Gwyllion

Also Known As: also Gwyllon; singular gwyll; the best-known of them is called the Old Woman of the Mountain
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Welsh Mythology, Celtic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: They take away a traveller’s road, so that a path walked since childhood turns strange underfoot and leads the wrong way home.
Role in Mythos: They are the hostile spirits of the Welsh uplands, the counterweight to the kindlier fairies of the valleys and the hearth.
Relation to Humans: They meet ordinary people on ordinary errands, going to market before daylight or out after dark to fetch coal and water, and they cost them a night and a good deal of nerve rather than their lives. Indoors the same beings had to be made welcome, since a household that offended them was thought to pay for it.

The mountain above Llanhyddel is not a large one. A mile and a half long, half a mile across, and a man who has crossed it since boyhood ought to be able to do it in fog with his hands in his pockets. That was exactly the trouble. People kept coming off it in the wrong parish. What they remembered afterwards was an old woman on the path in front of them, ash-coloured clothes, an oblong four-cornered hat, her apron thrown up over one shoulder, a wooden milk can swinging from her hand. She walked ahead. She never once looked back.

At first they were glad to see her. A local woman, out early, who would know the way. They quickened their pace to catch her and ask, and the faster they walked the further off she was, and the road they had known all their lives began to look like a road they had never seen. Some of them went on for an hour in perfect confidence, certain they were nearly home, walking steadily in the opposite direction. Sometimes she was not visible at all and only the cry came, a thin call of distress that the English-speakers wrote down as “Wow up” and the Welsh as Wwb. Neighbours going out at night for coal or a pail of water would hear it close enough to touch, and then a moment later hear it far off on the opposite mountain, as though it had crossed the whole valley in the time it took to turn the head.

Gwyllion is a plural. The singular, gwyll, is a word for gloom, shade, the dusk, and by extension for a hag, a witch, a goblin, which is a considerable amount of work for four letters. The idea that these particular spirits are a class, a company of frightful female fairies who haunt the mountain roads while the friendlier ellyllon keep to the woods below, comes from a book published in 1880 by Wirt Sikes, an American journalist who was serving as United States consul in Cardiff. British Goblins gave them the name, the ranking, and the comparison with Hecate riding the storm.

Underneath Sikes there is an older and stranger book. Edmund Jones, Independent minister of Aberystruth, born 1702, published his account of these hauntings a century before, and he is where every one of the good stories comes from. Jones was not a folklorist. He was arguing with atheists. His collection of apparition testimony was built to prove that the spirit world was real and that people who denied it were on the road to damnation, which is why he names his witnesses, vouches for their sobriety, and hands out scripture verses like sandwiches. Scholars now rate his books the richest surviving record of eighteenth-century Welsh supernatural belief, and also a historical oddity, since the genre he was writing in had been dead for fifty years. Read him and one thing stands out immediately. He never calls her a gwyll. She is the Apparition, and once, when his temper is up, the old hag.

Robert Williams of Llangattock, near Crickhowell, met her on the Black Mountain in Breconshire. He was travelling at night, he lost his way, he saw a woman ahead of him and shouted to her to wait. No answer, so he took her for deaf and ran. The swifter he ran, the further behind he was, which puzzled him, and he was still puzzling over it when his foot went into a marsh. Cold water, up to the shin, in the dark. Then he heard her laughing at him, the crackling laugh of an old woman, somewhere out in front. He happened to draw his knife for some other purpose, and she was gone. Only then did he see how dangerous the place was that she had brought him to.

The knife is the whole defence. Evan Thomas, crossing Bedwellty Mountain towards his own house in the valley of Ebwy Fawr, found the fairies dancing on both sides of the road and heard a hunting horn winding in the air above him, riders passing that were not there. He remembered what he had been told, drew his knife, and the road was empty. Jones vouches for him as a man so honest that he once told a truth against himself when it cost him money and would not be talked out of it.

