Professor E.G. Bowen was one of the most distinguished geographers that Wales has produced. He was also one of Aberystwyth University’s greatest characters. It is alleged that on one occasion the compilers of the Encyclopaedia Britannica rang him up and asked him the height of Snowdon. E.G. couldn’t remember – so he thought of a plausible number and reeled it off down the phone. But the people at the other end of the line then checked the figure with a second source. Startled by the discrepancy, they rang back in a panic. The professor was unmoved. “Don’t worry,” he said calmly, “Snowdon is sinking rapidly.” And he put the receiver down.

The professor’s researches into the geography of the settlements of the early Welsh saints were rather more reliable. Perhaps his most important achievement was to draw people’s attention to the importance of the seaways which linked the Celtic lands in the sixth century. At a time when travel overland was difficult and fraught with all sorts of dangers, the sea became a convenient highway (albeit not without its own perils). One of the reasons for the importance of St Davids was its central position. Scholars and pilgrims from Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, Gwynedd and the Isle of Man could sail across to Porth Clais and walk the short distance to the monastic school which Dewi Sant had founded.

Welsh saints and their legends had a habit of attaching themselves to a variety of places, and the sea routes helped to spread their popularity. As well as geographical factors, church politics and finances played a major part in this. In the Middle Ages the body of a saint was a valuable commodity. It could be assumed to have healing powers and would therefore draw crowds of pilgrims who would give generous donations to the shrine where the relics lay. It could also be a source of political influence: the more significant the saint, the greater the kudos which attached to the cathedral or church that possessed his remains. Readers of the Brother Cadfael novels will have caught a glimpse of the skulduggery that was often involved in the ‘translation’ of a saint’s corpse from one church to another.

Probably the most bizarre attempt to satisfy the rivalry of three ecclesiastical centres is the legend of the triplication of St Teilo. This was so notorious that it was even included in the Triads of the Island of Britain, the handy collection of ‘trioedd’ used to jog the memories of medieval Welsh story-tellers. St Teilo’s body was claimed by three different places: Penally (Penalun) in Pembrokeshire, which was his birthplace; Llandeilo Fawr in Carmarthenshire, the centre of the community and monastic school which he founded, and Llandaff Cathedral. Those of us connected with the Diocese of St Davids would say (somewhat ungraciously) that the Llandaff clergy only wanted him because they hadn’t got a decent saint of their own.

The story is that, after his death, Teilo miraculously triplicated himself in order to keep the peace between the three churches. All three were then able to claim that they had the genuine body of the saint. In reality, the acquisition of the bodies must have preceded the explanation of how they came to be where they were. The supposed miracle was a convenient way of sidestepping the issue of which of the churches actually possessed the true relics of St Teilo. It is, of course, possible to hazard a reasonably safe guess as to where the genuine remains actually were. My money would be on Llandeilo Fawr.

Sadly the saint’s amazing self-triplication did not entirely solve the problem. There were in fact three-and-a-bit bodies of St Teilo in medieval Wales. The ‘bit’ was reputed to be St Teilo’s skull – though some recent scholars have claimed that it was more probably that of a young girl, perhaps the victim of a pre-Christian human sacrifice. It was carefully guarded by the Melchior family, and was still being used in the early twentieth century by those drinking from the holy well at Llandeilo Llwydiarth in Pembrokeshire. To add to the confusion, when one of my parishioners visited the church at Landeleau in Brittany a few years ago, he was solemnly shown a fourth body of St Teilo. The local belief was that the holy man had ended his travels there.

The four (and a bit) bodies of St Teilo may well stretch the bounds of credulity. The four birthplaces of Dewi Sant are equally challenging. Most people assume that Dewi was born at St Non’s, on the cliff top not far from St Davids Cathedral. It’s a beautiful and numinous spot, from which you can look across the sea to Gwales, the island of eternity in the Mabinogion. The geography of the setting lends itself to a retelling of the story. At its centre is the healing ffynnon or spring, which is said to have gushed forth when Dewi was born – and the stones which rose up to protect his mother’s modesty. It doesn’t require much of a leap of the imagination to transform the ruins of the nearby medieval chapel into the site of a cottage where the single mother might have brought up her son and taught him the rudiments of the Christian faith.

The ancient standing stones, carefully positioned in the field connected with Dewi’s birth, suggest however that it was a holy place long before the birth of Christ. The link between St Non’s and Dewi’s birth may well be an example of the early Welsh Christian ‘baptism’ of a long-established cultic centre. Once the spring and its surroundings had been linked to the birth of the greatest Welsh saints, its past could be quickly forgotten, while the local customs connected with it would continue in a Christianised form.  Having said which, it is still worth pointing out that St Non’s has a very special atmosphere, sanctified by centuries of Christian prayer and pilgrimage. Whatever the doubts about its historical authenticity, it remains a lovely and appropriate place to pay homage to Dewi’s courageous mother.

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