The Cwn Annwn, the hounds of Annwn, the Welsh Otherworld, were a phantom pack heard running through the air at night, usually as a sign of death. They were said to be small, white, with red ears, and their baying grew fainter the nearer they came. Marie Trevelyan wrote that all the dreary valleys of south Wales were supposed to be haunted by them, naming the Vale of Taff, the Rhondda and the Vale of Neath as especially celebrated.
For the hills around Aberdare she gives two traditions. The first names their master as Arawn, the lord of Annwn in the Mabinogion. "Long years ago," she wrote, "people said they heard Arawn cheering his Cwn Annwn on the Aberdare Mountains, and in their wild hunting flight they trampled pedestrians to death unless the people got out of the way." The old story of the district added a moral: a bad man who would go hunting even on the Sabbath had been banished into the air for it, doomed to hunt for ever without rest. In some parts of Wales, Trevelyan added, the hunt ran only from Christmas to Twelfth Night, always with a howling wind.
The second concerns Ned Pugh, a fiddler who, in a story better known from north Wales, played his way into a cave and never came out. One version made him chief huntsman to Gwyn ap Nudd, the fairy king, with his fiddle turned into a bugle, wandering on Hallowe'en and other spirit nights. There was a story about him "among the wild places around Aberdare", where he could be heard cheering on the Cwn Annwn, blowing his bugle and shouting as he went.
The location given is approximate, on the high ground north-west of Aberdare.
Comments