Two Fugitive Ladies

Folding Rock is a literary magazine dedicated to finding and sharing new writing from Wales and beyond, and today’s story is taken from the current issue, themed around folklore and mythology. At the end of the piece, writer Alex Haydn-Williams admits, “Once upon a time, I’d found folklore a bit no-one knows who they were / or what they were doing”, but as you’ll see, the adventures of two 18th-century lovers has changed that. I love the beautifully detailed textual analysis in this essay, and the gentle empathy that draws out the similarities between lives lived hundreds, or even thousands of years apart.

One tepid February morning, I sweated uphill from Aberystwyth town centre. The National Library of Wales hunched above the town like an art-deco temple, or a fallout shelter. On its steps, I turned to a view familiar from the paintings in Aunty Gladys’ street-lit spare room: a slate-grey harbour; sheep on green hills. I walked in. Under the high Reading Room ceiling, I said my name. Then, a bobbed librarian escorted me to an office labelled Llyfrau prin – Rare Books.

On the desk, under clinical lamplight, sat Sarah Ponsonby’s journal for 1778. It was bound in red paper, with small black spots. The librarian checked I didn’t have any liquids on me, and closed the glass door. In the prior weeks, as I’d emailed [email protected] (Diolch yn fawr! Despite my surname, I’m afraid I don’t speak Welsh), I had pictured Britain’s oldest testament of a lesbian life as a padlocked tome. But Sarah’s journal was flimsier than the Ryman notebook I’d brought with me. I opened the journal gently, like picking a ladybird off a leaf. I leaned in, sniffed.

Sarah and her beloved Eleanor’s papers record their gentle decades of sweetly enjoyed retirement. But they begin with drama. On the night of 30 March 1778, Eleanor Butler – forty-two, and riding a horse for the first time – galloped across County Kilkenny. Just before midnight, she halted at an old barn near the Ponsonbys’ newly built manor. Within the manor, precisely on the hour, Sarah Ponsonby picked up her stolen pistol, and a lapdog called Frisk. Then she leapt from the parlour window and ran to her life. Once together, the women changed into Men’s Clouths, lay two nights on straw in a Barn, walked six miles over a mountain, and soon fled from Ireland by the Waterford ferry.

Their families begged them both to return. Eleanor could go back to the Benedictine convent, and Sarah – at twenty-three – still had a few marriageable years left. They could forget this stupid scheme of Romantic Friendship. But both were determined to quit the country their Ascendancy ancestors had planted. I will live and die with Miss Butler, Sarah told her uncle, I am my own mistress. My finger traced the line of her thick, broken nib. She and her sweet love toured Wales for a year, their hair cut short, smiling at their freedom. They kept a journal. Once they had time and ink, Sarah drew a frontispiece:

~ACCOUNT OF~
A Journey in Wales;
Perform’d in May,
1778
~By~
Two Fugitive Ladies
And Dedicated to
Her most tenderly Beloved Companion
~By~
The Author

Two years later, the fugitives stopped at Llangollen. The village had a narrow, Gothic-arched bridge, a winter fair, and a ruined castle. The Dublin-to-Westminster post road ran through it, so cousins and friends could stop in on their way home from London balls. The Ladies rented a cottage just outside the village from John Edwards, the farmer. They named it Plas Newydd, and stayed for fifty-one years.

Come Sunday, the Ladies of Llangollen – as neighbours started to call them – avoided church or chapel. Instead, they took communion with nature. At sunrise on Sunday 11 May 1788, Eleanor threw the windows wide. Gentle wind rustling through the leaves. Cooing of wood pigeons. Sweet pipe of the Thrushes and Blackbirds. In the yard, Margaret (their pet cow, named for a friend) lowed at Sapho (their pet dog named, with questionable spelling, for the famous poetess). After cold mutton at the kitchen table, the Ladies spent the evening sat together in Plas Newydd’s snug library. Candlelight glimmered on the dark oak panels. Read Madame de Sévingé. My Love drawing. From seven till nine, reads the entry in Eleanor’s thick journal, in sweet converse with the delight of my heart.

