Traethiad

Route: Llangollen to Glyndyfrdwy and back. Tuesday 4th June 2024

Into a New Territory

I’m back at the bus station in Oswestry, getting the bus north to Chirk. I change there, waiting across the road from the Hand Hotel. Locals chat around me, their gossip and banter flying like darts around the shelter. The next bus arrives, and I’m away to Llangollen.

We travel the concrete, semi-rural, semi- light industry business park terrain of north-east Wales. It’s my own country, but I’ve never been to this part of it before. Like Gawain, I’m entering new territory.

The hillsides become steeper and the sightlines shorter as the bus descends into the Dee valley, whizzing confidently along the twists and turns of the narrow roads. As we turn one corner, I’m jolted upright in my seat: there, ahead, hanging on to the top of a precipice as if in the air, defying gravity, is a mighty castle: Dinas Brân, the Raven’s Fortress. Built by the Welsh, and then burned by them so that the encroaching English couldn’t use it, it absolutely dominates the horizon, visible from miles around. It’s a tangible sign of past greatness and Welsh aspirations.

This dramatic stronghold was originally built by Gruffydd Maelor II of the House of Powys Fadog – and Owain Glyndŵr was his direct descendant. The site of the castle itself, which had been built upon the remains of a much older stronghold, was associated in Welsh myth with Bendigeidfran, Brân the Blessed, son of Llŷr and High King of Britain, who had led the men of the Island of the Mighty to Ireland to save his sister’s honour.

Giants in the Hilltops

Brân, of course, was a giant; we’re told in the Second Branch of the Mabinogi that he was so large that he could not fit inside any normal building. After he left his fortress for Ireland, he was killed by a poisoned dart. His severed head was taken by his companions to be buried in the White Hill of London.

Some time later, the now-derelict and empty fortress was occupied by a second giant: Gogmagog, who was as wicked as Brân had been noble. Wielding a great mace, he terrorised the countryside around – until, one day, a Norman knight arrived with his men.

Payn Peveril has accepted a challenge to spend a night at in the ruins, which no-one else dares do. In the best dramatic tradition, a great storm breaks overhead, and the giant, Gogmagog, emerges from the darkness, brandishing his mace. After a great battle, Payn’s sword pierces the giant’s defence, and Gogmagog falls to the ground, fatally wounded.

Poetry as Propaganda

So, a tale of two giants on the same great hill. But there’s more than that…

In the tale, the dying Gogmagog tells Payn that he himself drove Brân out of the castle by force. The Norman knight has thus triumphed over the force of nature, the giant, who had himself defeated the giant Welsh king: Norman power is demonstrated as all-conquering.

It may come as no surprise to learn, then, that this encounter is just one episode in the poem Fouke le Fitz Waryn, written in Anglo-Norman French and celebrating Anglo-Norman Baronial power in the face of the King – and the King’s Welsh allies. As we’ve seen, it’s the poem which celebrates Fulk III FitzWarin’s rebellion, and his ultimate seizure of the town and castle of Whittington, the location of the Knights Hospitallers’ commandery for north Wales, from the Welsh House of Mathrafal – Glyndŵr’s ancestors.

A Magical War of Words

Poems, in the fourteenth century and earlier, weren’t just artistic and imaginative stories. They were propaganda. They were intended to be learned, and shared, and repeated around winter hearths over many years. They were intended to shape opinions and manipulate thoughts, to influence the slow future of culture in a time before mass media.

Poems were written, in other words, to cause change through the power of words: the poet’s vision and will, shaping minds through precisely selected phrase and image. It’s the same principle expressed by ritual magicians today, those heirs of the medieval esoteric traditions – and practised also, to great and positive effect, by hypnotherapists. Magic is, as Dion Fortune put it, the art of changing consciousness in accordance with will. In medieval Wales and the Marches, poetry and magic were of one piece; the bard was expected to be poet, seer – and magician. Read the tales of Taliesin and Myrddin again, and it’s clear.

So we can look anew at the medieval Marches, and see that while battles between Welsh and English, barons and crown, Marcher lord and Marcher lord, were fought by steel-clad knights and their followers, they were also interwoven with a less tangible conflict: a magical war conducted by poets to win hearts and minds for their cause.

Understanding this, we need to look at the tales of the Mabinogi, written down by Glyndŵr’s ally, the soldier-seer Hopcyn ap Tomas ab Einion Offeiriad, not as static artifacts passed unchanged from past times, but as narratives intended to cause desired change at that particular moment, in the society and political environment of that time.

