St Davids Cathedral sits in a hollow beside the little river Alun, and in the Middle Ages the river on the north side of the churchyard was crossed by a single great slab of marble, worn smooth by the feet of pilgrims. Gerald of Wales, who knew St Davids well, describes it as ten feet long, six feet broad and a foot thick. It was called Llechlafar, the talking stone.
Ancient tradition said that once, when a corpse was being carried over it to burial, the stone broke into speech, and with the effort cracked across the middle; the crack could still be seen. Because of that, Gerald says, bodies were no longer brought over it. The stone was also the subject of a prophecy credited to Merlin: that a king of England, conqueror of Ireland, wounded by a man with a red hand, would die on Llechlafar on his way back from Ireland.
Gerald tells how Henry II, returning from Ireland in 1172, came to St Davids. A Welsh woman called out the prophecy to him as he approached. The king looked hard at the stone, then walked over it and, safely on the far side, declared that nobody would believe Merlin again. A bystander answered that he was not the king who would conquer Ireland, and so the prophecy did not apply to him. It is a rare case of a Welsh folk belief written down, with a date and a named king, in the twelfth century. Wirt Sikes repeated Gerald's account, and added from the same parish the story of stones on steps down to the sea which rang like a bell when struck, because pirates had rested a stolen chapel bell on them.
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