Llyn Coron is a low, marshy, almost circular lake on the coastal plain south-west of Bodorgan, just inland from Aberffraw. It is a Site of Special Scientific Interest now, famous for its waterbirds and its rich fringe of reed and sedge. It is also, according to a stubborn local tradition, home to its own afanc.
The afanc is the great water-beast of Welsh folklore — half-beaver, half-demon, sometimes described as a kind of giant crocodile, sometimes as a huge dog-headed thing with a snake's tail. The most famous afanc is the one Hu Gadarn is said to have dragged out of Llyn yr Afanc near Betws-y-Coed using two enormous oxen, after the creature had repeatedly broken its banks and drowned half the cattle in the Conwy valley. Anglesey, jealous as ever of its mainland cousins, always insisted it had one too — only better behaved, because there was no one local big enough to come and drag it out.
The Llyn Coron afanc was supposed to lie in the deepest part of the lake by day, under the mat of weed and the cold spring-fed water, and to come into the shallows at dusk to take cattle that wandered too close to drink. Farmers above the lake were warned, well into the nineteenth century, to bring their stock in from the lake margin before the light went. Cows that were missed sometimes disappeared overnight, leaving only the trampled reed-bed and, more than once, a single hoof.
The naturalistic explanation is the one you would expect: the lake margin is a peat bog, and a cow that strays in to drink at dusk can easily get bogged and drown. The afanc is, on this reading, the folk-memory of a real and recurring agricultural problem dressed up in a long dark wake and a pair of glowing eyes. But the bog and the dark wake have been quietly cooperating on Llyn Coron for so long that nobody in Aberffraw can quite tell them apart any more.
Today Llyn Coron is mostly visited by birdwatchers in green parkas with telescopes. They report mute swans, pochard, teal, the occasional bittern. Nobody has reported the afanc in a long time. But the path between the lake and the village is still avoided in the half-hour after sunset by people who grew up there.
Wear something inspired by the Afanc of Llyn Coron and you wear Anglesey's quiet little echo of the great Welsh water-beast — the one in the reeds at the back of Aberffraw, that has never needed Hu Gadarn or his oxen.