Nant Gwrtheyrn

Nant Gwrtheyrn is a valley in North Wales leading down to the sea.

Origin of the Name

Tradition says that the tyrant Vortigern, Gwrtheyrn in Welsh, met his end here, either when his fort was struck by lightning and burnt to the ground, or when he jumped into the sea from a well-known rock.

The Curse

Some time later, three monks from the nearby monastery of Clynnog were driven out of the village by stones, and as a punishment they cursed the valley with three curses: no two lovers from there would ever marry, not one of the inhabitants would be buried in consecrated ground, and the village itself would die.

Rhys and Meinir

Now there wasn't a church in the Nant so marriages and funerals weren't easy, but there was a time when the first curse seemed likely to broken, when a young couple called Rhys and Meinir were engaged. It was their wedding day, but before they left the valley for the church, Meinir, the bride-to-be, followed an old custom by pretending reluctance and going off to hide; Rhys and the other young men couldn't find her though they searched all day, and Rhys stayed searching all night and the next day, wandering up and down the valley calling out her name.

And he continued to do that, according to some followed by the obligatory faithful dog, all his life. Until one day when he was an old man it came on to rain (as it often does in North Wales, he said with feeling) and forced him to take shelter under an old oak tree; at the height of the storm the tree was struck by lightening and split open, and the skeleton of his beloved Meinir fell out before him, still in her wedding dress.

Rhys died soon afterwards of a broken heart, and the two lovers were placed in the same coffin, but even there they were not to rest in peace. As the cart carrying the coffin was climbing the hill out of the valley, it hit a rock and the coffin was shaken off and tumbled down the cliff to sink into the sea, doomed by the second curse.

The death of a village

After farming came the quarries, and the granite setts were used for road-building throughout Britain. But as with so many industries in Britain, and Wales in particular, the quarries and slate mines in the north as much as the coal mines in the south, the demand ceased and the quarries closed and the village was abandoned as predicted.

Rebirth

Parts of the village were later rebult to for a home for a residential centre to teach Welsh.