THE BEAVER 675 
This statement may, of course, be only a plume borrowed from 
Giraldus. 
The three references just dealt with constitute the whole of the 
reliable documentary evidence relating to the Beaver in England and 
Wales at present known. It is true that Price and Llwyd, in a Hestory 
of Wales written in the reign of Henry VIIL., have identified the Castor 
of Giraldus with a water beast called by the Welsh af/angc or avanc, and 
in this they have been followed by the compilers of Welsh Dictionaries ; 
our authors added that only the name of the beast lingered in Wales in 
their day, and “what it is very few can tell.’ Camden, Ray, and 
Pennant call attention to a pool in the Conway, not far from Bettws 
y Coed, at the junction of Denbigh and Carnarvon, called Llyn yr 
Afangc, or the Beaver Pool; to another pool bearing the same name 
in Montgomeryshire (between Moat Lane and Llanidloes); and also 
to a little valley called Mant Ffrancon, in Carnarvonshire, the name 
being supposed by the natives to be a corruption of Want yr Afancwn, 
or the Beaver Hollow. Pennant adds:—“I have seen two of their 
supposed haunts: one in the stream that runs thro’ Nant Frankon, 
the other in the river Conway a few miles above Llanrwst; and both 
places, in all probability, had formerly been crossed by Beaver dams.” 
Hoare points out that if the Afangc be identical with Gerald de Barri’s 
Castor, then the latter cannot have been confined tothe Teivi; and he 
quotes Owen-Pughe, who, in his Welsh Dictionary (published 1801), says 
that the Afange “has been seen in this vale (2.2, Mant /francon) within 
the memory of man.” Hoare concludes that the Afange is nothing 
more than an obsolete or perhaps a local name for the Otter, and 
this view has received Harting’s approval (Extinct Brit. An., 37). The 
animal described by Giraldus is undoubtedly the Beaver. That old 
writer was not only an acute observer, he was a Welshman as well. 
It is therefore very difficult to think him mistaken when he describes 
the Beaver as being restricted to the Teivi; the more so since he 
obviously took much interest in that point. But at a still earlier 
period, in Romano-British times and probably for some centuries later, 
the Beaver had certainly a wide distribution in both England and 
Wales. Therefore, notwithstanding the fact that the modern animal 
mentioned by Owen-Pughe was in all probability nothing but an Otter, 
there is no reason why Afange should not have been the name of the 
Beaver in North Wales long before the time of Giraldus; and this 
view would be in complete harmony with the statement of Price and 
Llwyd quoted above.! 
1 Canon Fisher tells us that the use of Afavc = Beaver in Welsh is comparatively 
modern ; it was used for an aquatic monster, like the Irish fzas/, Owen-Pughe 
dropped the reference to Nant Ffrancon in the second edition of his Dictionary 
(1832). 
