The well itself is at the foot of a very green field-bank at the head of the lake, but not on the same level with it, as the lake has had its waters lowered half a century or more ago by the outlet having been cut deeper. Adjoining the field containing the well is a larger field, which also slopes down to the lake and extends in another direction to the grounds belonging to the house. This larger field is called Cae’r Ladi, ‘the Lady’s Field,’ and it is remarkable for having in its centre an ancient standing stone, which, as seen from the windows of the house, presents the appearance of a female figure hurrying along, with the wind slightly swelling out her veil and the skirt of her dress. Mr. Williams-Ellis remembers how when he was a boy the stone was partially white-washed, and how an old bonnet adorned the top of this would-be statue, and he thinks that an old shawl used to be thrown over the shoulders.
Now as to Grassi, she is mostly regarded as a ghostly person somehow connected with the lake and the house of Glasfryn. One story is to the effect, that on a certain evening she forgot to close the well, and that when the gushing waters had formed the lake, poor Grassi, overcome with remorse, wandered up and down the high ground of Cae’r Ladi, moaning and weeping. There, in fact, she is still at times to be heard lamenting her fate, especially at two o’clock in the early morning. Some people say that she is also to be seen about the lake, which is now the haunt of some half a dozen swans. But on the whole her visits appear to have been most frequent and troublesome at the house itself. Several persons still living are mentioned, who believe that they have seen her there, and two of them, Mrs. Jones of Talafon, and old Sydney Griffith of Tyđyn Bach, agree in the main in their description of what they saw, namely, a tall lady with well marked features and large bright eyes: she was dressed in white silk and a white velvet bonnet. The woman, Sydney Griffith, thought that she had seen the lady walking several times about the house and in Cae’r Ladi. This comes, in both instances, from a young lady born and bred in the immediate neighbourhood, and studying now at the University College of North Wales; but Mrs. Williams-Ellis has had similar accounts from other sources, and she mentions tenants of Glasfryn who found it difficult to keep servants there, because they felt that the place was haunted. In fact one of the tenants himself felt so unsafe that he used to take his gun and his dog with him to his bedroom at night; not to mention that when the Williams-Ellises lived themselves, as they do still, in the house, their visitors have been known to declare that they heard the strange plaintive cry out of doors at two o’clock in the morning.
Traces also of a very different story are reported by Mrs. Williams-Ellis, to the effect that when the water broke forth to form the lake, the fairies seized Grassi and changed her into a swan, and that she continued in that form to live on the lake sixscore years, and that when at length she died, she loudly lamented her lot: that cry is still to be heard at night. This story is in process apparently of being rationalized; at any rate the young lady student, to whom I have referred, remembers perfectly that her grandfather used to explain to her and the other children at home that Grassi was changed into a swan as a punishment for haunting Glasfryn, but that nevertheless the old lady still visited the place, especially when there happened to be strangers in the house. At the end of September last Mrs. Rhys and I had the pleasure of spending a few days at Glasfryn, in the hope of hearing the plaintive wail, and of seeing the lady in white silk revisiting her familiar haunts. But alas! our sleep was never once disturbed, nor was our peace once troubled by suspicions of anything uncanny. This, however, is negative, and characterized by the usual weakness of all such evidence.
It is now time to turn to another order of facts: in the first place may be mentioned that the young lady student’s grandmother used to call the well Ffynnon Grâs Siôn Gruffuđ, as she had always heard that Grâs was the daughter of a certain Siôn Gruffyđ, ‘John Griffith,’ who lived near the well; and Mrs. Williams-Ellis finds that Grâs was buried, at a very advanced age, on December 14, 1743, at the parish church of Ỻangybi, where the register describes her as Grace Jones, alias Grace Jones Griffith. She had lived till the end at Glasfryn, but from documents in the possession of the Glasfryn family it is known that in 1728 Hugh Lloyd of Traỻwyn purchased the house and estate of Glasfryn from a son of Grace’s, named John ab Cadwaladr, and that Hugh Lloyd of Traỻwyn’s son, the Rev. William Lloyd, sold them to Archdeacon Ellis, from whom they have descended to the Rev. J. C. Williams-Ellis. In the light of these facts there is no reason to connect the old lady’s name very closely with the well or the lake. She was once the dominant figure at Glasfryn, that is all; and when she died she was as usual supposed to haunt the house and its immediate surroundings; and if we might venture to suppose that Glasfryn was sold by her son against her will, though subject to conditions which enabled her to remain in possession of the place to the day of her death, we should have a further explanation, perhaps, of her supposed moaning and lamentation.
