THE BEAVER 675 



This statement may, of course, be only a plume borrowed f*- >- 

 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 History 

 of Wales written in the reign of Henry VIII., have identified the Castor 

 of Giraldus with a water beast called by the Welsh afangc 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 Nant Ffrancon, in Carnarvonshire, the name 

 being supposed by the natives to be a corruption oi Nant 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 to the Teivi ; and he 

 quotes Owen-Pughe, who, in his Welsh Dictionary (published 1801), says 

 that the Afangc " has been seen in this vale (i.e., Nant Ffrancon) within 

 the memory of man." Hoare concludes that the Afangc 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 Afangc 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.^ 



' Canon Fisher tells us that the use of Afanc = Beaver in Welsh is comparatively 

 modern ; it was used for an aquatic monster, like the Irish piast. Owen-Pughe 

 dropped the reference to Nant Ffrancon in the second edition of his Dictionary 

 (1832). 