On my lunch break, I texted Flo, my lover.

they deliver the books to you in these
grey boxes, and you have to use latex
gloves to read them on red cushions

combined with having to read them
in a little warm silent cctved room
because they’re national treasures

it’s all kind of . . . erotic

Hours went by. I looked up. Through the blinds, the sun was smouldering on the horizon. I picked up the line of weighted beads, and closed the journal. While heading out, I sent Flo a picture of my sweaty gloves –

wondered if you’d like to conduct a
close reading?

– and crumpled them into my pocket. I ambled down to the orange beach. Starlings flocked behind the pier, like a thousand shadow puppets. I sat on a wooden breakwater and pulled my socks off. Trying not to notice the cold, I walked to the water’s edge. I gingerly dunked a toe in, stifled a yelp. Salty air blew. It felt rugged, thrilling.

But living with cold quickly becomes boring. Eleanor’s journal entries run long during summer. But in winter, during the Little Ice Age, Denbighshire’s muddy roads froze over, and the Ladies’ world shrank. They often fell ill. The next day, in a volume of Sarah’s letters, I found a home-brew remedy for Eleanor’s week-long headaches. Mix soft water with an egg yolk, then add syrup of violets, syrup of orange peel and antimony. Swallow. Sarah took this mildly poisonous mixture up to Eleanor on days like 2 December 1785:

I kept my bed all day with one of my dreadful headaches. My Sally – My tender, My Sweet Love lay beside me holding and supporting my head till one o’clock when I by Much entreaty prevailed with her to rise and get her breakfast. 

Later, on their pouffy four-poster bed, Sarah read a book about Switzerland aloud to Eleanor. The lovers’ papers – which they regularly burned in the fire – don’t mention sex. But they do document intimacy. Every few weeks, Eleanor recorded a book she’d read to Sally in expensive red ink, like the festal days in a medieval almanac. 

Saturday 14 Feb 
Deep and universal Snow. Piercing Cold. Finished Spencer to my Love.

On finding that red, I gasped. Ohmygod! Nobody had noticed this before; it was the only colour in the journal. Six weeks on, I would write in my master’s dissertation that:

the moment on St Valentine’s Day (a feast day Butler points out elsewhere in the journals) when, amidst ‘universal snow’, one woman read Edmund Spenser’s tales of peaceful shepherds and female knights to her female companion, is an extraordinary record of intimacy.

I wanted to say – why red? Do you think they kissed? 

As I walked down a pitch-black alleyway to dinner, I kept looking over my shoulder – only to see a seagull land, or a sweet old couple wheeling along. In Dumfries, on a previous research trip, a peevish auld man had accosted me outside Robbie Burns’ House. Get ye hair cut, pal. Today, I’d seen three other queers in the library cafe, plus plenty of neon hair and they/nhw badges on the streets. But still, my body thought I was at risk. 

Eleanor and Sarah would have understood. In July 1790, a sensational article in the scandal-loving Town and Country Magazine had shaken their still lives:

EXTRAORDINARY FEMALE AFFECTION
Miss Butler and Miss Ponsonby, now retired from the society of men, into the wilds of a certain Welch vale, bear a strange antipathy to the male sex, whom they take every opportunity of avoiding. 

The anonymous Town and Country correspondent described Eleanor as a Byronic butch, who hangs up her hat with the air of a sportsman in the hall; and appears in all respects as a young man. Meanwhile, Sarah did the housework. She looked soft, effeminate, corruptible. In reality, the women were equals. Both wore men’s riding habits; they had their hair cut short together at Lloyde’s of Oswestry. So they probably laughed at the article – like we laugh at Infowars; a laugh full of derision, and fear.

In 1789, as French revolutionaries decriminalised same-sex relations, Eleanor and Sarah had felt their aristocratic circles grow paranoid of damned sapphists. Their kind of love suddenly implied Jacobinism, and regicide. McCarthyist gaydars were all the rage. Once a close friend to the Ladies, the literary hostess Hester Piozzi now wrote in her diary that ’Tis grown common to suspect Impossibilities – (such I think ’em) – whenever two Ladies live too much together. She couldn’t tell for sure if her north Wales neighbours partook of that horrible Vice. But EXTRAORDINARY FEMALE AFFECTION implied, very publicly, that they did. 

