Note 13 — Chapter VIII · Welsh Cave Legends

To swell the irrelevancies under which this chapter labours already, and to avoid severing cognate questions too rudely, I wish to add that Elis o’r Nant makes the name of the giant buried on the top of Snowdon into Rhitta or Rhita instead of Ricca. That is also the form of the name with which Mrs. Rhys was familiar throughout her childhood on the Ỻanberis side of the mountain. She often heard of Rhita13 Gawr having been buried on the top of Snowdon, and of other warriors on other parts of Snowdon such as Moel Gynghorion and the Gist on that moel. But Elis o’r Nant goes further, and adds that from Rhita the mountain was called Wyđfa Rhita, more correctly Gwyđfa Rita, ‘Rhita’s Gwyđfa.’ Fearing this might be merely an inference, I have tried to cross-examine him so far as that is possible by letter. He replies that his father was bred and born in the little glen called Ewybrnant14, between Bettws y Coed and Pen Machno, and that his grandfather also lived there, where he appears to have owned land not far from the home of the celebrated Bishop Morgan. Now Elis’ father often talked, he says, in his hearing of ‘Gwyđfa Rhita.’ Wishing to have some more definite evidence, I wrote again, and he informs me that his father was very fond of talking about his father, Elis o’r Nant’s grandfather, who appears to have been a character and a great supporter of Sir Robert Williams, especially in a keenly contested political election in 1796, when the latter was opposed by the then head of the Penrhyn family. Sometimes the old man from Ewybrnant would set out in his clocs, ‘clogs or wooden shoes,’ to visit Sir Robert Williams, who lived at Plas y Nant, near Beđgelert. On starting he would say to his family, Mi a’i hyibio troed Gwyđfa Rhita ag mi đo’n ol rwbrud cin nos, or sometimes foru. That is, ‘I’ll go round the foot of Rhita’s Gwyđfa and come back some time before night’: sometimes he would say ‘to-morrow.’ Elis also states that his father used to relate how Rhita’s Gwyđfa was built, namely by the simple process of each of his soldiers taking a stone to place on Rhita’s tomb. However the story as to Rhita Gawr being buried on the top of Snowdon came into existence, there can be no doubt that it was current in comparatively recent times, and that the Welsh name of y Wyđfa, derived from it, refers to the mountain as distinguished from the district in which it is situated. In Welsh this latter is Eryri, the habitat, as it were, of the eryr, ‘eagle,’ a bird formerly at home there as many local names go to prove, such as Carreg yr Eryr15, ‘the Stone of the Eagle,’ mentioned in the boundaries of the lands on Snowdon granted to the Abbey of Aberconwy in Ỻewelyn’s charter, where also Snowdon mountain is called Wedua vawr, ‘the Great Gwyđfa.’ Now, as already suggested, the word gwyđfa takes us back to Rhita’s Carneđ or Cairn, as it signified a monument, a tomb or barrow: Dr. Davies gives it in his Welsh-Latin Dictionary as Locus Sepulturæ, Mausoleum. This meaning of the word may be illustrated by a reference in passing to the mention in Brut y Tywysogion of the burial of Madog ab Maredyđ. For under the year 1159 we are told that he was interred at Meifod, as it was there his tomb or the vault of his family, the one intended also for him (y ỽydua16), happened to be.