A Sad Tale from the Mountain

The Sad Demise of Johnny Wityn

Before the Second World War there was a strange old man called Johnny Evans who lived in a small cottage called Waun Fach, up a rough track off the Cilgwyn Road.  The cottage was unapproachable by wheeled vehicles.  But Johnny was happy enough, so long as people left him alone.  He did odd jobs for the local farmers, but he was something of a recluse who preferred his own company to that of others.  He was a very quiet and shy man, who had apparently been spoilt as a child and had been looked after for far too long by his mother when he grew up.  He was known to everybody as Johnny Wityn.  On one occasion Mr George Hughes of Felin Cilgwyn met Johnny, who was out in the woods gathering sticks for his fire.  He offered him a bucket of coal, but Johnny replied: “No thank you, Mr Hughes bach, I couldn’t accept that.  Coal is far too dirty.”  That was  ironic, since Johnny was known never to wash, and to sleep in the warm ashes of his fire when the weather was really cold.  People thought that one day he would certainly go up in flames.
    During the terrible winter of 1947, when thick snow blanketed the ground for weeks on end, Johnny caught pneumonia and the neighbours thought that he would die if he was not rescued from his hovel.  The Council decided to take him to some warm place where he could be looked after.  An ambulance managed to get fairly close to his cottage, and from there a rescue party trekked through deep snow-drifts to Johnny’s cottage.  He was cold and hungry, but still very much alive.  He  refused point-blank to leave his hovel.  A furious argument ensued, and at last the officers decided that “for his own good” force would have to be used.  After a struggle, he was tied to a chair and carried through the snowdrifts to the ambulance, protesting that he was being abducted against his will.  He was taken along the snowy roads to St Thomas’s Hospital in Haverfordwest, where he was bathed and fed and given medical treatment.  Two days later he was dead, and it is still believed in the community that “poor Johnny Wityn died of cleanliness”.  He was buried in an unmarked grave in Caersalem Churchyard.


(This tale, together with many others, is included in the 2008 booklet called "Carningli -- Land and People" -- still in print, priced at £6.00.)