From this it is clear that Rhys Goch meant that the cairn on the top of Snowdon covered the remains of the giant whose name has been variously written Ricca, Ritta, and Rhita. So I was impelled to ascertain from Glaslyn whether I had correctly understood his lines, and he has been good enough to help me out of some of my difficulties, as I do not know Snowdon by heart, especially the Nanhwynain and Bedgelert side of the mountain:-The cairn on the summit of Snowdon was the Giant's before it was demolished and made into a sort of tower which existed before the hotel was made. Glaslyn has not heard it called after Ricca's name, but he states that old people used to call it Carned y Cawr, 'the Giant's Cairn.' In 1850 Carned Arthur, 'Arthur's Cairn,' was to be seen on the top of Bwlch y Saethau, but he does not know whether it is still so, as he has not been up there since the building of the hotel. Bwlch y Saethau is a lofty shoulder of Snowdon extending in the direction of Nanhwynain, and the distance from the top of Snowdon to it is not great; it would take you half an hour or perhaps a little more to walk from the one carned to the other. It is possible to trace Arthur's march from Dinas Emrys up the slopes of Hafod y Borth, over the shoulder of the Aran and Braich yr Oen to Tregalan-or Cwm Tregalan, as it is now called-but from Tregalan he would have to climb in a north-easterly direction in order to reach Bwlch y Saethau, where he is related to have fallen and to have been interred beneath a cairn. This may be regarded as an ordinary or commonplace account of his death. But the scene suggests a far more romantic picture; for down below was Lyn Lydaw with its sequestered isle, connected then by means only of a primitive canoe with a shore occupied by men engaged in working the ore of Eryri. Nay with the eyes of

Malory we seem to watch Bedivere making, with Excalibur in his hands, his three reluctant journeys to the lake ere he yielded it to the arm emerging from the deep. We fancy we behold how 'euyn fast by the banke houed a lytyl barge wyth many fayr ladyes in hit,' which was to carry the wounded Arthur away to the accompaniment of mourning and loud lamentation; but the legend of the Marchlyn bids us modify Malory's language as to the barge containing many ladies all wearing black hoods, and take our last look at the warrior departing rather in a coracle with three wondrously fair women attending to his wounds.

Some further notes on Snowdon, together with a curious account of the Cave of ILanciau Eryri, have been kindly placed at my disposal by Mr. Ellis Pierce (Elis2 o'r Nant) of Dolwyđelan:-In the uppermost part of the hollow called Cwmttan is Tregalan, and in the middle of Cwm Tregalan is a green hill, or rather an eminence which hardly forms a hill, but what is commonly called a boncyn3 in Carnarvonshire, and between that green boncyn and the Clogwyn Du, 'Black Precipice,' is a bog, the depth of which no one has ever succeeded in ascertaining, and a town-inferred perhaps from tre

1 See Somer's Malory's Morte Darthur, xxi. v (=vol. i. p. 849), and as to the Marchlyn story see p. 236 above. Lastly some details concerning Lyn Lydaw will be found in the next chapter.

The oldest spellings known of this name occur in manuscript A of the Annales Cambria and in the Book of ILan Dáv as Elized and Elised, doubtless pronounced Elissed until it became, by dropping the final dental, Elisse. This in time lost its identity by assimilation with the English name Ellis. Thus, for example, in Wynne's edition of Powell's Caradog of Lancarfan's History of Wales (London, 1774), pp. 22, 24, Elised is reduced to Elis. In the matter of dropping the d compare our Dewi, St. David,' for Dewidt, for an instance of which see Duffus Hardy's Descriptive Catalogue, i. 119. The form Eliseg with a final g has no foundation in fact. Can the English name Ellis be itself derived from Elised?

Boncyn is derived from bonc of nearly the same meaning, and bone is merely the English word bank borrowed: in South Wales it is pronounced banc and used in North Cardiganshire in the sense of hill or mountain.

in Tregalan-is fabled to have been swallowed up there. Another of my informants speaks of several hillocks or boncyns as forming one side of this little cwm; but he has heard from geologists, that these green mounds represent moraines deposited there in the glacial period. From the bottom of the Clogwyn Du it is about a mile to Bwlch y Saethau. Then as to the cave of ILanciau Eryri, which nobody can now find, the slope down to it begins from the top of the ILiwed, but ordinarily speaking one could not descend to where it is supposed to have been without the help of ropes, which seems incompatible with the story of the Cwm Dyli shepherd following a sheep until he was at the mouth of the cave; not to mention the difficulty which the descent would have offered to Arthur's men when they entered it. Then Elis o'r Nant's story represents it shutting after them, and only opening to the shepherd in consequence of his having trodden on a particular sod or spot. He then slid down unintentionally and touched the bell that was hanging there, so that it rang and instantly woke the sleeping warriors. No sooner had that happened than those men of Arthur's took up their guns--never mind the anachronism-and the shepherd made his way out more dead than alive; and the frightened fellow never recovered from the shock to the day of his death. When these warriors take up their guns they fire away, we are told, without mercy from where each man stands: they are not to advance a single step till Arthur comes to call them back to the world.

