WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Folk-Lore of West and Mid-Wales cover

Folk-Lore of West and Mid-Wales

Chapter 121: LLANBISTER CHURCH (RADNORSHIRE).
Open in WeRead

About This Book

A compilation of folk beliefs, tales, and customs gathered across western and mid-Wales from elderly informants and local tradition. It presents translated Welsh narratives and organized material on fairies, mermaids and water‑horses, ghosts, witches and wizards, omens, animal superstitions, and popular spells, alongside accounts of wedding, birth, funeral, inheritance and sheep‑shearing customs, divination practices, augury, and prophecies. The emphasis is on literal fidelity to oral testimony and on preserving vanishing traditions rather than offering theoretical interpretation.

LLANBISTER CHURCH (RADNORSHIRE).

The Rev. Professor Tyrrell Green, St. David’s College, Lampeter, writes to me thus:—

“Jonathan Williams in his History of Radnorshire, p. 194, ed., 1859, says that near Llanbister Church is a piece of land on which it was originally intended to have erected the Church, but tradition reports that the accomplishment of this design was prevented by the intervention of supernatural agency. “The tradition that a supernatural being carried away in the night whatever was built of the church during the day, is still kept alive, because the warden claims an annual rent of 2s. 6d. for the vacant and unconsecrated site of the originally intended church.” In the same book mention is made of an old custom prevailing in this parish, viz., the payment of a certain tax or tribute called “Clwt-y-Gyllell,” or Knife Money, imposed on a certain corner of a field on some estates, consisting of a certain number of groats.