In the background, however, of the story, one detects the possibility of another female figure, for it may be that the standing stone in Cae’r Ladi represents a woman buried there centuries before Grace ruled at Glasfryn, and that traditions about the earlier lady have survived to be inextricably mixed with those concerning the later one. Lastly, those traditions may have also associated the subject of them with the well and the lake; but I wish to attach no importance to this conjecture, as we have in reserve a third figure of larger possibilities than either Grace or the stone woman. It needs no better introduction than Mrs. Williams-Ellis’ own words: ‘Our younger boys have a crew of three little Welsh boys who live near the lake, to join them in their boat sailing about the pool and in camping on the island, &c. They asked me once who Morgan was, whom the little boys were always saying they were to be careful against. An old man living at Tal Ỻyn, “Lake’s End,” a farm close by, says that as a boy he was always told that “naughty boys would be carried off by Morgan into the lake.” Others tell me that Morgan is always held to be ready to take off troublesome children, and somehow Morgan is thought of as a bad one.’ Now as Morgan carries children off into the pool, he would seem to issue from the pool, and to have his home in it. Further, he plays the same part as the fairies against whom a Snowdonian mother used to warn her children: they were on no account to wander away from the house when there was a mist, lest the fairies should carry them to their home beneath Ỻyn Dwythwch. In other words, Morgan may be said to act in the same way as the mermaid, who takes a sailor down to her submarine home; and it explains to my mind a discussion which I once heard of the name Morgan by a party of men and women making hay one fine summer’s day in the neighbourhood of Ponterwyd, in North Cardiganshire. I was a child, but I remember vividly how they teased one of their number whose ‘style’ was Morgan. They hinted at dreadful things associated with the name; but it was all so vague that I could not gather that his great unknown namesake was a thief, a murderer, or any kind of ordinary criminal. The impression left on my mind was rather the notion of something weird, uncanny, or non-human; and the fact that the Welsh version of the Book of Common Prayer calls the Pelagians Morganiaid, ‘Morgans,’ does not offer an adequate explanation. But I now see clearly that it is to be sought in the indistinct echo of such folklore as that which makes Morgan a terror to children in the neighbourhood of the Glasfryn Lake.
The name, however, presents points of difficulty which require some notice: the Welsh translators of Article IX in the Prayer Book were probably wrong in making Pelagians into Morganiaid, as the Welsh for Pelagius seems to have been rather Morien[7], which in its oldest recorded form was Morgen, and meant sea-born, or offspring of the sea. In a still earlier form it must have been Morigenos, with a feminine Morigena, but when the endings came to be dropped both vocables would become Morgen, later Mori̯en. I do not remember coming across a feminine Morgen in Welsh, but the presumption is that it did exist. For, among other things, I may mention that we have it in Irish as Muirgen, one of the names of the lake lady Liban, who, when the waters of the neglected well rushed forth to form Lough Neagh, lived beneath that lake until she desired to be changed into a salmon. The same conclusion may be drawn from the name Morgain or Morgan, given in the French romances to one or more water ladies; for those names are easiest to explain as the Brythonic Morgen borrowed from a Welsh or Breton source, unless one found it possible to trace it direct to the Goidels of Wales. No sooner, however, had the confusion taken place between Morgen and the name which is so common in Wales as exclusively a man’s name, than the aquatic figure must also become male. That is why the Glasfryn Morgan is now a male, and not a female like the other characters whose rôle he plays. But while the name was in Welsh successively Morgen and Morien, the man’s name was Morcant, Morgant, or Morgan[8], so that, phonologically speaking, no confusion could be regarded as possible between the two series. Here, therefore, one detects the influence, doubtless, of the French romances which spoke of a lake lady Morgain, Morgan, or Morgue. The character varied: Morgain le Fay was a designing and wicked person; but Morgan was also the name of a well disposed lady of the same fairy kind, who took Arthur away to be healed at her home in the Isle of Avallon. We seem to be on the track of the same confusing influence of the name, when it occurs in the story of Geraint and Enid; for there the chief physician of Arthur’s court is called Morgan Tut or Morgant Tut, and the word tut has been shown by M. Loth to have meant the same sort of non-human being whom an eleventh-century Life of St. Maudez mentions as quidam dæmon quem Britones Tuthe appellant. Thus the name Morgan Tut is meant as the Welsh equivalent of the French Morgain le Fay or Morgan la Fée[9]; but so long as the compiler of the story of Geraint and Enid employed in his Welsh the form Morgan, he had practically no choice but to treat the person called Morgan as a man, whether that was or was not the sex in the original texts on which he was drawing. Of course he could have avoided the difficulty in case he was aware of it, if he had found some available formula in use like Mary-Morgant, said to be a common name for a fairy on the island of Ouessant, off the coast of Brittany.
