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Storyteller is storïwr in Welsh. The old word is cyfarwydd. And this book is a sneaky peek into a storyteller's repertoire.
Meet the rowdy mermaids and drowned lands of Cardigan Bay, an ancient tree with a door into the otherworld, and the wise old toad who lives in Borth bog and knows everything. Discover a clever girl who transforms into a swan, the herd of fairy cattle who live beneath Llyn Barfog and an elephant who may or may not have died in Tregaron.
Feature/extract in West Wales Chronicle
13th August, 2025 in Folklore, Local & Family History
Wales holds in the popular imagination a reputation of magic, mystery, and ancient ways. A land apart from its’ neighbours, Cymru has been a destination for centuries, but more importantly it is home to a proud culture. Yet, despite the richness of its’ heritage, only certain asp…
31st March, 2025 in Folklore, Natural World
A magical mermaid story extracted from the new book Welsh Folk Tales of Coast and Sea by Peter Stevenson. The Welsh Utopia Amser maith yn ôl / A long time ago. The shallow sea in Cardigan Bay, from Pen Llŷn in the north to Ceredigion in the west, was once a mix of forests, lakes,…
3rd May, 2023 in Folklore, Local & Family History
Peter Stevenson author of Illustrated Welsh Folk Tales for Young and Old tells the extraordinary tale of the man who brought moving panoramas to the Welsh Valleys in the form of a ‘crankie’. Years ago I started telling Welsh folk tales with a crankie, a wooden box the s…
1st July, 2019 in Folklore
In June 2019, I was in Morgantown, West Virginia, hanging an exhibition of Welsh folk art in the Monongalia Arts Center. On the opening night, a lady told me her mother had organised a Welsh Eisteddfod in Morgantown up until the early 1960s, a lady from the St David’s Society of…
15th May, 2019 in Folklore, Local & Family History, Natural World
The Earth, on whose surface we live out most of our life, has been described as ‘the deep manuscript of time’ – a book of solid and molten rock, written in minerals and moisture, fire and ice. It is a long, slow book, once you dip even a little way below its surface, and look ben…
23rd January, 2017
In Wales, folk tales are intricately entwined with the landscape and people who live there. Stories are set in specific places, villages, streets, woods, lakes, seashores, rivers, valleys, mountains, bogs, coastlines and cities. The characters, too, are real, memories of those wh…