And the same is true of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Llangollen

I get off the bus in the centre of Llangollen, and walk around the corner to the Hand Hotel. It has the same name as the hotel in Chirk. One of the minor pleasures of this journey has been noticing the networks of hotels with the same name – the Wynnstay Arms, The Hand, The Cross Foxes – which represent the former influence of particular gentry families and the extent of their estates. It’s a reminder of how recently the old world of centuries still existed – less equal, less fair, but perhaps more personal and more rooted in community and place.

I unpack swiftly. Llangollen appears to be a pretty little town, but I’ll leave exploration for later. Tomorrow, I plan to take a leisurely walk to Dinas Brân and onwards to the ruins of Valle Crucis abbey, then enjoy the day mooching around the town. The day after that, I’ll be going to Wrexham, walking most of the way in Gawain’s footsteps via the forelands and the fords before the Holy Head.

Today, though, I’m heading to Glyndŵr’s other castle, the estate from which he took the name by which he was generally known: Glyndyfrdwy.

Glyndyfrdwy: The Prince Declared

I considered walking: it’s five miles, so a ten-mile round trip. But… I’ve arrived a bit too late in the day, the road’s a fast one, and the weather is not looking promising, with dark clouds gathering overhead. So I take the bus to Llidiart-y-Parc, a small cluster of houses and a petrol station at the foot of a mountain slope, passing through the village of Glyndyfrdwy on the way.

I disembark, and walk back along the road. A cold wind is picking up, and rain is beginning to spit. The castle is close, but I can’t see any sign of it. Then, suddenly, I round a corner and I see a stile in the hedge, overgrown with nettles. There’s an information board… and, in the field beyond, the earthen mound where Glyndŵr’s hall once stood.

I stamp down the nettles, climb over and approach the oak-crowned hillock. Deep dips and rises in the field suggest the memory of old defences. With some effort – there’s no distinct path – I climb to the top, where once walls would have stood and sentries kept watch.

I’ve approached from the south. On the northern edge is a sheer escarpment, the ground falling away precipitously to the valley floor below, where the river Dee writhes in leisurely, rocky bends. A line of dark trees marches along the edge towards Glyndyfrdwy in the east. Looking that way, the village can be seen huddling in the deep valley but the eye is drawn upwards, to the black bulk of Dinas Brân, elevated on the high horizon. The view west is obscured by a bend in the valley.

Across Glyndyfrdwy, with Dinas Brân on the horizon Copyright the author, 2026. All rights reserved.

I try to picture that day in September 1400, when his hand forced by Reginald Grey’s treachery, Owain Glyndŵr stood before a few hundred of his supporters and was declared the true Prince of Wales. Faint echoes of cheers and shouts seem to catch at my hearing. As I stand there, the clouds miraculously vanish. The sky is blue, and the valley floor is filled with warm sunshine. I take my photos, and let the scenery sink in. It’s ruggedly beautiful, but the valley is narrow and the mountains high. The land is poor here. It’s no surprise at all that Glyndŵr and his family preferred to have their home in lush, sun-soaked Sycharth.

For all its significance, the site seems lonely and unvisited, though someone has left a flag, Glyndŵr’s red and yellow banner, hanging from a tree branch.

I have a bus to catch, though, the only one for hours. I descend back to the field, cross the stile, and head back along the road. As I do, the clouds reappear in force, and begin sinking down towards me. I’ve barely reached the bus shelter when the rain begins, hammering down in wave after wave, sheets of water racing along the road. The bus doesn’t appear. I begin to worry. But, eventually, it arrives, delayed by traffic on this narrow road, and I head back to Llangollen.

Saints, Giants, and Sacred Stones

Llangollen, you’ll remember, was founded by Saint Collen – the former soldier who had become an abbot in Glastonbury and then a hermit. Educated in Gaul – in Orleans – and known for his knowledge and learning, he was invited to the invisible castle of the lord of the Otherworld, the glass castle on the peak of Glastonbury Tor. Gwyn ap Nudd, hermetic boundary-crossing lord of study and competence, of death and wild nature, wished to converse with him. Insulting Gwyn, Collen splashed him and his court with holy water from a flask which he had smuggled in under his robe. The glass castle vanished, leaving Collen alone on the Tor-top.

The tale ends abruptly here, presenting it as a victory for Christianity over Gwyn and his ‘devils’. But perhaps it wasn’t, because Collen didn’t linger long in Glastonbury. He uprooted himself from the open fens of the Summer Land and relocated to this great, damp hollow in the valley of the Dee, far away.

