The Wizard of Werndew
Joseph Harries of Werndew and Glan-yr-Afon was one of the most famous — or infamous — sons of Dinas, since there are at least 13 stories in local folklore about his prowess as a “Dyn Hysbys” or cunning man. In other words, he was a Wizard, known to be in touch with the spirit world and reputed to be capable of placing and removing curses, foretelling the future, and solving mysteries. Until now, he has been a somewhat shadowy figure, and I invented a character for him and used him as one of the key players in my Angel Mountain Saga. But what do we actually know about him?
Well, in digging into his history I am indebted to Stephen Evans and Hywel Bowen-Perkins and to a moment of pure chance when Hywel was quite literally invited to have a look at some material in a skip, which would otherwise have ended up in a landfill site. He recovered some of Joseph Harries’s notebooks in which, as a medical practitioner, he noted the symptoms, diagnoses, treatments and progress of scores of his patients from all over west Wales. The notebooks are a goldmine, and Hywel will one day analyse them and publish them. As a doctor himself, he says that Joseph was highly skilled, mixing medicines and potions in his own pharmacy and sometimes working with other local doctors to deal with particularly difficult cases. Some of the physicians mistrusted him, because he appears to have had no formal medical training — but they were, it seems, forced to accept that he was clever, and that he knew what he was doing.
Joseph was born in Werndew in 1830, and died in 1890. He never married. Virtually nothing is known about his childhood or his life as a young man. He is referred to as living at Werndew, but his family also owned Glan-y-Mor and he appears to have spent much of his life there, on the main Newport-Dinas road, rather than in the cottage up on the mountainside. He is referred to as “a little man on a grey mountain pony”, and he comes over as someone rather disreputable, and rather frightening and intimidating. He was a deacon of Gedeon Chapel. How “religious” was he? Not very, by all accounts, since he is reputed to have fathered at least two local children as a result of liaisons with unmarried local girls. Nonetheless, he left £1,500 to the chapel in his will. He is buried at the bottom end of the graveyard, flanked by the graves of his mother Mary, sister Jane, and brother Thomas. Not far away is the grave of his father William.
But where did his reputation as a Wizard come from? There is no trace of anything suspicious or wildly eccentric in his medical casebooks, so we might conclude that he was quite astute on the PR front — and he might even have invented some of the stories of his magical talents himself, for local circulation. In the stories, he comes over as a cross between Gandalf and Sherlock Holmes, involved in the occult, finding lost items and missing animals, summoning down evil and benign spirits, and punishing those who were guilty of crimes. So are the stories true? Your guess is as good as mine. What we do know is that he got into trouble for collecting human bones from Cwm yr Eglwys following the great storm of 1859 which destroyed many of the graves in the churchyard. And we also know that some very spooky things happened at Glan-y-Mor and elsewhere in the months following his death……….
For a fuller description of the Wizard and the stories, follow this link to the Peoples Collection Wales Joseph Harries – Werndew
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