Monday 5 February 2024

Newport 1835

 


This is a wonderful image from the National Library selection.  Newport around the year 1835 around the topm end of Marketv Street.  The building where the Friends Garden is now located does not look like a dwelling -- there are no proper windows.  Also the arched door is unusual.  Could it have been a stable for people who were coming into town to attend the market or on other business?

Note how ruinous the castle is.  It was renovated and brought back into use as a dwelling around 1855 -- and the facade overlooking the town was changed almost out of recognition, with the trimming down of the left tower and the addition of assorted windows,

So this is how the centre of town will have looked around Martha's time..........

Sunday 17 December 2023

Christmas Quiz 2023 -- the answers

 1.  Rose Castle Tower, near Picton Point

2.  Mountain Railway, Carningli, near Newport

3.  Gedeon Chapel, Dinas Cross

4.  Dinas Head, seen from the Nevern Estuary

5.  Carn Meini (Carnmenyn) seen from the Waldo Williams monument

6.  Ty Canol Wood, near Brynberian

7.  Shell House, Cilwendeg

8.  Baptistry, St Dogmaels

9.  Pwll Deri seen from Garn Fawr

10.  Trehowel, on Pen Caer

11.  The Bennet and Traeth Mawr, seen from Newport Castle

12.  Interior of Cilgerran Castle

13. Stepaside Iron Works

14.  Cattle Pound, Mountain West, Newport

15.  St Dogmaels, near the Abbey

16.  Cwm yr Eglwys

17.  Llanllawer holy well, Cwm Gwaun

18.  Rosebush slate quarry

19.  Folly at Monk Haven, near Milford

20.  Solva lime kilns

21.  Castell Henllys Iron Age Village

22.  St Govans Chapel

23.  Pembroke Castle keep

24.  Priory Ruins, Haverfordwest

25.  Five Arches, Tenby

26.  Abbey, Caldey Island

27.  Skomer Island

28.  Haverfordwest Castle

29.  Rhosygilwen Mansion

30.  Maiden Castle and Lion Rock, Treffgarne


Brian's Christmas Quiz 2023

Here are 30 Pembrokeshire images culled from my Facebook and blog sites -- thanks to Steve Mallett and Ruth Crofts for some of them.  And thanks too to Rhiannon James for acting the part of Mistress Martha a few years ago.  Can you identify all 30 of the places where the photos were taken? 

No prizes -- you can just bask in the glory of knowing that you are a Pembrokeshire expert.  If you get 1-10 answers right, you need to get out more often.  If you get 11-20 right, you can get moderately chuffed. And if you get 21-29 answers right, you can count yourself as rather well-informed and observant.  If you get all 30 answers right, it means you have probably been following me around for the last 50 years or so, and should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself........


 


1


2


3


4


5


6


7


8


9


10


11


12


13


 14


15


16


17


18


19


20


21


22


23


24


25


26


27


28


29


30



The answers can be found here:


... and a very happy Christmas to you all!




















































Sunday 26 November 2023

Mari Lwyd

 



 
A nice pic of the Mari Lwyd from the Castell Henllys web site.......

Wednesday 15 November 2023

Jemima & Co 1997

 

 

A nice pic from 1997 (the Bicentenary Celebrations relating to the Last Invasion of 1797) -- showing Yvonne Fox (Jemima Nicholas) and her ladies striding across the town square in Fishguard.  A fearsome sight indeed........

Pic -- from the Hanes Abergwaun web site.

Tuesday 14 November 2023

The Wizard of Werndew


Having collected up as much information as possible about Joseph Harries (1830-1890), the Wizard of Werndew, I have now published it as a short article on the Peoples Collection Wales web site:

https://www.peoplescollection.wales/items/2062701

I have added 13 stories about Joseph that seem to be authentic -- but you never can tell when it comes to folk tales.........


Once upon a time I acted the role of Joseph Harries in a dramatic production in Newport called "The Enchanted Land".  That was fun........

The Joseph Harries as he is revealed in historical snippets is very different indeed from the character I invented for the purposes of the Angel Mountain saga:

Joseph Harries the Wizard

(Spoiler alert: the following gives information which new readers may prefer not to know.....)