Here, perhaps, he felt safe from Gwyn’s revenge – but it was still a dangerous place. The high valleys and craggy plateaus of the region were the territory of many giants. We’ve already been introduced to Brân and Gogmagog, but there were many more. The main road northwards, through the horseshoe-shaped pass between Llantysilio mountain and Cyrn-y-Brain (the crows’ spire) was haunted by a giantess who preyed upon travellers. Taking his sword, Collen hunted down the cannibal, fought her, and slew her. He washed then blood from his hands and blade in a spring which to this day is called Collen’s Spring, from which the water still runs red.

Memory Held in Stone

Between the spring and Llangollen stands an ancient stone, a cylindrical pillar, with its roots sunk in a far older mound. The stone is the pillar of Eliseg, raised by the seventh-century prince Cyngen ap Cadell in honour of his great-grandfather, Elisedd ap Gwylog. This takes us back once again to the continuity between the Welsh of the middle ages and their ancestors in Roman and post-Roman Britain. The mound beneath it dates back to the Bronze Age; it’s been in this landscape since long before any memory beyond myth.

The pillar is inscribed with text, relating the deeds of Cyngen’s ancestors and the events of their times. Many of these names and events also appear in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain which, as we’ve often discussed, was in the time of Glyndŵr and the anonymous Gawain poet the primary non-Welsh source of the story of King Arthur. Elisedd had ruled Powys for many years, although his line died out and the House of Mathrafal, from which Glyndŵr was descended, came later. What this means, though, is that when the Welsh of Glyndŵr’s day read Geoffrey’s History, they weren’t believing the stories on the authority of a book; they believed the book because the stories had been carved by and for their ancestors on a stone that had stood in their own lands long before the Normans had arrived in Britain.

Between the pillar and Llangollen stands the Cistercian abbey of Valle Crucis, ‘the Valley of the Cross’ (the cross being the one carved on Eliseg’s pillar). This abbey had been established at the turn of the thirteenth century by Madog ap Gruffydd Maelor, prince of Powys Fadog – and a direct-line ancestor of Owain Glyndŵr. One of Madog’s children was a daughter, Angharad. Her father unsuccessfully sought to marry her to… Fulk III Fitzwarin, perhaps to keep Whittington and the former lands of eastern Powys under Welsh influence.

Land and Legend

If Glyndŵr travelled west from Glyndyfrdwy towards Corwen he would quickly have reached lands ruled by his brother Gruffydd, and later by Gruffydd’s son Tudur. Here was the village of Gwyddelwern, where the irascible saint Beuno had lived for a while and had brought an Irishman back from the dead. Further along the same road lies the village of Brynsaithmarchog, which is named in the Second Branch of the Mabinogi; it’s where the seven knights left by Bendeigeidfran to guard his lands while he campaigned in Ireland were based.

These lands? They were called Edeyrnion… after Edeyrn ap Nudd, brother of Gwyn, who ruled there. In Wales, the old gods were still known and honoured, their stories still told, alongside a deep-seated Christian faith.

Kinship, Time, and the Welsh Worldview

It’s now, perhaps that we can start to really start to inhabit the way the medieval Welsh understood the world. Glyndŵr, like all of them was simply one node in a web of kinship. Horizontally, in his own life, he was a part of the kinship system to the ninth degree which, under Welsh law, made all responsible for their relatives’ actions. To the Welsh, there was no system of noble and commoner; there were only more or less prominent members of a clan. Vertically, through time, he would have seen himself as just one in a long chain of generations in his family, responsible for the honour of the dead and the needs of those yet to be born.

He had lands and, like all lords of the time, would have been well-versed in its management – and so in the natures of the natural world, animals, and birds. His Christian belief, in the manner of the time, would have filled him with belief in the eternal – but also with the knowledge that divine vision underlay everything around him in numerically calculable and demonstrable principles. He knew that miracles had been worked, in his family’s own lands. What’s more, specific communities in his lands and those of his family had their place in ancient myths, and in histories carved in stone: indisputable evidence of the continuity of culture and kin from time beyond mind.

Like everybody, he knew that the veil of civilisation was very thin. Outside well-tended domains were the wild lands of mountain, moor and forest, where wild bandits clans lay in wait for the poorly-prepared and inadequately-defended traveller. No less dangerous or terrifying were the wild animals that roamed freely. It was no great leap of imagination to understand that there were still giants amongst the crags, or that the old spirits like Gwyn ap Nudd might put you to the test, with your life forfeit if you failed.

