Ceredigion Folk Tales by Peter Stevenson

Author:Peter Stevenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750955324
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2014-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

17

THE WAR OF THE

LITTLE ENGLISHMAN

There has long been a tradition of Englishmen moving to Wales, acquiring land and building castles. The Welsh also have a tradition, of fighting for the land they love. It is part of their soul – they belong to the earth beneath their feet and carry it with them wherever they go, like the mud on their boots. They call it hiraeth, a yearning, a longing, a word that barely translates into English.

So it was in 1815 – when absentee landlords and mining speculators were buying the commonly owned land in north Ceredigion – that John Hughes, the surveyor appointed to enclose the commons around Mynydd Llanrhystud, found himself surrounded by thirty odd-looking old women armed with dripping pans. They showed him the hole where they kept their surveyors, and Mr Hughes, quite understandably unnerved, diplomatically left, never to go near mountains, dripping pans or unshaven old women ever again. Soon there were 200 of them on the mountain, watching, and staring, and looking fetching in their frocks.

So the fairy tale begins. In 1819, a gentleman from Lincolnshire, Augustus Brackenbury, bought several hundred acres of common land on Mynydd Bach, for he had decided to build himself a castle. He hired a cheap workforce of local men to build a road to allow access on and off his land, and a cottage to live in while his castle was being designed. He was unsure what to make of the locals; they seemed polite enough, even though they spoke a language he didn’t understand. They were a little unnerving, for they had a habit of staring at him through dark furrowed eyebrows. They were good at staring. Men and women. Especially the children. Sheep, too.

Dafydd Ifan, the blacksmith, lived in a small damp cottage named Bwlchymynydd near Llanrhystud. Dafydd had a son, a dark shaggy-haired boy named Siaci. An inquisitive boy, Siaci Ifan could stare better than any boy on Mynydd Bach and he could blow a pibcorn louder than any cow could bellow. He and his father cut peat to sell in Aberystwyth and raised a few animals, as the soil was too thin and waterlogged to grow healthy crops. Earning a living was hard; men had not returned after the Napoleonic Wars, some had fled for America in pursuit of hope and dreams, and now the land they worked had been sold to a rich man.

The Englishman began to build his cottage while Siaci and his friends watched. They couldn’t take their eyes off him. Siaci saw a grand man in a silk hat, a velvet waistcoat, carsimer trousers and white socks, and assumed he must be a lord. He watched his lord and followed him everywhere. The lord spoke to him saying, ‘Go away, ragamuffins,’ but the children said nothing; they just stared because he spoke in a language they didn’t understand.

Soon the walls of the lord’s cottage were built, the roof timbers were in place with just the roof tiles to add and he went to bed that night feeling most satisfied.

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