The Cŵn Annwn were never seen, only heard. On wild stormy nights they could be heard in full cry, hunting the souls of the unbaptised and the unshriven to their place of torment. People who knew about them said a strange thing: the nearer the hounds were, the quieter their voices, and the further off, the louder.
In the 1890s a Mr Chapman of Dolfor, near Newtown, wrote to Elias Owen that a whole pack of them had recently been heard on the border of Radnorshire and Montgomeryshire. They went from the Kerry Hills towards the Llanbadarn road. The sound, he said, was like a pack of hounds in full cry, but softer in tone. And a funeral quickly followed the same route.
Owen adds that the Kerry Hills were also one of the few places in North and Mid Wales where the Cyhyraeth had been heard: a groaning, wailing sound that passed along the road a funeral would take, from the house of someone about to die to the churchyard, the morning before the death. Dogs that heard it would cower and hide. It was usually thought of as a South Wales omen, and Owen took its appearance on the Kerry Hills as a sign of how far such beliefs travelled.
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