But we must hasten along the deep and rocky valley of our river, past the little town of Lampeter, noted for its training college for those who are going to be clergymen, and through a fair country of meadows and hills till we turn aside to a very ancient village, with a still more ancient church. This is Llan-Dewi-Brefi, or the Church of St. David on the Brefi. We have heard of it in a former chapter, for it was the scene of St. David’s triumph over the heretics in the sixth century, and the church stands on the site of that which was built in memory of that triumph on the hill which rose under him as he stood to give his message to the assembly.
The word “Brefi” means a “bellowing,” and legend accounts for the name of the little stream which flows by the hill in this fashion.
Two mighty oxen were dragging stones from the river-bed wherewith to build the church, when they came to a very steep hill, up which they found it most difficult to pull the huge stone. At last, in his struggle to do so, one of the animals fell down dead. When this happened, its mate stood and bellowed nine times with force so terrific that the valley shook, and the hill fell down flat, so that the stone could be drawn easily to the site of the church. Once on a time the traveller would be shown an immense horn, said to have fallen from the head of one of these oxen, which gave its name of the “Bellowing One” to the stream below.
To the left of the Teify Valley, some miles farther up its course, lies the great Bog of Tregaron, six miles long and one broad, and far more like an Irish bog than any other quagmire in this country.
Picture to yourself a vast flat, brownish expanse, with pools of gleaming black water here and there, dotted by hillocks formed by stacks of black turf cut from its surface. It is loneliness itself, in spite of a brown-smocked turf-cutter here and there at work; and over it the only sound that echoes is the cry of the wild-duck, the peewit, or grouse.
Farther up still we find the Teify among the mountains, flowing in a valley, at the head of which stand the ruins of Strata Florida. Most solitary is this, perhaps, of all the lonely spots which those old Cistercian monks chose out in the wilderness, and “made to blossom like the rose.”
The monastery was probably founded by Rhys ap Griffith in 1164—“My Lord Rhys, the head, and shield, and strength of the south and of all Wales,” as the chronicler calls him. It became the darling of the Welsh chieftains, who showered lands and money upon the monks, until they found themselves the owners of the mountain-range above, and of most of the wide valley in which stand the ruins, and the most noted sheep-farmers in Wales.
In one of these cells was preserved the parchment, still in existence, upon which was kept, every day for one hundred and thirty years, a “chronicle” of the Welsh history of the time, which only ends with the death of Llewelyn.
Here, too, lies buried beneath the great yew-trees of the graveyard a famous Welsh poet of the fourteenth century, named Dafydd ap Gwilym (David, son of William).
Welsh literature is full of the love-poems addressed by this poet to Morfydd, his loved one, “Maid of the glowing form and lily brow beneath a roof of golden tresses.”