Fairylore survived until recent years in some of the remoter parts of North Wales. The Victorian folklorist Elias Owen uncovered some fascinating tales from justone upland region of North-East Wales.
There is a wild expanse in Denbighshire, North Wales, known as the Hiraethog. The name is almost untranslatable, the word ‘hiraeth’ meaning somethign like longing, or home-sickness and may suggest a mournful, affecting landscape. At one time the Hiraethog was well-known for its fairy-lore.
The Hiraethog is dominated by the peak of Bron Bannog. The Ychen Bannog, gigantic mythical oxen, appear to have been named after this mountain and it is an interesting fact that it is crowned by two tor-like outcrops of rock which, at certain angles, resemble the horns of a bull.
The Ychen Bannog were the offspring of a fairy cow, called the Fuwch Frech (Freckled Cow), who had her home among the ruins of ancient habitations now swallowed up by the forest of Clocaenog.
Local legend had it that the Fuwch Frech was a bounty to the neighbourhood, able to supply unlimited quantities of milk to whoever required it. Unfortunately, a wicked old hag, envious at the people’s prosperity, milked the fairy cow with a sieve until eventually she ran dry. Distressed by this treatment, the Fuwch Frech wandered off and disappeared under the waters of a lake, presumably back to Fairyland.
The Ychen Bannog followed her below the surface of the lake and ever afterwards it was known by the name of Llyn Dau Ychen, or Lake of the Two Oxen. Llyn Dau Ychen has silted up over the years and is now a marsh on the edge of the Alwen Reservoir. It was very near here that Judy Young found her ‘fairy house’.
The story of the Fuwch Frech was told to folklorist Elias Owen by a local farmer, Thomas Jones, in the 1880s. Mr Jones further stated that fairies had been seen in that neighbourhood.
Owen continues: ‘Jones said that some children had seen them on the hill close by. The day was misty and the clouds capped the hills, and the children saw a large number of diminutive folk , dressed in blue, emerging from the clouds, and then rushing back into the clouds.’
And it was well-known that the grandmother of one of Mr Thomas’s neighbours got on very well with the local fairies. This lady – whose name Owen gives only as ‘Mrs R’ – was referred to by the friendly Fair Tribe as ‘Aunty Ann’ and she in turn got to know each of them by name. When she was gathering rushes at Pont Petrual – a very pretty place popular with walkers today – the fairies’ dog would run up to greet her, ‘just as any other dog would come to welcome its master’s friend’.
Adds Owen: ‘It was very evident that the fairy tribe loved Mrs R and that she loved them.’
