The Culverts - Part III

In my search for what I have been assured was a paganistic cult, I’ve had to dig into some weird stuff. My main contact has been the priest I mentioned in the previous update, but I’ve also had to consult some books at the local library. Yeah, when was the last time you looked something up in a book?

I had it on good authority that there had been a trend going around the region with vague shamanistic at the time of the culvert-cult, but I had no idea that anyone had taken it to such a literal idea. A magazine article I found referenced a group of bohemians living by “Four Branches.” At first I thought it might be a place, but some more digging made me think it might have referred to the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. That’s a collection of written Welsh mythology, by the way.

I didn’t make the connection at first, as the only thing to guide me was the fact that the area around here was used for druidic worship in the time before the Anglo-Saxons. It is a “well-known fact” that druidic cults operated until the 1600s, even if I haven’t found any confirmation of this. However, once I looked up cult activity in newspaper reports from the 1920s, I found something. A group of people that moved from all over Britain to the region following the first world war gathered in a group of worshippers that referred to itself as “nifer o cyhyraeth”. I haven’t quite managed to figure out what it’s supposed to mean, but apparently Cyhyraeth is a being from Welsh mythology. It’s a large but thin, skeletal, wraith-like spirit that stalks people who are about to suffer a horrible fate.

Why anyone would want to associate with such a being is beyond me. Maybe they saw some form of divinatory power in its ability to predict death, or maybe there is some other ability that I didn’t read about that is appealing. Or maybe it’s just a misspelling of a completely different word. Unfortunately, I doubt any of the members from 1923 are alive today. However there are no later stories about that group of worshippers, which means that it is not impossible that some sort of religious tradition survived for some 65 years, manifesting in the culvert-cult.

So that’s my theory on who the people causing disturbances around the culvert were. I would have liked to be able to say something more definitive, especially as I’ve spent weeks researching this, but until I manage to get a hold of someone close to the cult, or even a member of it, this will have to do.

I hope you guys have enjoyed the culvert-mystery half as much as I have!