And, the Town and Country added, Britain’s government was paying annuities of fifty pounds each to these probable sapphists. The article propagated the same veiled incitement as Charity campaigning to end puberty blocker ban gets over £800k from council: your taxes are funding this! Do something! 

In the previous decade, the Ladies had fought for a regular income, cajoling their titled visitors to present a sad case of two penniless, eccentric recluses to the Queen. Charlotte – a fan of cottages – thought them whimsical, and granted the pay of a middling civil servant. It was not enough to buy a property. They had renewed their annual lease of Plas Newydd nine times, but John Edwards remained an unforgiving landlord.

So Eleanor and Sarah sought advice from their Anglo-Irish family friend, Edmund Burke. He cautioned the Ladies against suing for libel, and likely saved them from Oscar Wilde’s fate. Instead, the grandfather of British conservatism, and known defender of sodomites said, keep yourselves in your own persons, where you are, infinitely above the feeling of their malice. The scandal sheets would soon find a new target. Avoid the public stage; become less visible; survive. Your consolation, Burke added, must be that you suffer only by the baseness of the age you live in.

From then, the Ladies spent their weekends in the fields, watching from afar the elders soberly conversing returning from the Methodist Chapel. They carefully vetted visitors in advance, rejecting anyone too curious. When the curate of Ruthin turned up outside their door, they bolted it: we have no notion of being disturbed by Welsh parsons. In that quiet safety, they built a contented life. By 30 October, the storm had passed, and calm returned. In the evening, Eleanor and Sarah wandered out into the lane, to spot bonfires in the hills, a sight the Gods might have stooped from Olympus to behold. From the Lane we counted above twenty fires, one in the ruins of Dinas Brân. 

Castell Dinas Brân – or Crow Castle – perched high above Llangollen. Eleanor and Sarah loved ruins, like they loved anything Gothic, and regularly took visitors. Under Dinas Brân’s chipped windows, just after the Black Death (the Ladies told their friends), a bard named Hwyl had courted the fair lady of the castle, Myfanwy Fychan. As the daughter of an English Marcher Lord, Myfanwy knew she had to marry better than a bard. She cut Hwyl off. Heartbroken, he roamed the Eglwyseg Escarpment for years, composing ballads to the lost roses of her cheeks. 

On returning to Lichfield from a weekend in the Ladies’ half-timbered guest room, the poet Anna Seward wrote about Hwyl, dedicating ‘Llangollen Vale’ to her hosts. Seward’s misspelt ‘Hoel’ sings enchanting love songs. But Myfanwy remains silent, uncaring:

Tho’ Genius, Love and Truth inspire the strains,
Thro’ Hoel’s veins, tho’ blood illustrious flows,
Hard as th’ Eglwyseg rocks her heart remains

Amidst the long poem’s polite, Latinate verses, this one sounds lustful. Hoel’s… blood… flows… Hard. Perhaps his lost thirst echoes Seward’s own. In previous years, she had addressed hundreds of sonnets to her girlhood companion Honora Sneyd, and the love-warm looks in which I live. But when Honora came of age, she fell for a handsome officer. No sonnet could stop her marrying – and then dying – young. Like forlorn Hoel, Seward was left alone, to mourn a girl who chose convention over passion.

In ‘Llangollen Vale’s next stanza, though, a queer cohabitation becomes possible. Four hundred years after Hoel, two butch women have made Llangollen Vale their home. Eleanora and Zara (guess who!) live bound to one another. They pant for coy Nature’s charms ’mid silent dale, and plain: the valley provides a sporting ground, and the hills protect them. Their life is demure (coy, silent) and earthy, carnal (pant). Screen’d by mural rocks from the moralising of stern authority, the ladies build the home Seward and Honora couldn’t. Like many of their admirers – from Anne Lister in 1822, to Colette in 1932 – Anna Seward looked at the Ladies of Llangollen, and started to model her own future relationships. 