Joseph Harries of Werndew is one of the key characters in the story.  He was born in 1761 and died in 1826 at the age of 65.  In Martha’s time, wizards (or “knowing men”) were greatly respected.  Joseph Harries really did exist -- there are a number of folk tales about him. In reality, it seems that he might not have been a very nice fellow! And he did live at Werndew, just above the village of Dinas on the north side of the mountain ridge. The cottage was, and still is, within walking distance of Carningli and Plas Ingli.

But in my mind, and in the stories, Joseph is a herbalist, mystic, apothecary, surgeon, psychiatrist, sleuth, diplomat, counsellor and master of the arts of observation and deduction. He is a scientist, as well as being a man of culture. He knows several foreign languages and is familiar with many of the esoteric books on which the world’s great religions are based. On occasion he retreats into his cottage before emerging, exhausted, with answers to very complicated questions; but there is always the possibility that he is a “charlatan” with a superior intellect and an ability to observe things and make deductions in the manner of a prototype Sherlock Holmes. Whether or not he is familiar with the denizens of the spirit world, he certainly does have a vast range of abilities, acquired during years of careful study under a variety of great teachers, whom he mentions every now and then. We cannot doubt that in some way he is the inheritor of the wisdom of the Druids, who were reputed to be active in this area at the time of the Roman invasion and who might have had a grove in Tycanol Wood.

Joseph is a stout and loyal friend to Martha, and a friend to many others as well. Sometimes he charges for his services, or over-charges in certain cases, on the basis that his services provided to the poor are generally free. So as well as being a Sherlock Holmes, he is also a Robin Hood figure, loved by the poor and hated by at least some of the rich. He is also Martha’s knight in shining armour, who rides to her defence from his place across the mountain whenever he senses that she is in distress or in danger.

But while Joseph is always good humoured, eccentric, witty and supportive of others, he is also a tragic figure. As the stories unfold he reveals very little about himself and his family background, for as he explains to Martha, it is in his own interests to maintain an air of mystery about who he is, where he has come from, and where he will go to when his task on earth is done. But in one sensitive moment he admits to Martha that he was once married and that he lost his wife and child in childbirth. He dies after a horrible accident, gored by a bull during the course of a routine visit requested by one of the estates. There is irony as well as tragedy in that, since Joseph says many times that he enjoys working with animals.

He loves Martha from the the very beginning of the stories. This might be suspected by the reader, but Martha never realizes it until Joseph confesses it to her when he is on his death-bed. Even then he can try to make light of it, and when he has gone to his grave Martha finds the situation very difficult to bear, blaming him for his foolishness in allowing his emotions to get the better of him, and blaming herself for her blindness as to the reality of the situation.

Joseph knows, from the beginning of their relationship, that his love for Martha will never be requited, because she is a member of the gentry and he is a disreputable wizard with nothing but a small cottage and a pretty garden to his name. In any case, he is almost old enough to be her father. So he loves and worships her from a distance, gaining comfort from their close and easy relationship, and some physical pleasure from their frequent embraces.

He is quite a mysterious figure, and by all accounts he has a little fan club all of his own!

===============================

Did the real Joseph Harries have a "Big Book" or grimoire?  If so, were there incantations like those found in the papers of Dr John Harries of Cwrt y Cadno?

One of the incantations recorded by Dr John Harries, Cwrt y Cadno

The only first hand documentary material we know about is that which was recovered from a waste skip (yes, really!) by Dr Hywel Bowen-Perkins.  It consists of many pages from Dr Harries's case books, dealing with patients, symptoms, remedies and results.  Some patients died, but most seem to have recovered!   The local doctors clearly did not approve of Dr Harries and his dealings with patients across a wide area -- but Hywel says that the remedies prescribed and issued by Dr Harries were sensible and quite advanced, with no indications of "quackery".  In fact, Hywel thinks that his remedies were potentially far more effective than those prescribed by Dr Owen and other medical men in North Pembs.  There is evidence of good knowledge of herbal remedies and pharmaceutical practices, and not a trace of the occult.......

This is a typical page -- difficult to read but full of meticulously recorded detail:



Hywel is editing and annotating this treasure trove of material, and he hopes to publish it in some form in due course.  It also needs to be archived somewhere safe, as it is full of fascinating information relating to medical practices in the late 1800's.

