Where the Folk: A Welsh Folklore Road Trip

A road trip through Wales and its rich history of folklore.

Russ Williams was raised on Welsh stories, like the one about a mountain that would send you mad or turn you into a gifted poet if you camped out on it, or the one about the lost civilization drowned by the sea, and the one about the bottomless lake leading down to the Welsh Otherworld. Stories of witches and giants and heroic kings, dragons and mad doctors, ghostly women, giant beaver monsters, vampire furniture, and pirate-fighting monks.

As entertaining as it is informative, Where the Folk follows Russ Williams as he travels in Griff, his creaky red Fiesta, in search of places associated with Wales’s legends, folklore, and urban myths. In this joyful travelogue, not only does Russ recount some of Wales’s most interesting stories, but he also explores the origins behind the myths, talking to experts and storytellers to find out how and why they might have come about, and what they tell us about Wales past and present.

Russ Williams grew up in Caernarfon in North Wales and now lives in Cardiff. He runs two blogs, Brawd Autistico, which documents his life with an autistic brother, and Where the Folk, about Welsh folklore and urban myths.