sung in unaccompanied parts, survived continuously in the Tanat and Vyrnwy valleys and is one of the county's genuinely living traditions.

Wakes, fairs, calennig at New Year, and the rituals around death and burial are all recorded in the county society journals.

The people

Twm Siôn Cati belongs to Ceredigion but ranges across mid Wales in the telling, a sixteenth-century trickster and outlaw attached loosely to a real man, Thomas Jones of Tregaron.

Brychan, the supposed founder of Brycheiniog, and his implausibly numerous saintly children, who account for a large proportion of the church dedications in the south of the county. The genealogies are medieval constructions rather than records.

Using it well

Ask three questions of any story. Who wrote it down, and when? Does it explain a physical feature that is actually there? And is there a documented event nearby that it might have grown around?

The answers usually make the folklore more interesting, not less. A drowned-palace legend attached to a lake that contains a burned royal crannog is a better story than either half on its own.