Folklore & legend

The Green Fairies of Castell Moeddyn

Also known as: Moedin; Moyddin

Castell Moeddyn, between Llanarth and Lampeter

Recorded 1831

Castell Moeddyn is an old earthwork enclosure on the end of a hill roughly halfway between Llanarth and Lampeter, in the hill country of central Ceredigion. Its name, Moedin or Moyddin, was given to a whole hundred of the old county, the cantref of Moyddyn.

In a small book of 1831 called Cambrian Superstitions, W. Howells recorded that the fairies used to frequent the prehistoric encampment of Moedin. They were always dressed in green, and they were never seen there except in May, the spring month. Wirt Sikes picked this up in 1880 to show how the fairy costume varied from district to district: blue petticoats in the north, green at Moedin, and scarlet with red caps and feathers on Frenni Fawr in Pembrokeshire. John Rhys repeated it in 1901 and gave the camp's location.

The tradition is short, and there are no individual encounters attached to it in the sources. The same hundred of Moedin was the setting for a detailed phantom funeral story from 1816.

The earthwork lies on farmland; check rights of way.
Evidence
Long-standing local tradition
Access
Access unrecorded
Location
52.145, -4.225 (Parish-level only, treat as an area)

Sources: Wirt Sikes, "British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions" (1880), Project Gutenberg [public-domain]; John Rhys, "Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx", vol. 1 (1901), Project Gutenberg [public-domain]

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