Walk a Welsh lane late enough and you may see it: a small light ahead of you, bobbing at about the height of a lantern held in a hand. It keeps a steady distance. It seems to know the way. That is exactly the problem.
The Pwca is one of the Tylwyth Teg's rougher cousins — not a lord of the fair folk, but a hedge-and-ditch spirit with a lantern and a grudge against dignity. In Welsh tellings he is usually small, sometimes ugly, and always delighted with himself. He is not the Irish Púca, the great black horse of Samhain, though the two have clearly shared a pint somewhere along the western sea roads. The Welsh Pwca is lanes, farms and hillsides, and his favourite joke is you.
The best-known story comes from Cwm Pwca in the valleys of the south-east, a place the old guides said was named for him. A labourer walking home saw a light ahead and followed it, glad of the company. The lantern led him on across the moor, and on, and on — until the man found himself on the very lip of a sheer drop, with the roar of a river far below. The light hovered out over empty air. Then a small figure appeared beside it, blew out the flame, and left him to find his way back from the edge in the pitch dark, laughter trailing off into the night.
The Pwca does not only take the shape of a lantern-bearer. He has been a shaggy pony that lets you climb on and then gallops through every hedge and bog in the parish before vanishing beneath you. He has been a goat on a wall where no goat should be, a youth leaning on a gate, a sound like someone calling your name from the next field.
And yet he can be kind — on his terms. On some farms a Pwca was said to work through the night, churning butter, threshing corn and sweeping the yard, asking only for a bowl of fresh milk and a bit of bread left by the hearth. Treat him well and the farm prospered. Spy on him, mock him, or give him a gift he found insulting, and the churn would curdle, the cows go dry, and the lantern would start appearing on your lane at night.
That double edge is the heart of him. The Pwca is the countryside's reminder that the dark belongs to something other than us. The land will help you, if you remember your manners. Forget them, and it will walk you very politely to the edge of a cliff.
The Pwca sits among our Veiled Legends designs — half-glimpsed faces behind the mist, the ones you only half believe in until the lane goes quiet. Wear him if you like your folklore with a grin, and a little bit of danger in it.