On the high ground above Holywell, on the road between Pantasaph and Calcoed, two squat stones stand in the grass about 29 feet apart. The place is called Naid y March, the Horse's Leap.
The story is that in the early 16th century a well-to-do local man, Thomas ap Harri, made a wager that he could get his horse, not a hunter but an ordinary farm horse, to jump across an open mine shaft. This is lead country, and the hillside was pocked with shafts. He took the bet, put the horse at the gap, and it cleared the shaft, a jump of something like 22 feet. Two stones were set up to mark where it took off and where it landed, and people once said they were whitewashed so they could be seen from far off.
Not everyone believed it. Thomas Pennant, the great 18th century traveller, who lived nearby at Downing, wrote in 1796 that the leap was a tale and the stones were far older, probably marking the grave of some ancient hero. Archaeologists from the Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust dug at the site in 1983 and concluded that the stones, as they stand, are not prehistoric, since they are placed in relation to a comparatively modern shaft, though they allowed that the stones might have been brought from elsewhere. The site was tidied and made safe in 2008.
It is a legend rather than a paranormal story, but it is a good example of a place name and a pair of stones gathering a heroic tale around them.
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