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When the Celts look around them at the landscape, they were filled with all
wonder, at the great towers of boulders and colossal ramparts of
nature.
Like many peoples all over the world, our Celtic forefathers decided, it
must all be the work of the race of giants and there are thousands of
places in the cultic world named after giants.
Stonehenge is still known well in Welsh as CÖr y Cewri, the giant's
choir.
The chorus of giants so they say turns a stone in mid song.
And in Wales, the biggest of all landmarks also came about because of a
giant, a very nasty coliseum giant.
The story begins with two of the ancient kings of Britain Nyniaw and
Peibaw as they walked out one evening after supper.
Did you ever see such a large field as this field of mine, asked Nyniaw.
What field? Where? Asked Peibaw.
Well, in the sky of course with the horizon as hadrons.
Well, did you ever see such a large flock of sheep as this flock of sheep
of mine?╙ said Peibaw not to be outdone.
What flock? Where?
Well, the stars in the sky of course with the moon as their shepherd
grazing in your field.
They╒ve no business to be grazing in my field.
I think they have.
They have not.
I think they have.
Hostile words soon turned to blows and it seems that all out war was
inevitable, but the two of them decided to ask Rhitta the giant to
settle the matter.
Rhitta did more than settle the matter.
He settled the two of them in hand to hand combat and then he cut off their
beards to teach them a lesson.
Cutting off a king's beard was a grave insult and so all the ancient kings of
Britain banded together in order to reek vengeance upon Rhitta, the giant.
But Rhitta was too strong for them.
He met each one in hand to hand combat and defeated them, 28 in total.
He cut off all their beards until he have sufficient to fashion a cloak of
beards for himself.
It was long enough to cover him from head to toe.
But he left one gap in his cloak, his intention was to claim the beard of no
lesser person than King Arthur himself to fill that gap, so he sent a
messenger to king Arthur's court telling him to flay off his beard and
send it back to Rhitta and should he refuse?
Rhitta challenged him to a duel, with the winner to claim the loser╒s beard.
Arthur of course was furious when he received this insulting request and he
went immediately to meet Rhitta in combat--.
Rhitta suggested they cast their weapons aside and wrestle to see who
is strongest.
They set to roaring and grunting and were soon rolling down the mountain
until they came to rest, each having succeeded in ripping the other's beard
out by the roots.
Then they fought on with swords, and this time there was no doubt who was
strongest.
Arthur killed the giant and he claimed his cloak of beards for his own.
But Rhitta was not buried at--but buried instead in the heart of
Snowdonia.
Arthur commanded his people to carry heavy stones and set them upon the
body of the giant in order to obscure him from view.
And that╒s how this mountain came into existence.
Snowdon, but better known in the Welsh language as Wyddfa Rhitta Gawr, the
burial mount of Rhitta the giant.
Giants were brutal creatures.
Some people think this in the original story, these are the giants not only
cut off the beards of the kings of the Britain, he cuts off their heads as
well.
Another Welsh giant Ysbaddaden Bencawr was just as nasty.
Each time a young man called Culhwch came to ask for his daughter's hand in
marriage, he threw a poison spear at him.
And each time Culhwch and his comrades caught the spear and threw it back at
the Ysbaddaden.
That he was so big that the spears didn╒t kill him, they just stung him.
Ysbaddaden's eyes were so huge and heavy that his servants had to use
pitchforks to lift his eye lids.
This is a characteristic he shared with a horrible one eyed Irish giant
called Balor.
He was there against his daughter marrying as well.
Balor was the leader of the Fomorian tribe who ruled very oppressively over
island.
He lived on Tory island of the coast of Donegal and from there he waged war
against his enemies.
More than anything else, it was his evil eye that made Balor such a
terrible giant.
The landscape still bears witness of his power today.
To show how terrible he was, Balor threatened to burn island with his eye
and the effects can still be seen in the black tips of the rushes on the
barren slopes of the mountains of Muckish and Derryveagh.
Barlor╒s eye was a venomous weapon with a polished ring in its lid.
And it needed four strong men and a system of wheels and pulleys to open
it.
And it was never opened except on the battlefield.
When an opposing army looked into his eye, it was immediately withered and
burned by it.
Balor was not born with this evil power.
It came about by accident when his father╒s Druids were doing a powerful
magic portion.
As Balor looked on, the fume settled on his eye giving it its needful
power.
It was foretold by a Druid that Balor would be slain by his grandson and so
he had his daughter Ethlinn in prison to prevent her meeting any man but his
plan failed.
As foretold he met his grandson Lugh in the battlefield at Magh Tuiredh.
This battle was fought between two super human races for the control of
Ireland.
Balor and his Fomori against Lugh and Tuatha DÄ Danann.
As Balor's evil eye swept the battlefield, it's deadly gaze
destroyed all who stood before him, whole troops of warriors lay withered
in its weight and the tide of battle turned against the Tuatha DÄ Danann.
But Lugh had prepared himself well for this moment and he cast a powerful
lightening weapon that drove the evil eye through the head of Balor and
turned it back on the army of the Fomori so that all those near it
perished.
When Balor fell down dead, his body made a huge crater that later filled
with water and that╒s how Loch na S£l, the lake of the eye in County Sligo
was created.
The church didn╒t frown upon giants in quite the same way as it frowned upon
other Celtic monsters like dragons and serpents.
After all doesn╒t it say in the Book of Genesis that there were giants upon
the earth in those days.
And there are stories about Celtic saints pitching their wits against
giants like the Giant Bolster of Cornwall.
