There is, it is true, a pool at a place called Maes y Ỻyn in the neighbourhood of Tregaron, as to which there is a tradition that a village once occupied the place of its waters: otherwise it shows no similarity to the lake of Howells’ story. Then there is a group of lakes in which the river Aeron takes its rise: they are called Ỻyn Eiđwen, Ỻyn Fanod, and Ỻyn Farch. As to Ỻyn Eiđwen, I had it years ago that at one time there was a story current concerning ‘wild cattle,’ which used to come out of its waters and rush back into them when disturbed. In the middle of this piece of water, which has a rock on one side of it, is a small island with a modern building on it; and one would like to know whether it shows any traces of early occupation. Then as to Ỻyn Farch, there is a story going that there came out of it once on a time a wonderful animal, which was shot by a neighbouring farmer. Lastly, at Ỻyn Fanod there are boundary walls which go right out into the lake; and my informant thinks the same is the case with Ỻyn Eiđwen[30]. One of these walls is probably what in Howells’ youthful hands developed itself into a causeway. The other part of his story, referring to the lowing of the Bannog Oxen, comes from a well known doggerel which runs thus:—
Ỻan Đewi Frefi fraith[31],
Ỻe brefođ yr ych naw gwaith,
Nes hoỻti craig y Foelaỻt.
Ỻanđewi of Brefi the spotted,
Where bellowed the ox nine times,
Till the Foelaỻt rock split in two.
Brefi is the name of the river from which this Ỻanđewi takes its distinctive name; and it is pronounced there much the same as brefu, ‘the act of lowing, bellowing, or bleating.’ Now the Brefi runs down through the Foelaỻt Farm, which lies between two very big rocks popularly fancied to have been once united, and treated by Howells, somewhat inconsistently, as the permanent forms taken by the two oxen. The story which Howells seems to have jumbled up with that of one or more lake legends, is to be found given in Samuel Rush Meyrick’s County of Cardigan: see pp. 265–6, where one reads of a wild tradition that when the church was building there were two oxen to draw the stone required; and one of the two died in the effort to drag the load, while the other bellowed nine times and thereby split the hill, which before presented itself as an obstacle. The single ox was then able to bring the load unassisted to the site of the church. It is to this story that the doggerel already given refers; and, curiously enough, most of the district between Ỻanđewi and Ystrad Fflur, or Strata Florida, is more or less associated with the Ychen Bannog. Thus a ridge running east and west at a distance of some three miles from Tregaron, and separating Upper and Lower Caron from one another, bears the name of Cwys yr Ychen Bannog, or the Furrow of the Ychen Bannog. It somewhat resembles in appearance an ancient dyke, but it is said to be nothing but ‘a long bank of glacial till[32].’ Moreover there used to be preserved within the church of Ỻanđewi a remarkable fragment of a horn commonly called Madcorn yr Ych Bannog, ‘the mabcorn or core of the Bannog Ox’s Horn.’ It is now in the possession of Mr. Parry of Ỻidiardau, near Aberystwyth; and it has been pronounced by Prof. Boyd Dawkins to have belonged to ‘the great urus (Bos Primigenius), that Charlemagne hunted in the forests of Aachen, and the monks of St. Galle ate on their feast days.’ He adds that the condition of the horn proves it to have been derived from a peat bog or alluvium[33]. On the whole, it seems to me probable that the wild legends about the Ychen Bannog[34] in Cardiganshire have underlying them a substratum of tradition going back to a time when the urus was not as yet extinct in Wales. How far the urus was once treated in this country as an emblem of divinity, it is impossible to say; but from ancient Gaul we have such a name as Urogeno-nertus[35], meaning a man of the strength of an Urogen, that is, of the offspring of a urus; not to mention the Gaulish Tarvos Trigaranus, or the bull with three cranes on his back. With this divine animal M. d’Arbois de Jubainville would identify the Donnos underlying such Gallo-Roman names as Donnotaurus, and that of the wonderful bull called Donn in the principal epic story of Ireland[36], where we seem to trace the same element in the river-name given by Ptolemy as Mo-donnos, one of the streams of Wicklow, or else the Slaney. This would be the earliest instance known of the prefixing of the pronoun mo, ‘my,’ in its reverential application, which was confined in later ages to the names of Goidelic saints.
To return, however, to the folklorist’s difficulties, the first thing to be done is to get as ample a supply of folklore materials as possible; and here I come to a point at which some of the readers of these pages could probably help; for we want all our folklore and superstitions duly recorded and rescued from the yawning gulf of oblivion, into which they are rapidly and irretrievably dropping year by year, as the oldest inhabitant passes away.
Some years ago I attempted to collect the stories still remembered in Wales about fairies and lake dwellers; and I seem to have thrown some amount of enthusiasm into that pursuit. At any rate, one editor of a Welsh newspaper congratulated me on being a thorough believer in the fairies. Unfortunately, I was not nearly so successful in recommending myself as a believer to the old people who could have related to me the kind of stories I wanted. Nevertheless, the best plan I found was to begin by relating a story about the fairies myself: if that method did not result in eliciting anything from the listener, then it was time to move on to try the experiment on another subject. Among the things which I then found was the fact, that most of the well known lakes and tarns of Wales were once believed to have had inhabitants of a fairy kind, who owned cattle that sometimes came ashore and mixed with the ordinary breeds, while an occasional lake lady became the wife of a shepherd or farmer in the neighbourhood. There must, however, be many more of these legends lurking in out of the way parts of Wales in connexion with the more remote mountain tarns; and it would be well if they were collected systematically.