Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/38

16 from the far side of the same wall a pack of barriers yelped a welcome. Against the dark green background of sombre firs the pale shoots of the latches stood out in delicate freshness; a flicker of white wings showed where the chaffinches were busy amongst the little tufts, not, like the pigeons, devouring, but ridding them of tiny insect pests. Anemones, pink-tinged, had pushed through the carpet of last autumn's leaves, and primroses in clumps gave colour to the banks.

Beyond the park, and a little to the left of the road, stands the mined church of Llanidan, famous in history. Here was—perhaps still is—the Maen Mordhwyd, or stone of the thigh, built into the church wall. Giraldus de Barri, priest and scribe, describes the stone as he found it when he visited the place in 1188; it was small, shaped like a thigh, and possessed wonderful homing instincts; "whatever distance it may be carried, it returns, of its own accord, the following night, as has often been experienced by the inhabitants." Hugh Lupus, we learn from the same veracious source, who did not like anything but himself to have power, determined to subdue its wandering proclivities. Chaining it to a much heavier stone, he pitched the two into the Straits, but next day it was back in its accustomed station. "A countryman also, to try the power of the stone, fastened it to his thigh, which immediately became putrid, and the stone returned to its original situation." Giraldus failed to finish the story; what became of the countryman's own thigh? Here in the early days of the eighteenth century Henry Rowlands, vicar of Llanidan, wrote "Mona Antiqua Restaurata," dealing with all the antiquities of Anglesey from a point of view very remote from that of the higher critics. The marshes and bogs which till the inlets and valleys of the rugged western shores were, to Rowlands, relics of the Deluge, the "dreggy sediments