[6] It was so called by the poet D. ab Gwilym, cxcii. 12, when he sang:
I odi ac i luchio
Ođiar lechweđ Moel Eilio.
To bring snow and drifting flakes
From off Moel Eilio’s slope.
[7] This is commonly pronounced ‘Y Gath Dorwen,’ but the people of the neighbourhood wish to explain away a farm name which could, strangely enough, only mean ‘the white-bellied cat’; but y Garth Dorwen, ‘the white-bellied garth or hill,’ is not a very likely name either. [↑]
[8] The hiring time in Wales is the beginning of winter and of summer; or, as one would say in Welsh, at the Calends of Winter and the Calends of May respectively. In North Cardiganshire the great hiring fair was held at the former date when I was a boy, and so, as I learn from my wife, it was in Carnarvonshire. [↑]
[9] In a Cornish story mentioned in Choice Notes, p. 77, we have, instead of ointment, simply soap. See also Mrs. Bray’s Banks of the Tamar, pp. 174–7, where she alludes to H. Cornelius Agrippa’s statement how such ointment used to be made—the reference must, I think, be to his book De Occulta Philosophia Libri III (Paris, 1567), i. 45 (pp. 81–2). [↑]
[10] See the Mabinogion, pp. 1–2; Evans’ Facsimile of the Black Book of Carmarthen, fol. 49b–50a; Rhys’ Arthurian Legend, pp. 155–8; Edmund Jones’ Spirits in the County of Monmouth, pp. 39, 71, 82; and in this volume, pp. 143, 203, above. I may mention that the Cornish also have had their Cwn Annwn, though the name is a different one, to wit in the phrase, ‘the Devil and his Dandy-dogs’: see Choice Notes, pp. 78–80. [↑]