The Heresy of Dr Dee

Lenny for the background on Plant Mat, Twm and Dee’s Welsh roots; my wife, Carol, for the usual massive and perceptive edit; and Sara O’Keeffe at Corvus for a final overview… and a lot of patience.

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Pilleth Church on Brynglas is well worth a visit. The holy well remains, if not the statue of the Virgin and – as someone said – it’s so light and welcoming up there these days that it looks as if ‘work’ has been carried out there.

The name of Rhys Gethin, who achieved Owain Glyndwr’s greatest victory, at Pilleth, is still remembered in Wales – most recently as the professed author of communications from the small terrorist unit, Meibion Glyndwr, who ran an arson campaign against English-owned holiday cottages in north Wales in the 1980s. The most intriguing account of Glyndwr’s campaign and its aftermath is Alex Gibbon’s The Mystery of Jack of Kent and the Fate of Owain Glyndwr.

My apologies to Nicholas Meredith, who may have been an entirely honest and decent businessman and property dealer.

The Mappa Mundi can be seen at Hereford Cathedral.

Legends of guardians of ancient sites are well known on the Welsh border. And some stories of guardian manifestations are rather too recent to qualify as old legends. An archaeologist once told me he’d been refused permission to excavate a Bronze Age mound on a farm in Powys because the farmer had himself once sunk a spade into it and seen something so dreadful he’d not gone near it since, with any kind of implement.

According to legend, the restless spirit of Amy Robsart at Cumnor Place was removed from Cumnor by ten priests with candles.

Poor Amy. That seems wrong, somehow.