Summarizing the foregoing notes, we seem to be right in drawing the following conclusions:—(1) The well was left in the charge of a woman who forgot to shut it, and when she saw the water bursting forth, she bewailed her negligence, as in the case of her counterpart in the legend of Cantre’r Gwaelod. (2) The original name of the Glasfryn ‘Morgan’ was Morgen, later Morien. (3) The person changed into a swan on the occasion of the Glasfryn well erupting was not Grassi, but most probably Morgen. And (4) the character was originally feminine, like that of the mermaid or the fairies, whose rôle the Glasfryn Morgan plays; and more especially may one compare the Irish Muirgen, the Morgen more usually called Líban. For it is to be noticed that when the neglected well burst forth she, Muirgen or Líban, was not drowned like the others involved in the calamity, but lived in her chamber at the bottom of the lake formed by the overflowing well, until she was changed into a salmon. In that form she lived on some three centuries, until in fact she was caught in the net of a fisherman, and obtained the boon of a Christian burial. However, the change into a swan is also known on Irish ground: take for instance the story of the Children of Lir, who were converted into swans by their stepmother, and lived in that form on Loch Dairbhreach, in Westmeath, for three hundred years, and twice as long on the open sea, until their destiny closed with the advent of St. Patrick and the first ringing of a Christian bell in Erin[10].
The next legend was kindly communicated to me by Mr. Wm. Davies already mentioned at p. 147 above: he found it in Cyfaiỻ yr Aelwyd[11], “The Friend of the Hearth,” where it is stated that it belonged to David Jones’ Storehouse of Curiosities, a collection which does not seem to have ever assumed the form of a printed book. David Jones, of Trefriw, in the Conwy Valley, was a publisher and poet who wrote between 1750 and 1780. This is his story: ‘In 1735 I had a conversation with a man concerning Tegid Lake. He had heard from old people that near the middle of it there was a well opposite Ỻangower, and the well was called Ffynnon Gywer, “Cower’s Well,” and at that time the town was round about the well. It was obligatory to place a lid on the well every night. (It seems that in those days somebody was aware that unless this was done it would prove the destruction of the town.) But one night it was forgotten, and by the morning, behold the town had subsided and the lake became three miles long and one mile wide. They say, moreover, that on clear days some people see the chimneys of the houses. It is since then that the town was built at the lower end of the lake. It is called Y Bala[12], and the man told me that he had talked with an old Bala man who had, when he was a youth, had two days’ mowing of hay[13] between the road and the lake; but by this time the lake had spread over that land and the road also, which necessitated the purchase of land further away for the road; and some say that the town will yet sink as far as the place called Ỻanfor—others call it Ỻanfawđ, “Drown-church,” or Ỻanfawr, “Great-church,” in Penỻyn …. Further, when the weather is stormy water appears oozing through every floor within Bala, and at other times anybody can get water enough for the use of his house, provided he dig a little into the floor of it.’
In reference to the idea that the town is to sink, together with the neighbouring village of Ỻanfor, the writer quotes in a note the couplet known still to everybody in the neighbourhood as follows:—
Y Bala aeth, a’r Bala aiff,