The toads will have left the magic lake by now. Eight hundred or so will have crossed the road that runs between Llandybie, Milo and Carmel on mild damp autumn nights from Pantllyn lake at Pentre Gwenlais to higher ground and dank winter quarters.

 

Elbows out, toad, an estimable gentleman, ambles in a four-cornered sort of walk, unlike the upstart hopping frog.

 

The timing of the toads’ springtime spawning is wonderfully synchronised to the strange behaviour of this unique little Carmarthenshire lake - a turlough.

 

Oblivious of the weather, it fills to overflowing in late autumn and, by the time the toad-tadpoles are small amphibians the following July, the lake will have gone and they’ll thrive in its rare herbage. Just now, though, they will be comatose under some cold stone or decaying log.

 

The turlough at Pentre Gwenlais is one of the wonders of Wales and unique on mainland Britain. Western Ireland has similar phenomena which are only found in glacially-affected karst limestone. The filling and emptying takes place through swallow holes and springs - some deep and faraway. The lake refills in autumn by action of what is termed estevelle, or a reversing spring. The Gwenlais brook, whose water is usually as clear as any southern chalk stream, carries off any surface water.

 

Gerald the Welshman, Giraldus Cambrensis, grandson of the illustrious Princess Nest, ‘Helen of Wales’ who was born and brought up in Dynevor Castle, describes in his Itinerary of 1188 what I believe to be the Pantllyn turlough, though factuality got in the way of the telling. He says there is a magic well near Dynevor:

‘On the other side of the river Towy in Cantref Bychan there is a spring which, like the fitful tide, ebbs and flows twice each twenty-four hours’.

 

Land south of the river was indeed the Small Cantref before it became the commote of Iscennen, and Pantllyn is two-and-a-half miles directly south of the royal stronghold.

 

Gerald, growing up, would undoubtedly have heard of this ‘magical’ hydrological occurrence which many still believe is related to the big spring tides. And that’s where the error lies and folklore takes over. There is no well anywhere near that ebbs and flows twice daily. Pantllyn does ebb, like the tide, but twice a year. On his travels in Ireland, Gerald may have learned of one turlough, Caherglassaun, near Galway Bay, which does ebb and flow with the tide every 24 hours, but no others do.

 

 

It is not a long walk from Pantllyn to Llynllech-Owain, now a country park nearby to the Carmel television mast.

 

A descendant of Rhodri Mawr and Llywelyn the Great and heir to the princes of Gwynedd, described by one historian as ‘possibly the greatest military genius Wales has produced’, Owain Lawgoch, found fame in the Hundred Years’ War. Leading a company of Welshmen, armed, according to Giraldus with longbows made of wild elm, unpolished and uncouth’, he fought with distinction on the French side for Charles V at Poitiers and elsewhere. Charles was later to loan him a fleet of ships and an army of 4,000 men to reclaim his Welsh inheritance, but weather and ‘events’ thwarted both endeavour and ambition.

 

It is really very unlikely that this shining knight ever visited Wales ‘on leave’, as it were, from his ferocious campaigns on the continent. Less plausible even that he and his horse should have come to find refreshment at a spring in Iscennen in deepest wooded Carmarthenshire around 1372. He, in legend, is said to have forgotten to replace a capping stone on the spring and to have fallen asleep, only to awake to find he’d caused an inundation! Hence ‘The lake of Owain’s Stone’. Do you believe in fairies, or toads?

 

No capstone ever held back a deluge, and here it is not difficult to see that the magic lake – gone today, here tomorrow – impressed the imaginations of local story-tellers. The two lakes became confused, one with the other. And so the story grew.

 

Owain and his army are supposed by the same fiction to be asleep in a limestone cave at Cylrhychen – awaiting the call. In fact, he was murdered by an English agent, one John Lamb, at Mortagne-sur-Mare, in 1375, and is buried in the church of St Leger on the banks of the Gironde.

 

There are toads around Llynllech-Owain, frogs, too, spawn there in spring. But it is a curiously sterile place, illuminated only by white and yellow water lilies in summer. No fish, with the exception of the now very scarce freshwater eel, can survive in water whose pH is at best 5.5. Yet it is an equally magical place.

 

The surface area is 15.20 acres, and its depth no more than 4’ on average. When surveyed in 1949 for further draw-down of 185,000 gallons to the 400,000 already being taken for potable supply, its capacity in gallons was reckoned at 18,622,350. Its waters are no longer exploited.

 

The curious thing is that Llynllech-Owain shows very little depletion from evaporation or abstraction and its discharge capacity exceeds its surface and catchment area – which is to say that when it rains a far greater volume of water is discharged down the Gwendraeth Fawr than falls on its surface and surrounding land. So it is fed from some mysterious and distant aquifer – just like Pantllyn.