An Invitation to Beltane

Tinkinswood

Had a lovely weekend. Dad and Marilyn came over on Sunday and we went round Tinkinswood and St. Lythans. I spend a lot of time at the former - most full moons. Had a lovely time there with my landlady on the last full lunar eclipse. Heulwen took her fiddle, and I my tin whistle. We took tea and Welsh cakes, sat and watched it darken over and turn the red of a 'blood moon'.

Towards the end we were frozen. We'd been there a couple of hours and it was only just March. The stream had flooded, and we had to feel our way back in the pitch black. On a clear full moon it is as bright as daylight, but of course the moon had darkened over!

A couple from the local village, St. Nicholas, arrived with their young whippet. This was auspicious as Tinkinswood is also known as Maes-Y-Felin, or 'Kennel of the Greyhound Bitch', although this may be borrowed from St. Lythans.

When we visited yesterday, in glorious sunshine, a man was walking his two sighthounds there, too :)

There is a Beltane gathering at Tinkinswood on Wednesday May 2nd for the full moon, from around 6pm onwards. 

I was putting up a flyer for this at Shared Earth in Cardiff, and one of the guys there told me about another Beltane bash towards Cowbridge. It's called Triban, a collection of local earth-based bands with a fire pit, camping space and general heathenry. Starts from 2pm on Saturday 5th May. Tickets £5 before 5pm and £7 after. I plan to go to both and can offer a lift if someone would like it.

There is an interesting snippet about St. Lythans (here referred to as the stones in Maes-Y-Felin Field) and Tinkinswood (the 'great cromlech in Duffryn sic. woods'):

Duffryn, near St. Nicholas, in the Vale of Glamorgan, has Druidical stones scattered about in various places. Some of these have stories attached to them. Old people in the beginning of the nineteenth century said that once a year, on Midsummer Eve, the stones in Maes-y-felin Field whirled round three times, and made curtsies; and if anybody went to them on Hallowe'en, and whispered a wish in good faith, it would be obtained. The field in which these stones stand was unprofitable, and people said the land was under a curse. The stones in Tinkins Wood, some distance away, but belonging to the same Druidical series, were said to be women turned into stone for dancing on Sunday. The great cromlech in the Duffryn Woods was an unlucky place to sleep in on one of the " three spirit nights," for the person who did so would die, go raving mad, or become a poet. These stones were haunted by the ghosts of Druids, who were in the habit of punishing wicked people by beating them, and were particularly hard in their treatment of drunkards. A man fond of drink slept there one night, and his experiences were terrible. He declared the Druids beat him first, and then whirled him up to the sky, from which he looked down and saw the moon and stars thousands of miles below him. The Druids held him suspended by his hair in the mid-heaven, until the first peep of day, and then let him drop down to the Duffryn woods, where he was found in a great oak by farm-labourers. - Trevelyan, M. Folk-lore and Folk-stories of Wales