Book extract: In Search of The Last Bard by James Stewart

We are pleased to publish an extract from James Stewart‘s account of an extraordinary Welsh figure, Edward Evan of Toncoch, who seems to have rolled many lives into one.

Yn iach iti’r hen fwthyn,

Hen gartre’r beirdd dros ronyn,

Lle buont ganwaith wrth y tân

Yn gwneuthur cân ac englyn.

Dros fwy na chant o flwydda’

O fewn i’r breswyl yma,

Bu’r awen yn blaguro’n llon,

Ond darfu hon ei gyrfa.

Farewell to you, old cottage,

Farewell old home of the bards,

Where many times beside the hearth

They made their songs and poems.

For a hundred years and more,

Within this little dwelling,

The muse – the ‘awen’- lived and bloomed,

But now her songs are silent.

It was in the spring of 2021, as pandemic restrictions were loosened, that my search began for traces in the landscape of Edward Evan of Ton Coch.  I walked with a friend across the golf course at Mountain Ash, on a plateau high above the Cynon Valley, looking for the remains of a farmhouse whose name was once well-known across Wales as the home of the bard. The fairways between tee and green have replaced fields with names like Gwaun Pennar Isaf, Drysiog, Cae Pen y Rhiw and the meadow called Ton Coch, the Red Field, which gave its name to his farm and his home.

It was the first day the course had been open for over a year. We met a pair of veterans, enjoying the spring sunshine, who remembered when the remains of the farmhouse walls were still standing.  They knew a club member whose grandmother had lived there until her marriage around the time of the Great War. We followed their directions to a spot near the fourteenth green where a pile of overgrown stones was all that remained of a cottage built in the late seventeenth century, not long before Edward Evan’s birth. Below the site, the name survives in Ton Coch Terrace on the steep road that climbs up towards Cefnpennar ridge and the mountain separating the ancient parishes of Aberdare and Merthyr Tydfil.

Though he is all but forgotten now, Edward Evan was remembered and honoured a century ago. On 8 July 1916, the cottage on the golf course was the destination of a group of pilgrims who gathered to mark the bicentenary of his birth. Speeches were made and they heard a poem composed in honour of the poet and his home, including these lines:

Y Ton Coch fu’n tanio cân

Ar dafod Edward Ifan.

Ton Coch lit the flame of song

On Edward Evan’s tongue.

It was after the death of Edward’s son that the family’s connection with Ton Coch was broken and the verses at the head of this chapter were composed by his grandson. The poem is a tribute not only to a family of poets and musicians, but an elegy for a vanished world. Theirs was a way of life which stretched back hundreds of years in the uplands of Glamorgan, the life of small farmers and craftsmen living among the sparsely populated hills and, in this family, cultivating not only the land but also the musical and poetic traditions whose roots lay deep in the history of Wales.

In Edward Evan’s work as a bardd gwlad, a people’s poet, farming was a constant theme, which is no surprise, considering that it was at the heart of his own life from the time of his birth. In a poignant tribute almost a century after his death a local poet prophesied that his fame would live ‘as long as the meadows of Ton Coch bring forth clover and nourishment for man and beast’.

The legends associated with Edward Evan go back to the days of Henry VIII and an ancestor, a blacksmith called Hywel Gwyn y Gôf.  He lived at Pantygerdinen in the parish of Aberdare and owned the iron furnace at the Dyffryn.  Hywel became rich, but he feared for his wealth, so he went with his young daughter Gwenllian and buried his gold under one of the cairns on the mountain between Aberdare and Merthyr.

This was an old established family and their descendant was Edward Evan of Ton Coch, whose poems were so popular that they were printed four times in the following century, when his own legend flourished.

He was revered as ‘the last of the ancient bards’, a direct descendant of the Celtic druids, and the essential link between the distant past and the Gorsedd of Bards, created by Iolo Morganwg, and embedded in the revived Eisteddfod. Another legend was that he had preserved the priceless manuscript of the earliest poem written in Welsh, the Gododdin of Aneirin, which had been lost sometime in the late eighteenth century.

It was not only as this legendary figure that he was remembered, but as one of those whose religious radicalism, rooted in the politics of the seventeenth century, kept the flame of liberty alive for the Chartists of the nineteenth. He stood at the threshold of the industrial revolution and his poetry resonated in the new age of iron and coal which changed the face of south Wales beyond all recognition.

The son of tenant farmers, with little or no formal education in Welsh or English, he was a weaver, a harpist, a carpenter and glazier, a farmer, a woodsman, a bard, and a radical minister of religion. Iolo called him ‘a poet in a thousand’ and he was remembered as ‘a true lover of the Welsh language; a wise and learned singer and preacher; a brotherly poet; a man of good works’.

In Search of the Last Bard by James Stewart is now available online and from all good bookshops.