Nor were the Welsh an isolated people, huddled into the western mountains and isolated from the wider world. They had traded and crusaded around the known world. Their ancient saints like Collen and Germanus had travelled between Wales and Gaul and Rome, and Glyndŵr’s generation were no different. Men like Gregory Sais had fought as mercenaries the length and breadth of Europe while maintaining their proud Welshness. They’d met Arab and Turk, in the eastern Mediterranean, in the Balkans, in Spain. They’d crusaded with the Teutonic knights in the Baltic. They bought clothing and tapestries from Egypt and Central Asia. They might, who knows, have consorted and fought alongside warriors, traders and diplomats from the mighty Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, which maintained contacts with their co-religionists in both the Eastern Roman Empire and the Latin Catholic west.

A Nation in Christendom

No, the Welsh were no bumpkins. They were a culture and a people confident of their place amongst the peoples of Christendom and beyond. Of course there were their neighbours to deal with: the Saxons and their Norman and Breton overlords, now well-advanced in the process of becoming ‘English’. Yes, the Welsh had been conquered and their princes killed – but not all; some princes had, after all, sided with the English, swearing allegiance to the crown and, keeping their lands, had blurred into the nobility of the Marcher lordships. If they no longer ruled the lost lands of Powys in the west and north, and of Gwent in the south-east, they had not lost the memory – nor had the still-Welsh communities now under English rule forgotten their former Welsh lords. The power struggle between the lords of Powys Fadog and the Anglo-Norman FitzWarins over Whittington shows how contemporary, even realistic, that Welsh dream of reclaiming old lands was for Glyndŵr and his generation.

Myth and the Missing Kingdom

In this setting, as we saw above, poetry was more than entertainment; it was propaganda, used to shape opinions and influence thinking.

Which makes me wonder about the Mabinogion.

As we’ve repeatedly discussed, our main source for these tales comes from the Red Book of Hergest, compiled by the poet, seer and soldier Hopcyn ap Tomas ab Einion Offeiriad. Hopcyn was a man of Deheubarth, with ancestral loyalty to Glyndŵr’s line. Read these stories again: the action takes place in Gwynedd, Deheubarth and Powys. These are the three ancient Welsh kingdoms to which Glyndŵr could claim as his by right; three ancient territories which were still considered distinct entities in his time.

But, in his own time, there was a fourth Welsh lordship still extant. This was Morgannwg, or Glamorgan. Like the rest of Wales, it had been conquered, and was a Marcher kingdom held as a possession of the Earls of Gloucester. But, like the other Marcher territories, it remained intensely Welsh. The communities there still lived by Welsh law and custom, and the families of the old Morgannwg lords still held lands and status. As elsewhere in the March, Norman lords such as the Tubervilles of Coity had become entirely Welsh in their language and customs. The Welsh nobility of Morgannwg still sometimes rose in rebellion against the Normans.

So why are the lands and legends of Morgannwg absent from the Mabinogion?

Yes, south-east Wales is mentioned – but only in the context of the long-extinct lordship of Gwent, once the seat of Arthur’s court, which had extended into Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. That line of princes was long gone. But Morgannwg, and its princely lines, its Welshness and identity were very much extant when Hopcyn was compiling the Red Book.

Could it be that he left it out because Glyndŵr had no ancestral claim to it? Was it because it was intended to evoke a broader, ancestral Wales, which was to be reclaimed – and Morgannwg was an inconvenience, to be ignored in favour of the older Gwent?

As we’ll see, the territories and towns visited by the heroes of the Mabinogion map closely to the borders of the independent Wales that Glyndŵr tried to establish during his rebellion.

And, as we’ll also see, the same can be said of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Gawain’s journey begins in Deheubarth, skirts Gwynedd and passes through Powys. And then… it follows very closely the older boundaries of the lost lands of that older Powys that the Welsh still dreamed of reclaiming.

I said last time that Owain Glyndŵr should never had rebelled, and wouldn’t have if he hadn’t been forced into it. But, with that Welsh cross-generational view of time discussed above, that doesn’t mean that he might have been quietly putting the pieces in place for his sons or grandsons to do it. And that might have involved commissioning tales to maintain the memory of Welsh rule in those lands. Like hypnotists, like propagandists, like magicians, using image and phrase to shift the unconscious through fireside tales told in the darkness by poets…

The Body Intrudes

Hmmm. There’s an awful lot to think about here. But, back in my room at the Hand, I’ve got a more immediate problem. Somehow or other, that brief walk at Glyndyfrdwy has raised an enormous blister on my right foot. I lance it with my penknife, clean it, and patch it with a large plaster, but it’s going to take time to heal. There’s no way I’ll be able to walk fully-laden to Wrexham.

Toward the End of the World

So, I change my plans. I won’t go to Dinas Brân or Valle Crucis abbey tomorrow. Instead, I’ll enter the valley of giants, cross the fords along the foreland, and go to the Holy Head, at the End of the World.