Winged serpents

I have just found time, over breakfast, to read yesterday's Guardian. When, lo! I find that the fossil of a dragon-like flying lizard has been found in north-eastern China. And it is not even April Fool’s day.

“The bizarre lizard, named the “flying dragon” by its Chinese discoverers, glided using a flap of skin spread over eight ribs.” – The Guardian.

It was six inches long, apparently, including the very long tail.

I disdain to quote the Telegraph, but they do have a picture of the fossil, which the Guardian prints but has not displayed on its website. The Guardian also prints a fine ‘artist’s impression’, which Scientific American has here.

I was instantly reminded of this intriguing piece of modern Welsh folk-lore:

The woods round Penllyne Castle, Glamorgan, had the reputation of being frequented by winged serpents, and these were the terror of old and young alike. An aged inhabitant of Penllyne, who died a few years ago said that in his boyhood the winged serpents were described as very beautiful. They were coiled when in repose, and ‘looked as if they were covered with jewels of all sorts. Some of them had crests sparkling with all the colours of the rainbow.’ When disturbed they glided swiftly, ‘sparkling all over,’ to their hiding places. When angry, they ‘flew over people’s heads, with outspread wings bright, and sometimes with eyes too, like the feathers in a peacock’s tail.’ He said it was ‘no old story invented to frighten children,’ but a real fact. His father and uncle had killed some of them, for they were ‘as bad as foxes for poultry.’ The old man attributed the extinction of the winged serpents to the fact that they were ‘terrors in the farmyards and coverts.’

An old woman, whose parents in her early childhood took her to visit Penmark Place, Glamorgan, said she often heard the people talking about the ravages of the winged serpents in that neighbourhood. She described them in the same way as the man of Penllyne. There was a ‘king and queen’ of winged serpents, she said, in the woods round Bewper. The old people in her early days said that wherever winged serpents were to be seen ‘there was sure to be buried money or something of value’ near at hand. Her grandfather told her of an encounter with a winged serpent in the woods near Porthkerry Park, not far from Penmark. He and his brother ‘made up their minds to catch one, and watched a whole day for the serpent to rise. ’Then they shot at it, and the creature fell wounded, only to rise and attack my uncle, beating him about the head with its wings.’ She said a fierce fight ensued between the men and the serpent, which was at last killed. She had seen its skin and feathers, but after the grandfather’s death they were thrown away. That serpent was as notorious ‘as any fox’ in the farmyards and coverts around Penmark. Buried money had been found not far from Penmark Place in her childhood, and she said it had been ‘hidden away by by someone before going to the great Battle of St Fagan’s, when the river ran red with blood.’

Marie Trevelyan

from Folk-Lore and Folk Stories of Wales (1909)

I love accounts like this. So circumstantial, so down-to-earth – ‘terrors in the farmyards’! – so unbelievable.

How to account for them? Did the folklorist slip unknowingly through a crack between the worlds and interview people in a parallel universe? Is it a case of wild peasant humour: telling ever taller stories to the lady who seems so happy to listen? Or is it some form of confabulation: a case of elderly people ‘remembering’ as actual events the folk-tales that were transmitted to them as children?


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