Penarth Head is the high headland at the mouth of the River Taff and Ely, looking out over Cardiff Bay and the Bristol Channel. In the days before the docks, local men fished the waters below it.
Marie Trevelyan collected a belief that the devil could take the form of a fish. In one version he appeared as a fine sturgeon to tempt people into casting their nets, and in that way drew them to destruction.
At Penarth she has one family's story. An old Glamorgan man told her, in all seriousness, that his grandfather, a man known as a "truth-teller", was once fishing off Penarth Head, near Cardiff, when he saw a large fish in the water and harpooned it. When the harpoon struck, what came out of the wound was not red blood but a thick black fluid, and it stank of "fire and brimstone." The implication was clear to everyone who heard it.
A modern reader might think of the ink of a large squid or cuttlefish, which would be very strange to a man used to channel fish. But nothing in the account says what the creature looked like, or what happened to it or to the fisherman.
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