Among the death omens of south Wales the cyhyraeth was one of the most unnerving, because it was only a sound. Joshua Coslet, whom the preacher Edmund Jones calls judicious and who lived by the river Tywi in Carmarthenshire, described it as a doleful, disagreeable noise heard before the deaths of many, and most likely before foul weather.
The voice, he said, resembled the groaning of sick people about to die. It was heard first at a distance, then nearer, then close by, so that it was a threefold warning. The first cry was strong, louder than any sick man could make; the second lower but no less miserable; the third lower still and soft, like the groans of a sick man almost spent. Someone who remembered the sound, going later to the bedside of the dying, would hear the same groans from them exactly. It came before deaths anything up to three quarters of a year ahead.
It was heard above all in the twelve parishes of the hundred of Is Cennen, on the south east side of the Tywi, where at one time it groaned before the death of every person who lived that side of the country, and before the deaths of people born there who died elsewhere. It was so familiar that anyone making a dismal noise, or a child crying without reason, would be told off with "Oh 'r Cyhyraeth!" People thought it was more common there because St Non, the mother of St David, had lived in those parts, where a village, Llan-non, carries her name. Wirt Sikes printed Coslet's account in 1880.
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