The coast of the Vale of Glamorgan had a belief, found in few other places, in foxes that were not quite foxes.
About a hundred years before Marie Trevelyan was writing, she says, people along the seaboard knew several fox dens whose occupants could never be caught, killed or trapped. Country people put this down to something more than luck. These foxes were said to be very old, and twice a year, at midsummer and midwinter, they could change into human shape and prowl round the lonely villages and hamlets. So when a vagrant with sandy hair came to the door, the housewife gave him something good to eat and sent him off with a blessing, and then the "old fox" would not harm the children. The fox-people were playful and quiet when fed, dangerous when angry or hungry.
The best known of them lived in the woods near Porthkerry in the eighteenth century. Everybody knew her by the grey patch across her shoulders, and she was called Catti Cwmciddy, Catherine of Cwmciddy, after a farm there. People from further away said that twice a year she could be seen in human shape by anyone who cared to walk through Porthkerry woods between sunset and sunrise on the three longest or the three shortest days of the year. Llancarfan woods had more than one such half-human fox, and Tresilian Cave near St Donat's was said to shelter a band of them who were wreckers when in human shape.
Porthkerry has one more fox story. A drover coming down to the Vale for cattle was caught by night in the Porthkerry woods and lay down in a sheltered corner. In the night he heard someone talking, sat up, and saw an old grey fox in the moonlight beside him, clearly troubled. When the drover asked what was wrong, the fox said it was burdened with sorrow handed down through many generations: it was directly descended from Einion ap Collwyn, the man who, in Glamorgan tradition, betrayed the Welsh to Robert Fitzhamon and so helped the Normans take the county.
Comments