1513 James V crowned King of Scotland in the Chapel Royal at Stirling Castle, aged 17 months.
1621 King James I of England gives Scottish courtier and poet William Alexander a royal charter to colonize Nova Scotia.
1776 5 days after British take New York, a quarter of the city burns down.
1896 British General Kitchener's army occupies Dongola, Sudan.
1915 Cecil Chubb buys the prehistoric monument Stonehenge for £6,600 and later donates it to the British nation.
… On 21st September 1949, the Prince Llewelyn Hotel in Beddgelert, Gwynedd was hit by a meteorite. It is only the second ever known to hit Wales, the other falling in 1931, at Pontllyfni, near Caernarfon. The meteorite was preceded by a brilliant light and a series of dull explosions, which ended with a buzzing sound and the sound of roof slates shattering. The following morning a dark-coloured stone the size of a cricket ball was found on the floor of the attic.
… Wales' first comprehensive school opened on 21st September 1949 as Holyhead County School.
… On 21st September, 2002, in recognition of those who had arrived in Australia on the First Fleet in 1788, stonemason Ray Collins commenced work on 'First Fleet Commemorative Park' in Wallabadah, north of Sydney, N.S.W. These first emigrants to Australia were mostly convicts including four Welsh men and two Welsh women. By 1852, the number of transportees who had been tried in Wales had risen to approximately 1,800, of whom, 300 were women. These included Lewis Lewis for his part in the Merthyr Riots of 1831 and the Chartist leaders John Frost, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones for their organising of the Newport Rising.
…
1976 Asylum Records releases "Small Change", the fourth studio album by singer-songwriter Tom Waits; his best-selling album until 1999, features the songs "Tom Traubert's Blue" and "The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)" ..
And a silly one to finish…
On 21st September 1987, there was a reported sighting of the Afanc of Llyn Syfaddan(Llangorse Lake). The Afanc is a lake monster from the mythology of Wales, described as taking the form of a giant beaver or large crocodile, which devoured anyone or anything that entered its waters. The earliest known literary reference to the Afanc is in a poem by the 15th century Welsh poet, Lewys Glyn Cothi. One legend tells of the wild thrashings of the afanc causing flooding and another tells of a maiden taming the Afanc and letting it sleep in her lap, whilst other villagers attempt to capture it. However, the Afanc awakes and crushes the maiden. Later legends have King Arthur slaying the Afanc in Llyn Barfog in Gwynedd. Nearby is a rock with a hoof print mark in it, which was supposedly made when Arthur's horse, Llamrai, dragged the Afanc from the lake. Iolo Morgannwg then popularised a version in which two long-horned oxen dragged the Afanc from the lake, to be killed. [b]
That Daily Mirror headline is as daft as the Afanc legend!
The latter reminds me of a modern "manufactured" legend about a supposed mythical animal called "Veasta" living in the sea around Portland, and I wonder if Lewis Glyn Cothi had indeed invented the Afanc and its legends.
The modern concoction arose in the 1980s or 90s; by a Weymouth man writing a letter to the Dorset Echo claiming to have read a Mediaeval account of a bishop's expedition to the Isle of Portand, which in those days was quite isolated.
Allegedly, the cleric claimed locals described to him a bizarre creature that appeared from time to time, but only in that area. No-one had seen a veasta, as they called it, anywhere else. Later, the bishop reckoned to have been told of another, stranger animal yet, which stuck its head above the water, crowed like a cock and dived back down.
Flaw 1: The letter writer did not cite the document and location, and why he had been reading these very securely archived papers (or vellums); nor his academic credentials.
Flaw 2: No-one else had ever heard of any such legend; including parallels elsewhere along the English Channel coast.
Flaw 3: The letter-writer used the spelling VEÄSTA. I may have the accent on the wrong vowel, but I don't think it was ever used in early English or the Latin more likely for the supposed era.
If any such account does exist, perhaps the locals had seen some ordinary marine creature far from its normal regions and unidentifiable by them: such visitations are fairly common in the waters around the British Isles. Alternatively they had invented these animals as a practical joke against a visitor they felt was patronising them because he was Ever So Clever (i.e. could read and write Latin and was a bishop).
A local pub mounted a carving commemorating the fabulous animal, on an external wall in public view. It was destroyed when the pub was demolished. The County Council named a road roundabout after this Veasta, for no clear reason. Otherwise, the legend soon became largely forgotten. I know people living in the area, and don't recall them ever knowing anything about it other than the original letter and the two public ornaments.
My judgement is that the letter-writer had totally fabricated the legend: coining the creature and the document's existence. I have no idea why - apart from ego.
So did the Afric legend similarly come entirely from the poet's own imagination?
If so, we might wonder how many other old legends were only ever pure fabrications, apart from ancient "folk-tales" about unusual natural events the contemporary locals genuinely could not understand.
