The Story of Ned the Head

When I was 19, I did a summer WLPAN course in Wales (Welsh immersion). It was held in Lampeter at St. David's University, and I was placed in the intermediate group because I'd had a few years of Welsh already. We had students from everywhere, including Japan and New Zealand. Now and then they loaded us on buses and took us on field trips, including Ystrad y Fflur (Strataflorida) to see the grave of Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Eisteddfod in Abergwaun.

One of our trips was to the Dolaucothi Roman gold mine (dating from the late 3rd century, briefly revived in the 1800s, and closed by 1938). I remember there was a large sign in Welsh at the front, and one of the workers seemed skeptical of all these "foreign" kids being able to learn Welsh. I don't know why, but he focused on me (blonde braids, braces, looking terribly American), and he challenged me---in front of the whole group---to read the sign aloud. All eyes were on me. I stuck my chin in the air and confidently read the sign to the best of my ability, and the man backed off, looking a bit humbled. The other students (many of whom were much more fluent than I) gathered and patted me on the shoulders and said I'd done well. But you see, there's a trick to it -- Welsh is a very phonetic language. If you know the sounds the letters make, you can read anything aloud and sound fluent. Meanwhile, I was silently thanking my lucky stars that the man hadn't asked me to actually translate the sign, because I hadn't understood a single word of it!

The tour guide led us through dimly-lit tunnels (I remember one area was called "Fat Man's Misery"). At one point, he told us the story of Ned. My memory may be faulty, because this was forty years ago, but I believe the story went like this: Ned was a miner who broke the cardinal rule of not working in pairs. He sat and ate his lunch one day but somehow his lamp or candle went out. He tried to fumble his way along the passage in the dark and must have fallen down a shaft and thence to the rock crusher, because all they found of him was his boots (the gorier version of the story is that his boots still contained his feet). The ghost of Ned still wanders the mine shafts, looking for his lamp.

Years later, my husband and kids gave me a ceramic head to put in my garden. Of course there was only one name to give a disembodied body part... Ned the Head. He sits on a flower pot set over the electrical outlet for my fountain, to protect it from rain. He needs a coat of paint now, but he reminds me of Wales and my tiny moment of triumph over the grumpy man at the mine.