Another haunted stone in a country lane, this time in Anglesey. Another similar story from North Wales.
By Richard Holland
The story of the Lancashire Written Stone (see ‘Do not disturb’) bears a marked similarity to a story from North Wales, and one or two other accounts from this folklore-rich region of the British Isles.
On the Isle of Anglesey, not far from the village of Brynteg, there can be found a strange boulder with a round depression, or ‘scoop’ taken out of it. The stone goes by the name of Cadair-y-bwgan, which translates as ‘Bwgan’s Chair’ – ‘bwgan’ is the Welsh equivalent of the Lancashire ‘boggart’ and comes from the same root word, from which we also get ‘bogey man’ and ‘boo!’.
A Mr W Pritchard, who wrote an article on folklore for the Anglesey Antiquarian Society in 1914, describes the bwgan as ‘a terrible phantom’ which ‘used to visit the farm houses of the neighbourhood, always with some malevolent purpose, such as befouling the dairies, causing the cows to withhold their milk, overturning the milk pails, and even bringing the animals under baleful influences. After becoming tired of tormenting the farmers and others, he would retire to his chair on the roadside to the great terror of the passers by.’
Native of Anglesey, broadcaster Gwyn Llewellyn, was able to pinpoint the location of the stone for me (W Pritchard had been very vague). He saw it many times in his youth, and his father, when a boy himself, had an eerie experience while passing by it. Mr Llewellyn senior had been walking his bicycle up the hill, when ‘something like a tornado’ rushed out from the direction of the Cadair-y-bwgan and under the wheels of the bike. It was all the boy could do to stop it being toppled over. Although he didn’t see anything supernatural, and heard only a rushing noise, he was convinced it was a manifestation of the bwgan itself and in later years enjoyed telling the story to his son whenever they had occasion to pass the mysterious rock. Gwyn was kind enough to seek out the stone for me, and a photograph he had taken standing beside it appears in my ‘Haunted Wales’.
The similarities between this account and the legend of the Written Stone are obvious. I am reminded, too, of another incident recorded from North Wales, this time from Denbighshire. In this case a farmer was riding late one night passed an earthen bank near the village of Llandegla when he saw a shadowy human shape approach him out of the darkness. The next thing he knew, he was dragged from his horse and savagely attacked – in fact, he was beaten unconscious. He survived the assault, but was convinced his assailant had been no living man. He was not robbed and there seemed no purpose behind the assault.
The spot where the assault occurred was well-known as being haunted, a place where sometimes ‘a sudden and intense darkness would fall all around and a high wind would spring up’, terrifying travellers. Many years later, the earthen bank by the side of the road was removed and a Bronze Age urn was discovered. Part of the bank had been a prehistoric burial mound. Was this the origin of the violent haunting?
One wonders whether the Written Stone and the Bwgan’s Chair also had some significance in prehistoric times. Are boggarts and bwgans, and indeed other ghosts of the countryside, elemental powers dating from prehistoric times? It’s an intriguing idea.
[SOURCE: 'Haunted Wales' by Richard Holland, 2005; 'Wales of the Unexpected' by Richard Holland, 2005]
© Richard Holland 2008 / My thanks to Michael Bayley-Hughes for introducing me to Gwyn Llewellyn, who is pictured beside the Cadair-y-bwgan. (Picture © Michael Bayley Hughes)
