Prion is a small parish in the hills south west of Denbigh. Its rector in the late 19th century, the Rev. Lewis Williams, knew the local belief that witches could turn into hares, and he passed two stories to Elias Owen.
The first is the classic form. A farmer was being troubled by a witch who came to him as a hare. He shot her. She changed back into her natural shape, but she carried the marks of the shot in her nose for the rest of her life, so everyone knew what she had been.
The second is stranger. A farmer kept seeing a hare that seemed to be making fun of him, appearing and dodging away as if it knew exactly what it was doing. He became convinced it was no hare but a witch, and waited his chance. When it came he fired. The hare let out a terrible noise and leapt about in a frightful way, then fell and lay as if dead. He walked up to it and found on the ground not a hare but something as big as a donkey. He dug a hole and buried it, and after that he was never bothered by hare or witch again.
Owen collected similar stories from all over north Wales, including a man who saw a hare three Sundays running on the same spot on his way to Efenechtyd church and a woman who turned back from Caerwys fair because a hare crossed her path. The Prion tales come from a clergyman passing on what his parishioners believed.
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