Bolster was of enormous size.
He would stand with one foot on the top of St. Agnes╒ Beacon and the other
six miles away on Cairn Brea.
He had a wife and according to tradition, he would send her out to
clear stones from the fields and bring them here to the top of the hill.
However, he was not a faithful husband as he felt deeply in love with another
woman, the beautiful St. Agnes.
Bolster would just not leave her alone.
He followed her incessantly proclaiming his love.
St. Agnes lectured him in vain on the impropriety of his conduct, seeing as
he was already a married man but he would not listen.
In the end, poor persecuted Agnes thought of a way to rid herself of
this monster.
She pretended that his protestations of love had finally won her over.
But before she could give herself to him, she said that she required just
one more small proof of his love just so she could be sure.
Denag said Bolster, anything.
St. Agnes explained that at Chapel Porth there was a hole on the cliff
and if Bolster would just fill this small hole with his blood, the lady
would no longer look coldly on him.
Bolster, the huge bestrider of the hills thought that it would be an easy
thing to do and thought he could fill many such holes without being any of
the weaker for the loss of blood.
So he stretched his great arm across the hole, plunged a knife into a vein
and watched as a torrent of blood burst forth.
It cascaded to the bottom and the giant expected in a few minutes to see
the final proof of his devotion in the filling of a hole.
However it seemed to require much more blood than Bolster supposed, still,
that must be filled before long so he bled on.
Hour after hour the blood flowed from the vein, yet the hole was not filled.
He was unable to staunch the wound which he had made.
Eventually the giant fainted from exhaustion and Bolster died.
The cunning saint in proposing this tasked Bolster was well aware that the
hole opened at the bottom into the sea, and as fast as the blood flowed
into the hole, so it poured out at the bottom, staining the cliffs a deep red
which remains to this day.
Not all giants were bad, some were heroes.
In the older stories characters like King Arthur and Finn McCool were men
of ordinary size but they sometimes kill giants and the stories about them
became taller and taller and so did they until they themselves were
giants.
Finn McCool height is given very precisely at 52 feet and 6 inches, he
wasn╒t as big as Fergus and Bennadonnar but he was way above them
in cunning.
There are numerous landmarks associated with him across Ireland.
There are many mountain tops called the seat of him, where he would sit.
Great flagstones that were his griddle, while many hill tops were his
table.
There are even claims that the Isle of Man is a huge sod, torn in anger from
the ground in Ulster that hurled by Finn into the sea.
The hole that remained filled up with water and became Lock Neigh.
But the most famous landmark associated with Finn is the giant's
causeway in Antrim.
According to tradition it was built by Finn to enable a Scottish giant
Bennadonnar to come to Ireland to challenge him.
Having built the causeway all the way to Scotland, Finn fell asleep.
When he woke the gigantic Bennadonnar was half way across the causeway and
much bigger than Finn expected.
He decided he╒d have to outwit him.
So he jumped into his child╒s cradle and pretended he was the baby.
As Bennadonnar waited for Finn to return home, he played with the baby
who promptly bit off the giant's finger, in his pain Bennadonnar
concluded that if Finn's child was big enough and vicious enough to do that
to him.
And Finn must be truly enormous.
He panicked and returned at haste to Scotland, destroying the causeway
behind him as he went.
And all that is left at Finn's causeway now is the short section we
can see today, disappearing into the sea of the coast of Antrim.
The stories about Finn McCool a more than a thousand years old, but
somewhere on the edge of the Celtic consciousness, giants are still
around.
As a giants at this top of this Swansea Valley called the
Cribarth--the sleeping giant.
This is not a landmark from the beginning of time, the shape is
created by a 19th century stone quarry but in the local imagination it╒s a
giant.
And 30 miles away in the Rhymney Valley, another giant was believed to
be responsible for a discovery which turned the place upside down.
Long ago there was a cruel giant living in Gilfach Fargoed in Rhymney
Valley.
One thing that caused more terror even than his size was his strange staff
with a living snake coiled around it. The fairies who lived in the valley
could no longer venture out because the giant would catch them and eat
them.
They covered in their hiding places and lived in sorrow.
And then one young boy, would be orphaned by the giant decided to kill
him, to avenge the death of his parents. Because he was one of the
fairy╒s he knew the language of the birds, and so he went to speak to an
owl that lived in an oak tree by Pencoed Fawr, Bedwellty.
He asked for a help in killing the giant, and so they set the arrow and
bow at the top of an apple tree near other giant's lane and the young boy
was to release the arrow when the giant passed beneath the tree.
One evening the giant came and sat beneath the tree and fell asleep.
The boy released the arrow, the giant died instantly and the snake on his
staff died of fright.
The giant╒s body was left where he╒d been killed until his corpse began to
smell and then the fairies dig a huge pit in order to bury him, but even
after they╒ve done this, the nasty odor was so bad that they made a fire
on the body to cremate it.
But to their surprise, the hollow also caught fire, the fairies threw water
into the pit and in the end was succeed in putting the fire out.
The boy then decided to go down and see why the pit had caught fire.
It came back with something black, never seen before, if this black pit
burns he said, no doubt it╒s this black rock that sets a delight.
He took some of it home and put the black stone on the half and behold,
they had an excellent fire to keep themselves warm. So as a result of
killing the giant, the first coal was hunt on the Rhymney Valley.
And so even though some giant legends go back thousands of years, giants
still fascinate us as a way of explaining some of the mysteries of
the landscape, just as I fascinated our Celtic forefathers in the halls of
long ago.