On one page, in 1887, Joseph describes the ailments and treatment of "my dear brother David Harries" -- so maybe in later life they did get on well together, having gone through a rough patch earlier on......  That's family life for you!

















Tuesday 7 November 2023

The grave of Joseph Harries

 


Joseph Harries of Werndew (1830-1890) is buried in bottom corner of the graveyard behind Gedeon Chapel, Dinas.  The headstone is a simple granite slab with a rounded top, identical to that marking the grave of Thomas, his half brother, who died in 1887.  Between the two is a squared-off slate headstone erected at the grave of their sister Jane who died in 1858 at the age of 26, and Mary Harries, Joseph's mother, who died in 1885.  Nearby is the grave of father William, who died in 1857, marked by another slate headstone.

According to the headstones both Joseph and Thomas were deacons of the chapel.



Gedeon Independent Welsh Chapel, built in 1830 (the year of Joseph's birth) and extended several times afterwards.

I find it intriguing that Joseph, known in his lifetime as a "dyn hysbys", conjuror and wizard, was nonetheless buried here in hallowed ground, on the patch dedicated to the Harries family of Werndew.


Monday 6 November 2023

Joseph Harries and the building of Glan-y-Mor


The wizard Joseph Harries was born in 1830 and lived during his youthful years at Werndew -- the family farm on the mountainside above Dinas. In 1859 he was forced to move out when his half brother inherited the property, and he built a house on the main Newport-Fishguard road at the bottom end of the Werndew driveway.   This was planned to be the residence for himself and his widowed mother, and she probably paid for most of the work.  The building of the house took almost ten years - maybe because cash was tight. 

Two men were employed on building the house.  One of them recorded that one day the supply of building stones ran out.  Joseph Harries was unconcerned, and told the builders that there was nothing to worry about.  Sure enough, next morning when the men turned up for work "there were stones aplenty".   How did they get there?  Nobody else could have delivered them overnight, and the builders were quite convinced that some mysterious power had been invoked by the wizard in order to bring them in and stack them ready for use.........

Willian Beddow, one of the builders, made a deposition to the Rector of Dinas on 28 March 1892 about Joseph Harries, who had died in 1890.   He claimed that around 1874 he had been engaged to build a wall at Glan-y-Mor.  One day he and a local miller were called in by Joseph Harries to look at a mirror placed on the kitchen table.  He then said he would go upstairs and stamp his foot on the floorboards -- at which point the men were required to look into the mirror. They did as they were bidden, and saw David Harries of Werndew (Joseph's half brother) and Ebenezer Davies of Ffynnonofi (a well-known local rascal).  

They gave the names to Joseph when he came downstairs, upon which he nodded and said no more.  It was known that the wizard used the mirror in order to find the names of those who had committed various crimes -- it was used to find the name of the man who shot a horse belonging to a local farmer, and also the name of the person who had stolen jewels belonging to a lady belonging to the Pembrokeshire gentry.




Joseph Harries and the ghostly reverberations

 

When the wizard Joseph Harried died at Werndew on 29 November 1890 -- probably of kidney failure -- some very strange things happened.  He had written his will 8 days earlier, so he must have known that the end was near......

In the throes of death he groaned and screamed, as if he was refusing to die.  On that day the horses on the farm went wild and unruly and the pigs refused to eat.  The locals thought that the devil had come to take him.  There were rumours that the family had put something on the fire and that the smoke had choked him -- and that suggests that he was not greatly loved by his nearest and dearest.  A couple of months later, when his possessions were sold by auction, people were very reluctant to bid, assuming that somehow to bring any of his things into their own houses would bring the devil in too.

Not long after the death Rev Benjamin Rowlands was at Glan-y-Mor, where he heard a horse arrive at the trot at about 10.30 pm in the pitch darkness.  The sound became more distinct but slower, and then faded away, and there was no sound of the horse leaving again.  The reverend gentleman went to the inner door of the porch and shouted "Who's there?" to which there was no reply.  He did the same at the outer door, again with no response.  This happened on several later occasions.

