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Folk Tales of Hidden People and Lost Lands
The Grimms called them The Quiet Folk, in Māori they are Patupaiarehe, in Wales Y Tylwyth Teg: hidden people who live unseen, speak their own languages and move around like migrants, shrouded from our eyes – like those who lived in the utopian world of Plant Rhys Ddwfn off the west Welsh coast, where this book begins.
In mythology, lost lands are coral castles beneath the sea, ancient forests where spirits live, and mountain swamps where trolls lurk. Strip away the mythology, and they become valleys and villages flooded to provide drinking water to neighbouring kingdoms, campsites where travellers are told they can’t travel, and reservations where the rights of first nations people are ignored.
The folk tales in this book tell of these lost lands and hidden people, remembered through migrations, dreams and memories.
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…
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…
16th September, 2021
Peter Stevenson author of Boggarts, Trolls and Tylwyth Teg tells the magical stories of the hidden people and lost lands in Wales. On the 15 January 2020, shortly before travel became a dream, I sat sketching an 800 year old Rimu tree at Otari-Wilton’s Bush, close to Wellington,…
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…
