The local Radnorshire bogeywoman in the 13th century was the giant Moll Walbee. Hay Castle’s gatehouse was reputedly built by her in a single day. The story goes that, crossing the River Wye one day, she felt a piece of grit in her boot, took it out and hurled it across the river. It landed in the circular churchyard at Llowes, where it was long known as Moll Walbee’s Stone: a 7ft-high menhir of hard, pale-grey sandstone.
It is now inside the church of St Meilig, in this same village, but formerly it had been at Croesfeilliog, on the eastern spur of the Begwns above Llowes, beside the road between Clyro and Painscastle. I can imagine anxious travellers in the dusk on that lonely way crossing themselves as they hastened by. The menhir, like so many similar pagan relics in the British landscape, was assimilated into the Christian tradition, a pious monk having carved on to it an unusual wheel-cross design.
As the rain from Storm Ciarán lashed down last week, I took shelter in the porch of St Meilig’s church. Small flocks of fieldfare and redwing surfed eastwards on the gale, or feasted on the haws that are so abundant this autumn. Foliage on the hazel hedges was lemon-hued and luminous in the fast-fading light. I tried the church door. It was open, so I stepped inside, and there at the western end of the nave, facing towards the altar, the large, incongruous presence of this ancient megalith confronted me. I’ve seen other megaliths reconfigured for differing systems of belief – the Stones of Drumtroddan on the Isle of Whithorn in Dumfries and Galloway, for example – but none where the effect was so startlingly anomalous.
My mind drifted back to Moll Walbee. Behind her name lurks an historical personage from the 12th century – Maude de Sainte Valerie. The Elizabethan historian William Camden characterised her as a “malapert, stomackfull woman”. She upbraided King John about his treatment of the young Prince Arthur, and paid for it with her life – imprisoned with her young son in Corfe Castle, with just a sheaf of wheat and a piece of bacon by way of provisions. After 11 days the room was opened. Both were found dead, the boy’s cheeks gnawed, and not by rats.
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