Around Christmas and New Year of 1891/92, just over a year after Joseph's death, a student called James Beynon Williams came to stay at Glan-y-Mor as a guest of Rev Benjamin Rowlands.  He was very sceptical about some of the things he had heard about Joseph from his host.  One evening they went off to bed, leaving the dog on the mat in the kitchen across the door.  At 10.30 they were awoken by the dog howling.  They heard the door latch, footsteps, harness being hung up, boots coming off, more footsteps, and another door being opened.  Both men left their rooms to investigate what was going on, but their candles were both extinguished.  James Williams was speechless and terrified, and afterwards they found that the dog had shifted its position to lie on the mat by the front door, which is where it would lie when Joseph came home when he was alive.

After that Benjamin Rowlands accepted that 10.30 was the "haunting hour" and always endeavoured to return home after 11.30 pm.........

On 13th March 1892 a lad called John Thomas was staying at Glan-y-Mor -- his sister was engaged to marry Rev Benjamin Rowlands.  At 11.30 pm he clearly heard a pestle and mortar being used in the room that had been Joseph Harries's dispensary and surgery.  The sound continued for about 30 minutes.

Late one night -- around the same date -- a passer-by from Newport heard groans and screams, as if from somebody on their deathbed, coming from Glan-y-Mor.

At Glan-y-Mor Joseph's bedroom was the one above the entrance -- and after his death it was reputed to be haunted -- referred to locally as "The Devil's Room".

It was reputed that in the garden of the house a Bible was kept "in a burrow" -- presumably because Joseph did not want it inside the building.  It was also reputed that a skeleton collected by Joseph from the beach at Cwm yr Eglwys (derived from the churchyard as it was being eroded away by the sea) was also buried somewhere in the garden.

(Information kindly provided by Stephen Evans and Hywel Bowen-Perkins)

Sunday 5 November 2023

Joseph Harries -- Pembrokeshire's best known "cunning man"

 


We should perhaps refer to Joseph Harries, the Wizard of Glan-y-Mor........

I have in my possession -- courtesy Stephen Evans of Glan-y-Mor and Hywel Bowen-Perkins -- assorted notes and copies of pages from Joseph Harries's notebooks that were literally recovered from a skip.......  He was a meticulous record keeper.  In his notebook entries dating from 1873 to 1889 (copied by Hywel) we see that he most often saw just one patient per day -- and hardly ever more than three in a day.  He recorded their names and addresses, symptoms, previous treatment from local doctors, prescribed remedies and details of recovery or reactions.  Hywel records that he was very precise in his observations and diagnoses, and gave very sophisticated treatments -- often, but not always, based on herbal preparations that he mixed himself. Some sources say that he was qualified as a chemist or pharmacist but not as a doctor -- so some in the medical profession would have seen him as a "quack doctor" and would have resented his involvement in the care of the sick people of the community. He was registered as a chemist on 29 June 1869 -- but that does not mean he was qualified (the Royal Pharmacological Society registered all practising chemists as an amnesty, and were afterwards much more carful about those accepted as qualified practitioners).

Joseph lived from 1830 to 1890,  and was just 59 when he died. He never married. Virtually nothing is known about his childhood or his life as a young man.  Where was he educated?  Did he have a mentor? Where did he learn his skills as a chemist and and as a physician?  Was he self-taught?  

He is referred to as living at Werndew, but  his family also owned Glan-y-Mor and he appears to have spent much of his life there, on the main Newport-Dinas road, rather than in the cottage up on the mountainside. He travelled widely -- "a little man on a grey mountain pony" -- and sold his services to those who needed them over a distance of 20 miles to west, south and east, incorporating Cardigan, Haverfordwest and Fishguard.  The "renowned doctor" was feared and respected in equal measure.  He comes over as someone rather disreputable, and rather frightening and intimidating......

I am intrigued by his association with Gideon Chapel, where he was a deacon.  How "religious" was he?  Not very, by all accounts, since he is reputed to have fathered at least two local children as a result of liaisons with unmarried local girls.  Nonetheless, he left £1,500 to the chapel in his will.