To swell the irrelevancies under which this chapter labours already, and to avoid severing cognate questions too rudely, I wish to add that Elis o'r Nant makes the name of the giant buried on the top of Snowdon into Rhitta or Rhita instead of Ricca. That is also the form of the name with which Mrs. Rhys was familiar through

out her childhood on the ILanberis side of the mountain. She often heard of Rhita1 Gawr having been buried on the top of Snowdon, and of other warriors on other parts of Snowdon such as Moel Gynghorion and the Gist on that moel. But Elis o'r Nant goes further, and adds that from Rhita the mountain was called Wydfa Rhita, more correctly Gwydfa Rita, 'Rhita's Gwydfa.' Fearing this might be merely an inference, I have tried to cross-examine him so far as that is possible by letter. He replies that his father was bred and born in the little glen called Ewybrnant 2, between Bettws y Coed and Pen Machno, and that his grandfather also lived there, where he appears to have owned land not far from the home of the celebrated Bishop Morgan. Now Elis' father often talked, he says, in his hearing of 'Gwyđfa Rhita.' Wishing to have some more definite evidence, I wrote again, and he informs me that his father was very fond of talking about his father, Elis o'r Nant's grandfather, who appears to have been a character and a great supporter of Sir Robert Williams, especially in a keenly contested political election in 1796, when the latter was opposed by the then head of the Penrhyn family. Sometimes the old man from Ewybrnant would set out in his clocs, 'clogs or wooden shoes,' to visit Sir Robert Williams, who lived at Plas y Nant, near Bedgelert. On starting he would say to his

1 The name occurs twice in the story of Kulhwch and Olwen : see the Mabinogion, p. 107, where the editors have read Ricca both times in 'Gormant, son of Ricca.' This is, however, more than balanced by Rita in the Book of ILan Dáv, namely in Tref Rita, 'Rita's town or stead,' which occurs five times as the name of a place in the diocese of Landaff; see pp. 32, 43, 90, 272. The uncertainty is confined to the spelling, and it has arisen from the difficulty of deciding in medieval manuscripts between and c: there is no reason to suppose the name was ever pronounced Ricca.

2 This can hardly be the real name of the place, as it is pronounced Gwybrnant (and even Gwybrant), which reminds me of the Gwybr fynyd on which Gwyn ab Nûd wanders about with his hounds: see Evans' facsimile of the Black Book of Carmarthen, p. 50a, where the words are, dy gruidir ar wibir winit.

family, Mi a'i hyibio troed Gwydfa Rhita ag mi đơ'n ol rwbrud cin nos, or sometimes foru. That is, 'I'll go round the foot of Rhita's Gwydfa and come back some time before night': sometimes he would say 'to-morrow.' Elis also states that his father used to relate how Rhita's Gwydfa was built, namely by the simple process of each of his soldiers taking a stone to place on Rhita's tomb. However the story as to Rhita Gawr being buried on the top of Snowdon came into existence, there can be no doubt that it was current in comparatively recent times, and that the Welsh name of y Wydfa, derived from it, refers to the mountain as distinguished from the district in which it is situated. In Welsh this latter is Eryri, the habitat, as it were, of the eryr, 'eagle,' a bird formerly at home there as many local names go to prove, such as Carreg yr Eryr1, 'the Stone of the Eagle,' mentioned in the boundaries of the lands on Snowdon granted to the Abbey of Aberconwy in Lewelyn's charter, where also Snowdon mountain is called Wedua vawr, 'the Great Gwydfa.' Now, as already suggested, the word gwydfa takes us back to Rhita's Carned or Cairn, as it signified a monument, a tomb or barrow: Dr. Davies gives it in his Welsh-Latin Dictionary as Locus Sepulturæ, Mausoleum. This meaning of the word may be illustrated by a reference in passing to the mention in Brut y Tywysogion of the burial of Madog ab Maredyd. For under the year 1159 we are told that he was interred at Meifod, as it was there his tomb or the vault of his family, the one intended also for him (y 6ydua), happened to be.

1 Dugdale has printed this (v. 673a) Carrecerereryr with one er too much, and the other name forms part of the phrase ad capud Weddua-Vaur, 'to the top of the Great Gwydfa'; but I learn from Mr. Edward Owen, of Gray's Inn, that the reading of the manuscript is Wedua vawr and Carrecereryr.

'The MSS. except B have y 6ylva, which is clearly not the right word, as it could only mean 'his place of watching.'