Some Myths and Legends

We visited Gelert's 'grave' and were slightly underwhelmed by it all albeit the countryside around was fantastic.

Thanks for the revelation!

A few others for you:

The Luddites.

The word "Luddite" is now applied very loosely and wrongly to deride anyone who is not as clever at using, or indeed chooses not to use, the sort of technical equipment the critic considers compulsory.

The original Luddites were textile makers frightened the newly-invented machines would make them redundant, in the earliest phases of the Industrial Revolution. They feared for their livelihoods, and were not afraid of the new machines they were perfectly capable of learning to use; but simply destroyed them.

When arrested for criminal damage, they named Thomas Ludd as their leader.

Thomas Ludd was remarkably elusive though. That's because he did not exist! The aggrieved spinners and weavers had invented the name to baffle the authorities.

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The Cerne Giant.

This decidedly risque chalk figure of a nude male carved into the hillside above the Dorset village of Cerne Abbas, gained a reputation for being an ancient, perhaps Bronze Age, fertility symbol. There is no evidence for that, and more recently other interpretations have been suggested, some more credible than others.

The reality is that his age is unknown, his creators unknown, his purpose unknown.

Even the local abbey, destroyed in the Dissolution, did not seem to have recorded the figure - if it existed then - although any such document is likely lost, perhaps in the closure of the abbey.

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Stonehenge is a Druidic temple.

Not at all. It is far older (Neolithic), built on a site apparently already significant long before its erection; and we do not know its purpose.

The date can be ascertained, to some extent, but its original and and later genuine uses cannot be known, because there are no records. We do not know what the society that created this and similar monuments believed, nor how they organised themselves, although evidence from contemporary graves suggests they were strongly religious.

The modern stone-huggers fancy themselves as latter-day Druids but I doubt they really know much about the Late Bronze Age / Romano-British priestly caste, who anyway appeared much later than the henges era. If anyone recorded anything about the real Druids, they would have been Roman historians, not the Ancient Britons themselves.

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Vëasta - a fabulous sea-animal.

This is a modern concoction, illustrating how some of the older legends may have originated. Only, people nowadays are far less credulous. Well, most are. Allegedly. The modern equivalents are the conspiracy-"theories", personality-based "religious" cults and some financial arrangements.

A little geographical background:

The original Portland and Weymouth on the South English coast, not the US namesakes, form a triangular peninsula between two broad bays; Weymouth to the East; Lyme on the West, open to the South-West all the way to the Caribbean. That exposure to the prevailing Westerly, and sometimes Easterly, weather made Portland and its adjoining Chesil Beach very dangerous to shipping in the days of sail. Modern ships use the appropriate lee side to shelter from storms in the English Channel.

Portland is a tombolo and although now joined to the rest of England by a modern road (and for a hundred years, a railway) along the isthmus, until the 19C it was very isolated. Prior to the bridges local access used a ferry across the narrow entrance to the Fleet lagoon between Chesil Beach and the land.

Socially, the Portlanders were very insular and self-sufficient too; their main occupations being stone-quarrying, fishing and small-scale farming; but for centuries most people anywhere rarely travelled far from home anyway. It was and is a "Royal Manor", and a small tax was levvied on its stone exports for community purposes.


Vëasta first surfaced in a letter to the Dorset Echo, in the 1980s or 90s - I forget exactly when. A Weymouth man claimed to have read a Mediaeval bishop's account of having visited the isolated, insular Isle and Royal Manor of Portland. The bishop wrote local fishermen told him of this fabulous animal they called "Vëasta", which apparently dwelt only in Lyme Bay, and was occasionally seen off Chesil Beach. It apparently looked rather like a fantastical version of a porpoise; but the fishermen would have known the local and occasional visiting animals.

1) The letter writer did not cite the document, its location and why he would have seen it. A Mediaeval church paper would have been written in Latin, in the handwritten font of the time, and now so irreplaceable only genuine historians and ecclesiastical academics able to read and translate it would see it, for proper research purposes. A modern translation would be public.

2) This was the first time anyone had ever heard of odd creatures apparently living only in a fairly small region of the English Channel, nowhere else. Strays do appear occasionally though, in this arm of the NE Atlantic Ocean, and people hundreds of years ago might well have been baffled, even frightened, by their appearance.

3) The writer followed that tale with another, even less likely.

4) It is feasible a bishop had visited Portland, and he being Very Clever as he could read Latin (including the Bible) and was in some authority, the locals might have found him patronising so concocted the Vëasta as a parcatical joke. Modern travellers have sometimes encountered similar jokes against them.


What became of Vëasta?

A local pub commissioned an engraved plaque illustrating it, carved in the (local) Portland Stone, for public display on an exterior wall. Presumably that was destroyed when the pub was closed a few years ago by the extremely rich Dorset land-owner who owned it, and demolished to be replaced by a big block of flats.

The County Council commemorated Vëasta by naming a road roundabout after it. That's fame for you.

Otherwise, Vëasta swam away into oblivion and occasional local memories of a letters in a newspaper.

This was brilliant. These myths and legends might not be true but the are certainly a lot of fun. The stories connected to our inland waterways are great too. I keep thinking about compiling a post. Thanks for sharing. Xx