Taffy ap Sion was the shoemaker's son living near Pencader, in the hills of north Carmarthenshire. One day on the mountain above the village he stepped into a fairy circle and danced, for a few minutes as he thought, and then stepped out again.
Everything had changed. There were roads and houses he had never seen, and where his father's humble cottage had stood there was a fine stone farmhouse, with cultivated fields where the bare mountain had been. He told himself it was a fairy trick on his eyes, but when he walked into a hedge it was solid and full of old thorns that could not have grown in ten minutes. The only thing he recognised was the Carreg Hir, the tall standing stone on the mountain south of Pencader. The farmer who now lived there took pity on the ragged stranger, heard his story, and said he must have been with the fairies. Taffy gave his father's name, Sion Evan y Crydd o Glanrhyd, but the farmer had never heard of him or of Glanrhyd. He set off to take Taffy down to old Catti Shon in Pencader, who might remember, and as they walked he heard the footsteps behind him grow fainter. He turned, and saw Taffy crumble in an instant into a thimbleful of black ashes. Old Catti, when he reached her, remembered her grandfather telling how Sion's son had been lost one morning and never heard of again, and was said to have been taken by the fairies.
Wirt Sikes adds that Pant Shon Shenkin, nearby, was a famous haunt of the Carmarthenshire fairies, and that traditions about them there were numerous. The strangest was that a woman once actually caught a fairy on the mountain near Pant Shon Shenkin and kept it in her custody for a long time, and it stayed the same size all the while, until at last it escaped. The same place gave the story of Shon ap Shenkin, a young man who sat down under a tree to listen to a bird sing and, when the song ended, found that he had been there for generations. John Rhys, who cited W. Howells's Cambrian Superstitions of 1831, gives Pant Shon Shenkin as near Pencader but puts it in Cardiganshire, a small disagreement over a place that sits close to the border.
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