Joseph's father William (who died in 1857) was first married to Ann, and their first son David inherited Werndew when his father died.  Joseph was 37 at the time, and his mother was Mary, William's second wife.  We don't know all the details, but it appears that he and David did not get on well, and in 1857 he set about building Glan-y-Mor as a home for himself and his widowed mother. It took a long time -- most of the work was done between 1861 and 1871; maybe they lived there while the work was going on.  It was like a lodge down on the main road, connected to Werndew by a driveway. The driveway is still in use today.  The family must have owned an extensive tract of land, including Felin Werndew to the east along the Newport Road.  In 1887 Joseph inherited Werndew on the death of his brother, and moved back there -- and that is where he spent the last 3 years of his life.  So we can assume he was at Glan-y-Mor for 30 years. There are records of his surgery and dispensary there.  

Joseph had an interesting relationship with Rev Benjamin Rowlands, who was ordained in 1885 and immediately took up his post as minister of Gideon Chapel, not far from Werndew and Glan-y-Mor. He was a lodger at Glan-y-Mor between 1885 and 1887, and resigned his post at Gideon in 1892 prior to moving with his new bride to Saron Chapel in Clydach. He died in Dinas in 1902, having left Clydach in 1899.  He was only 44 years old -- and locals blamed his early demise on the evil influence of Joseph Harries the wizard.......    He left a "deposition" in March 1892 relating to various spooky events that occurred after Joseph's death.  He was not always complimentary about his erstwhile landlord; nonetheless,  Joseph left him a pony and trap in his will when he died in 1890.

The most solid of the stories relating to Joseph Harries are these:

The building of Glan-y-Mor

The Conjuror and the Hornets

Joseph and the familiar hare

The killing at Clyn

The smashed windows of Gideon Chapel

The robber on Trenewydd Mountain

Joseph and the jewel thief

Joseph and the salty bones

The Ghost of Joseph Harries

When I visited Werndew a few years ago the lady then in residence told me that she had recently cleared out a room that had been used (presumably about a century earlier) by Joseph Harries as a dispensary.  She had thrown away assorted old bottles full of medicines and potions -- what a sad loss to science and folklore.......!!

As far as I am aware, there are no photographs of Joseph Harries in any of the local collections.

See:  "Folklore and Folk Stories of Wales" by Marie Llewellyn, 1899

Note:  When I collected together assorted folk tales for my Pembrokeshire Folk Tale Trilogy (in 4 volumes) I found some confusion relating to Joseph Harries and Abe Biddle, who lived near Haverfordwest.  Some folk tales have been transferred from the one to the other, and who knows where the truth lies?



Werndew, where Joseph Harries was born and where he died


Outbuildings at Werndew

There are some interesting insights here:


........in the section on Gideon Chapel, Dinas.  The chapel was built in 1830 (the year of Joseph's birth) but Mrs Harries Werndew is listed as one of the leading lights in the growing "independent" congregation.  So we can assume that Joseph's mother was very active in the chapel and was committed to the cause.  She must have contributed to the building costs, and to improvements to the chapel in 1843 together with an extension to the cemetery.  One wonders what Joseph's feelings were about the chapel, the ministers and the great revival in the local area in 1859?  He was eventually a deacon, but it does not appear that he was the architypal "good Christian gentleman......."

John Davies was the minister from 1843 to 1877.  Then came John Francis, who was driven out in 1881 because of the bitterness of a small number of persons in the congregation.  One wonders what that was all about.  When he left, the chapel may have been without a minister for a while, until the young single minister called Benjamin Rowlands arrived, and he was still in post when Joseph died.





One person who studied the life and reputation of Joseph Harries was Rev Towyn Jones, who died in 2019.  He gave a talk to the Dinas Cross Historical Society on 20 Jan 2003, and Stephen Evans took some rough notes of what he said.  It's not known whether there was a transcript of the talk.  Towyn picked up some information from Joseph Thomas of New Moat, who knew a lot about Joseph Harries's deeds and reputation -- the Welsh Folk Museum taped his recollections.

The depositions about JH collected by the rector of Newport may be somewhere in Cambridge, together with an 1892 photo of Glan-y-Mor.........


Rev Towyn Jones (1942-2019), who had a great interest in the supernatural and who wrote extensively about wizards, ghosts etc in the Welsh language.