Lastly, our information as to the hunting of Twrch Trwyth is not exclusively derived from the Kulhwch, for besides an extremely obscure poem about the Twrch in the Book of Aneurin, a manuscript of the thirteenth century, we have one item given in the Mirabilia associated with the Historia Brittonum of Nennius, § 73, and this carries us back to the eighth century. It reads as follows:--
Est aliud mirabile in regione quæ dicitur Buelt. Est ibi cumulus lapidum, et unus lapis superpositus super congestum, cum vestigio canis in eo. Quando venatus est porcum Troit, impressit Cabal, qui erat canis Arthuri militis, vestigium in lapide, et Arthur postea congregavit congestum lapidum sub lapide in quo erat vestigium canis sui, et vocatur Carn Cabal. Et veniunt homines et tollunt lapidem in manibus suis per spacium diei et noctis, et in crastino die invenitur super congestum suum.
'Another wonder there is in the district called Buallt: there is there a heap of stones, and one stone is placed on the top of the pile with the footmark of a dog in it. Cafall, the dog of the warrior Arthur, when chasing the pig Trwyd printed the mark of his foot on it, and Arthur afterwards collected a heap of stones underneath the stone in which was the footmark of his dog, and it is called Cafall's Cairn. And men come and take the stone away in their hands for the space of a day and a night, and on the following day the stone is found on the top of its heap [132].'
Lady Charlotte Guest, in a note to the Kulhwch story in her Mabinogion, ii. 360, appears to have been astonished to find that Carn Cavall, as she writes it, was no fabulous mound but an actual 'mountain in the district of Builth, to the south of Rhayader Gwy, and within sight of that town.' She went so far as to persuade one of her friends to visit the summit, and he begins his account of it to her with the words: 'Carn Cavall, or as it is generally pronounced Corn Cavall, is a lofty and rugged mountain.' On one of the cairns on the mountain he discovered what may have been the very stone to which the Mirabilia story refers; but the sketch with which he accompanied his communication cannot be said to be convincing, and he must have been drawing on his imagination when he spoke of this somewhat high hill as a lofty mountain. Moreover his account of its name only goes just far enough to be misleading: the name as pronounced in the neighbourhood of Rhayader is Corn Gafallt by Welsh-speaking people, and Corn Gavalt by monoglot Englishmen. So it is probable that at one time the pronunciation was Carn Gavall [133]. But to return to the incident recorded by Nennius, one has to remark that it does not occur in the Kulhwch; nor, seeing the position of the hill, can it have been visited by Arthur or his dog in the course of the Twrch Trwyth hunt as described by the redactor of the story in its present form. This suggests the reflection not only that the Twrch story is very old, but that it was put together by selecting certain incidents out of an indefinite number, which, taken all together, would probably have formed a network covering the whole of South Wales as far north as the boundary of the portion of Mid-Wales occupied by the Brythons before the Roman occupation. In other words, the Goidels of this country had stories current among them to explain the names of the places with which they were familiar; and it is known that was the case with the Goidels of Ireland. Witness the place-name legends known in Medieval Irish as Dindsenchas, with which the old literature of Ireland abounds. On what principle the narrator of the Kulhwch made his selection from the repertoire I cannot say; but one cannot help seeing that he takes little interest in the details, and that he shows still less insight into the etymological motif of the incidents which he mentions. However, this should be laid mainly to the charge, perhaps, of the early medieval redactor.