What is odd, and Jones records it without noticing how odd it is, is that the same beings had to be entertained at home. In stormy weather the gwyllion came into the houses at Aberystruth, and the people made them welcome, not out of any affection but out of fear of what they would do if slighted. Clean water was set out for them. Every knife and cutting tool was taken out of the corner by the fire, because that was where the fairies liked to sit, and for want of that care, Jones says, many were hurt by them. The steel that drives them off the mountain is an insult at the hearth.

They have an origin of sorts, and it is a grubby one. Tradition around Llanhyddel held that the Old Woman was the spirit of Juan White, who had lived there time out of mind and was reckoned a witch, and the proof offered was simply that the mountain was not haunted until after she died. So the fairy is a dead neighbour. By the nineteenth century boys around Pontypool could point out the ruined cottage on Lasgarn hill where she had lived and would tell you she walked at midnight with her head under her arm, a detail that appears in none of the testimony and shows exactly how fast this sort of thing grows. A separate tradition connects the gwyllion with goats, which in Wales were held to be on excellent terms with the fairies and to know more than they let on. Sikes tells the tale of Cadwaladr, who lost his temper with his favourite goat, killed her with a stone, wept over her, and watched her turn into a young woman with brown eyes who put her black slipper on the end of a moonbeam and led him up to a summit crowded with shadowy horned things that bleated him off the edge of a crag.

Their power is precise and it is limited. They do not touch anyone. Nobody in the record is bitten, struck or carried off. What they take is the road, and they take it in daylight as readily as at night if there is mist enough, which is why one man who was led round and round a hillside until he fetched up in a clump of rushes went home and composed a song of complaint against her, mentioning the four-cornered hat. Against them a man has cold iron, a fast tongue, and the name of God, which Jones insists these spirits cannot endure to hear. He tested it himself. Riding over the mountain in mist and suspecting she was near, he said aloud, do thy worst thou Old Devil, I will not lose my way, and he did not lose it. He also thought the whole tribe of them was in retreat, driven by the preaching of the Gospel out of the open hills and into the coal-pits and holes of the earth. It is a triumphant line, and it did not age well. Within a lifetime his parish was black with pits, and there were men underground in the dark all night with something old down there beside them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Gwyllion?

The Gwyllion are female spirits of Welsh folklore who haunt lonely mountain roads and take away a traveller’s sense of the way, so that a familiar path leads somewhere else entirely. The name is a Welsh plural built on gwyll, a word meaning gloom or dusk that also carries the senses of hag and witch. They were treated as a distinct class of hostile mountain fairies by the folklorist Wirt Sikes in 1880.

Who is the Old Woman of the Mountain?

The Old Woman of the Mountain is the most famous of the Gwyllion, and the only one described in any detail. She appears as a poor old woman in ash-coloured clothes and an oblong four-cornered hat, with her apron thrown over her shoulder and a wooden milk can in her hand, always walking ahead of the traveller and never turning round. Local tradition at Llanhyddel in Monmouthshire held that she was the ghost of a woman named Juan White, who had been thought a witch in life.

How do you escape the Gwyllion?

Draw a knife. Every account agrees that Welsh spirits of this kind cannot stand cold steel, and in the recorded cases the apparition vanishes the moment a blade is out. Speaking the name of God was held to work as well, and the minister Edmund Jones claimed to have crossed a haunted mountain in mist unharmed after telling the spirit aloud to do its worst.

Are the Gwyllion dangerous?

They are dangerous in a specific and non-violent way. No one in the surviving testimony is bitten, struck, or carried off, but people are led into marshes and onto dangerous ground at night, walked for hours in the wrong direction, and left exhausted and badly frightened. Indoors the same spirits were thought capable of hurting a household that failed to make them welcome.

Where do the Gwyllion stories come from?

They come from Edmund Jones, an Independent minister of Aberystruth in Monmouthshire, who published witness accounts of the Llanhyddel apparition in the late eighteenth century as evidence against atheism rather than as folklore. Wirt Sikes retold Jones’s stories in British Goblins in 1880 and supplied the collective name Gwyllion, which Jones himself never uses.