Walk inland from Llanddeusant on the back roads of north-west Anglesey and you will come, eventually, to a low green rise above the Afon Alaw. On the rise stands a ring of stones, weather-bitten and half-sunk. The Ordnance Survey calls it a Bronze Age round cairn. The Welsh have always called it Bedd Branwen — Branwen's Grave.
Branwen ferch Llŷr is the central figure of the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, one of the four great medieval Welsh prose tales. She was the sister of Bran the Blessed, the giant-king of the Island of the Mighty, and she was married off as a peace-offering to Matholwch, king of Ireland. The marriage went catastrophically wrong. Branwen was beaten in Matholwch's kitchens. Bran took the entire host of Britain across the sea to rescue her. Almost everyone died — Irish and British alike — and only seven men returned alive.
Branwen returned with them, but she did not survive the homecoming. The text is unusually plain about it: 'And they came to land at Aber Alaw in Talebolion. And then they sat down and rested. Then she looked on Ireland and on the Island of the Mighty. "Alas, Son of God," said she, "woe is me that ever I was born — two good islands have been laid waste because of me." And she heaved a great sigh, and with that her heart broke.'
A four-sided grave was dug for her on the bank of the Alaw, and there she was buried. Then her seven survivors walked on, carrying the severed head of her brother Bran south through Harlech and Gwales, where it would speak with them for eighty years.
What is genuinely strange is that when a real Bronze Age cairn at this exact spot was excavated in the 1810s, and again more carefully by Frances Lynch in 1967, the diggers found a central urn of burnt bone. The cairn really is, in its own quiet way, somebody's grave. It is much, much older than the medieval Mabinogi — but the Mabinogi knew the mound was here, and chose to give it to her.
Bedd Branwen is the place where mythology and archaeology touch. You can stand on the rise, listen to the Alaw running below, and decide for yourself whether you are looking at a Bronze Age burial or at the heartbroken queen of the Mabinogi. The people of Ynys Môn have never quite separated the two.
Wear something inspired by Bedd Branwen and you wear the oldest grief in Welsh literature — and the small green hill on Anglesey where it is still kept.