Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Maes-y-Dydd ·
The River That Signs Its Banks
At every hard frost the river sets a fresh mark on its bank wall, and the masons price the work it orders without once going down to the water.
- status: folklore
Ask at Maes-y-Dydd who owns the river, and the answer you get is the masons', which is: nobody. Ask who signs for it, and nobody points at the water. They point at the wall.
The wall is the bank-stone on the near side of the Onn, from the toll steps down to the stone bridge, coursed, coped, and kept by the masons as their fathers kept it before them. Each winter, at the first hard frost, the mark comes. It lies along the coping under the white of it, a long drawn stroke the exact length of the yard of wall that will want pointing come spring, and about the stroke is written one closed ring, the way a mason rings a tally to make it official.
Visitors argue ice. Ice ferns, they say, ice feathered along a crack in the stone. The masons let them argue. Ice the masons know to the yard, having broken it off their own coping for two hundred years; and the mark has been read at dawn while the breath of the river was still standing on it, and it has an underline. Ice does not underline.
The rule of the wall is short. The mark is a works order. It names its place by lying there, and it says the wall will be wanted. So the masons copy it onto paper — they do not touch it; the frost is not to be handled — measure their pointing from the bank, price the work in the book, and put the bill where all bills for the wall go: the slot in the third pier of the stone bridge, a hand wide, lined with tin. The bill goes in folded once, with the same ring drawn fair on the back, and nothing posts it and nobody collects it and no keeper of the bridge owns the slot. By Lady Day the bill is answered. It is answered in stone: gravel at the upper bend, graded coarse to fine down the slope, cartload for cartload whatever was priced, and no note attached. Forty winters of the masons' book, and never once a short delivery.
Under that rule is the rule they keep hardest: a mason may price the mark but may not go down to the water to price it. No meeting. A job quoted at the water's edge, the old men say, is a job negotiated, and a negotiated wall is not a wall but a lease, and leases run out.
Elias Prosser kept the book for thirty-one of the forty winters, and it was on his watch that the mark came short. One winter the stroke arrived with its tail left off, an unfinished signature, and it was a lean year and the men were owed work, and they priced it as complete and drew their money. In March the gravel came one cartload light. There was no flood to speak of that spring — the quietest thaw in the book — and yet overnight the last course came off the end of the wall, neat as a filed receipt, and the coping behind it was signed and finished, the missing tail drawn fair and square at midsummer, when no frost had any business being frost.
The book itself lives in the vestry safe with the tithe papers. The churchwarden will show you the delivery pages if you ask him after supper, and the figures are all square, every cartload counted into its course of stone. He will not say whether the pages are written in one hand or several, and he will turn the question round on you with a look, because he has understood what the visitors have not: that whoever writes the marks also reads everything else the parish writes down.
They tell it at Maes-y-Dydd today where it has always been told — on the toll steps, the night of the first hard frost, in lamplight, with the masons reading the new mark together and pricing it aloud from the bank and the bill going into the third pier before the doubters can open their mouths. And they end, as old Prosser ended, with his palm flat open on the coping: if the signature is the river's, then whose hand has been holding its pen all this while?