The ceffyl dŵr, the water horse, is one of the stranger beasts of Welsh folklore. In the south it was usually a small, sometimes luminous horse that tempted tired travellers to ride it and then plunged with them into the water; in the north it could take many shapes. Marie Trevelyan gathered stories of both kinds, and one of them comes from the Rhondda before the coal rush, when the valley was still wild farmland.
Early in the nineteenth century, she wrote, a man who lived "in the wilds of the Rhondda" was riding down the valley to Pontypridd. On the way a ceffyl dŵr attacked him, not in the form of a horse but of a squirrel. It leapt onto him and settled between his shoulders, then clasped his neck so tightly that he could barely breathe. The creature shook and beat him so badly that the next day he was struck by a mysterious illness. He never recovered, and lingered on in misery for nearly two years.
Trevelyan marks the source with the initials [J. R.], one of her informants. It is an odd story even by the standards of Welsh folklore, a water spirit in the shape of a squirrel riding a rider, and it has echoes of the "hag riding" of nightmare lore.
The road down the Rhondda to Pontypridd passes Hopkinstown, where this record is placed approximately.
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