The academic Fiona Brideoake describes Eleanor and Sarah as a spectral presence in the queer lives of their friends and fans. It seems true. Six weeks later, with their days of winter sickness and quiet care in my ears as I finished my dissertation, Flo would come down with a nasty bug. Not wanting to keep me up by coughing, they’d blow up an airbed in the living room. In the evening, we’d watch In the Mood for Love, and drift off. At midnight, I’d bring ginger tea and paracetamol through from the kitchen. I’d touch Flo’s warm, sleepy head and say, my sweet love.

Two afternoons drifted by at the National Library of Wales, as I pored over Eleanor’s neat, minute handwriting. After putting the last journal back into its grey cardboard sleeve, I walked down to Cardigan Bay. From the promenade, I smiled at a neon-haired trans couple scouring the shore for seashells. High above, the furrows of Pen Dinas – an Iron-Age hillfort – glowed in the 5pm sunset. My breathing slowed. 

The last time I’d felt so comfortable in a landscape like this, I’d been eleven, thirty miles south, kicking a football against an old farmhouse in the Preseli hills. Every nineteen-degree summer of my 2000s youth, my parents had taken me on pilgrimage to Pontrhydyceirt, the hamlet where Dad’s Aunty Gwen had once owned a dairy farm.

I loved Gwen’s old hafod (farm; summer dwelling). Sitting by the stone fireplace, my parents read Tivyside Advertiser articles about speeding motorists, as I watched Ivor the Engine on VHS. 

Before the farm, marriage had been Gwen’s only real prospect. The state paid for Grandad to go to university. But Alice (always the clever one) wasn’t allowed. So when our family inherited a farm – after the Second World War killed three cousins, and left the cows unherded – she left Swansea behind.

Gwen had found a quiet idyll in the Preselis. On arriving in 1946, she renamed the farmhouse Bryn Heulog, or Sunny Hill, and filled its west-facing living room with books. Like centuries of Preseli women before her, Gwen lived in kinship with the seasons. She raked autumn leaves; she read novels under a Welsh blanket; she tended calves as the hedgerows came back to life. The Preselis granted Gwen the space to think, as well as exist – just as Llangollen Vale had, 160 years before, to Sarah and Eleanor. 

Each year, Gwen drove to Oxford for a week’s summer school at Kellogg College. Perhaps she tied a hamper to her Morris Minor’s luggage rack, full of pressed flowers and Welsh cakes. That would fit the Gwen I was constructing in my head. 

She was a critical fabulation, I suppose; an attempt to imagine what might have happened, like Saidiya Hartman does, from scraps of anecdote inherited alongside bibles and mottled wedding photos. Amidst the shibboleths of family history (Grandad fighting Mussolini; the uncles on strike in 1926), Gwen’s independence felt fugitive, hard to capture. So did my own. On those long summer trips, we always called on Aunty Gladys at her bungalow. A sparkling, five-foot woman, she had played her tabernacle’s organ for seventy consecutive years. She’d give me ration-paper copies of the Mabinogion and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. I never told Gwen that I wasn’t a Methodist. Let alone admit to being a genderqueer, bisexual communist, who cheered when England scored. Instead, I ate sausage rolls and lied about knowing vicars. 

The neon-haired couple put their scarves on, and left the beach. It was getting cold. My phone vibrated. Your train to London Euston is leaving on time. After a weekend with Eleanor and Sarah, maybe my heulu (household; family; nation) had grown. Even when they couldn’t kiss in public, Welsh queers like them had lived together – quietly understood, almost mentioned, earthy, and smart.

The next year, in a cold March, I returned to Aberystwyth with Flo. We climbed Pen Dinas, Flo’s coat-tails swishing in the Atlantic wind. From the top, we saw to Yr Wyddfa, and took a selfie with tousled hair. It hailed on the way down. Laughing, we ran to a nearby bus shelter. The elements tap-danced on its corrugated roof.

That evening, curled up in our hotel room, I read Welsh folktales aloud from my phone. In the time of Arthur’s birth, on an isle in Llyn Tegid (that’s near Llangollen!) lived Ceridwen, a liar skilled in magic, witchcraft and sorcery. Ceridwen, Ystoria Taliesin said, brewed magic potions in the cauldron of Awen (meaning poetry, opening of the self). A bard who drank her draughts would gain poetic insight – and the ability to change shape. 

