While on the subject of warnings and death omens, I may mention a curious tradition connected with an old church I know in Pembrokeshire. In a corner of the building is kept the bier used at funerals; and it is reported that always just before any death occurs in the parish, this bier is heard to creak loudly, as though a heavy burden had been laid upon it. The churchyard adjoining has also a haunted reputation, and I have been told that not even a tramp would willingly pass its gates after dark.
Another death warning is the tolling--by unseen hands--of the bell of Blaenporth Church (in Cardiganshire). This eerie sound was said to be always heard at midday and midnight just before the death of any parishioner of importance. But as far as I can gather, the Blaenporth bell has ceased to toll its warnings; for an inhabitant of the parish, who knows the country people and their ideas very well, told me she had never heard of the mysterious tolling, and thought it must be a dead tradition. But it is a picturesque one, and so characteristic of Celtic ideas, ever interpreting as signs and portents the slightest incident that happens to break the ordinary routine of life, that I thought it worth recording here.
Another superstition (certainly not picturesque), which I have never heard of but in Cardiganshire, was that it was very unlucky to bury the bodies of any cattle that happened to be found dead in the fields! What idea can have been connected with such an unsanitary prejudice I cannot imagine.
When reading a paper at a local antiquarian meeting some few weeks ago, the Vicar of Lledrod,[21] Mr. H. M. Williams, referred to the origin of the Welsh word "Croesaw," which means "welcome"; and in explanation he related how he came to realise that the word was derived from the noun _croes_ (a cross). He said: "A farmer's wife, whenever I visited her house, as soon as she saw me at the door, would take some instrument of iron, such as a poker or knitting-needle, and ceremoniously describe a cross on the hearth, and would afterwards address me with the words 'Croesaw i' chwi, syr.' ('Welcome to you, sir.') This custom existed at Llanddeusant, Carmarthenshire, where I lived twenty years ago."