Folk-Lore of West and Mid-Wales

In 1911, a scholar wandered the hills and villages of West and Mid-Wales, listening. What he heard, he wrote down: the love customs that governed young people's hearts, the wedding rituals that marked a couple's passage into marriage, the superstitions that darkened doorways and blessed newborns. Jonathan Ceredig Davies understood he was recording something fragile. Already, the old ways were fading. Industrialization, modernization, the Great War looming all threatened to silence the voices who had carried these stories for centuries. This book is the result of that urgent labor. Davies gathered tales from farmers, servants, old women who remembered what their grandmothers had told them. He documented beliefs about the fairy folk who lived in hills and bridges, the warnings whispered about certain stones, the customs that governed who could marry whom and when. Some customs seem strange to modern eyes. Others feel hauntingly familiar. All are presented with the quiet reverence of a man who knew their worth. A century later, this collection endures because it captures Wales before it transformed. It is for anyone who hungers for the old world, who wants to touch the living texture of a culture that believed in signs, seasons, and the weight of tradition.