Entry for 14 March 1611 in the vestry book of Sarnwen: "Evan Tegid's field gate, the left of two, gone in the night with its hinges. Nothing else touched." The clerk wrote the same entry in 1609 and again in 1613, changing only the farmer's name, and never put down what took it. The answer is the giant of Gwaun Llethr, which has taken the left gate of every pair for four centuries and has never once taken the right. No one has a theory the others will accept.
The second record is a surveyor's field book from 1748. His map of the Gwaun shows a row of sixty-one dots along the ridge, labeled "posts, unaccountable," and at the west end a figure he first took for a dead oak. It scratched its ribs against a boulder, and he did not finish the western survey. The third is the Sarnwen almanac for 1902, which lists moon phases, market days and one line of advice in the same type: "One gate to a field. Mend it yourself."
The giant itself stands about fifteen feet, narrow in the shoulder and long in the arm, with a hide the gray-green of wet slate. Lichen grows on its north side the way it does on a wall. It wears a coat of sheepskins, wool turned in, laced up the front with rawhide, and it carries nothing. It eats slugs, cold-water crayfish and turnips, and it finds the first two by turning over boulders. The undersides of those stones stay pale and bare for about a week before moss returns, which is how it is tracked. It plants each stolen gate upright in the ridge peat, in one long row, and it is particular about that row. A shepherd who straightened one gate in 1957 found every coping stone on his wall turned upside down by morning, and the gate back where it had been.
I measured a footprint in the peat above the Gwaun by laying a six-foot ash plow pole beside it and reading the heel and toe against the pole: thirty-one inches. Job Maelor, who runs ewes on that slope, hangs a single gate to a field and tells anyone who asks that a man with two gates is only offering. Leaving by the sheep track, I look back along the ridge. The gates stand in their row, every one set hinge-side down, and at the end of the row is a new one, the iron still bright orange with rust.
- Classification
- Giant, upland solitary humanoid
- Habitat
- Bare ridges and peat moor
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 15 ft standing
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Welsh-style border uplands
- Binomial
- Gigas saxicola
- Diet
- Slugs, crayfish, turnips, the odd ewe
- Temperament
- Sullen, fussy, slow to anger