Storytelling is shapeshifting. Words alter matter. Like I will live and die with Miss Butler, I am my own mistress; like I think I might – I think I don’t completely – I think I don’t completely identify with masculinity.

We watched an Alice Roberts documentary on Flo’s laptop, our legs entwined under the covers. Roberts and the cuddly UCL archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson strode across Waun Mawn, a windswept, grey-green field in the Preselis. A stone circle had once stood there, Pearson said. Five thousand summers ago, on solstice morning, a crowd had thronged up from the valley floor. They’d watched the sun rise between a pair of Waun Mawn’s two-metre-tall bluestones and celebrated – somehow – the turning of the year. 

The evidence for all this is so old, it barely exists. In order to date Waun Mawn accurately, a cagoule-wearing geologist called Tim used a photon microscope to look for a spot, far below ground, where ancient sunlight had once touched grains of quartz in the soil, proving it had been disrupted. The process was called Optically Stimulated Luminescence – OSL for short. As archaeology tends to, OSL had proven one simple fact – a stone stood here – and suggested infinite stories. We couldn’t hear the prayers of my ancestors’ priestesses; we couldn’t see their costumes, or their dance. But it felt consoling to know their stones lined up with a solstice; that my 123-times-great-grandparents had lived within the same seasonal cycle as my great-aunt, nine-and-a-half miles down the road from her farm.

Perhaps, Flo and I wondered aloud, those priestesses were intellectual like Gwen. Perhaps they were trans, like us. On the slow train from Birmingham to Aberystwyth, we had passed an old copy of the London Review of Books between us. One article had described Enheduanna, a Babylonian High Priestess of the Moon, and the world’s earliest named author. In the city of Ur, twenty-three centuries before the Common Era (while Waun Mawn’s bluestones still topped the Preselis), Enheduanna had written a praise poem to a Mesopotamian goddess who could turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man. Passionate Inanna tells of festivals overseen by gender-blurring priestesses and cultists. The pilipili were raised as women, but Inanna gave them a spear, and made them men; the gala adopted female names on joining her cult, where they sang in a dialect reserved for holy women. Another, less elevated anecdote implied that the gala bottomed at carnival time.

Queerness isn’t restricted to one place. So, we asked: did boys in the Preselis ever cross the boundaries of gender, as Susan Stryker thinks we always will? Did they become priestesses, like their Babylonian contemporaries? Did those tall girls greet the sun on solstice morn? The Irish writer Manchán Magan, whose book Thirty-Two Words for Field I’d brought to Aberystwyth, imagined that medieval Celtic legends carry a fragment of lost Neolithic tradition within them, like quartz trapping sunlight underground. Did Ceridwen’s story hold a folk vestige of trans priestesses? We can’t know with a rational certainty. But myth is not opposite to fact. A sorceress-poet, who switches gender at will, sounded like a plausible memory of self-authorship and transition.

That night, as the sea lapped on the pebbly shore below our window, Flo’s love of myth and witchcraft conjured up new worlds. Once upon a time, I’d found folklore a bit no-one knows who they were / or what they were doing. But talking with Flo in our rented burrow, the blurred edges of my patrimony meant possibility, not erasure. Before sleep, I opened Notes, and added ceridwen or ceri (gender neutral!) to my long list of ideas for a new middle name.

Folding Rock was founded in 2024 by two editors determined to help put Wales and Welsh writing on the UK’s literary map. They publish the best new creative writing, including fiction, non-fiction, and everything in between.

Alex Haydn-Williams is a writer and researcher, who thinks a lot about queer domesticity between 1740 and 1835. Alex’s work has featured in the International Journal of Welsh Writing in English and at the International Bisexuality Research Conference. With Seedlings, they run quarterly Rambles through London’s queer and radical histories.

Freya Allan is an illustrator based in Dundee. Her practice involves translating her lived experience in our beautiful world into playful, stylised, and appealing illustrations. She loves drawing cool people, cute animals, beautiful places, and food she wants to eat. You can find more of her work on Instagram.