Journey 5
Gerald of Wales
Llangorse
Is Gerald’s account always true to life?
The joy of Gerald’s writing is his unpredictability. His account digresses intro flights of fantasy.
Convinced that Wales buzzes with superstition, he relates tales of lakes that shift location, hybrid
‘deer-cow’ and ‘monkey-dog’ animals, and locals who predict the future using the shoulder blade of a ram.
At Llangorse, Gerald describes a lake that “sometimes turns bright green, and in our days it has known to become scarlet, not all over, but as if blood were flowing along certain currents and eddies.”
Is he making it up, or is there a grain of truth in his account?
Nick talks to a water ecologist, who explains how the green colouring might have been caused by algal blooms, and the red by heavy rain sluicing sandstone into the water. So, on this occasion at least, we can match Gerald’s writing with modern science.