Walk into almost any medieval church in Wales — Llananno, Patrishow, Llaneilian here on Anglesey, Cilcain in Flintshire — and look up. Somewhere on a corbel, a roof boss, a pew-end or a font, you are likely to find him: a face peering out of a tangle of carved leaves. Oak, ivy, hawthorn and acorns spill from his mouth and curl out of his ears. His eyes are open. His expression is somewhere between welcome and warning.
He is the Green Man, and nobody knows exactly what he means.
The name itself is modern — coined in a 1939 article by the folklorist Lady Raglan, who noticed how often the foliate head appeared in English and Welsh churches and decided he must be connected to Jack-in-the-Green, the May Day figure, and to the older spirit of the woods. The medieval masons who actually carved him left no explanation. They simply put him into the stone — sometimes alongside saints and angels, sometimes by himself, sometimes in places only the rafters can see.
What we can say is that the foliate head is genuinely old. There are Roman versions, late antique versions, early Christian versions in the Levant. He appears in Romanesque France in the 12th century and travels north with the Cistercians. By the late Middle Ages he is everywhere in Britain: spitting leaves, sprouting branches, sometimes laughing, sometimes grimacing, always returning. He is in cathedrals (Llandaff, Hereford, Norwich) and in tiny mountain chapels with twenty seats.
The temptation is to call him a survival of paganism — the old god of the woods, smuggled into Christian buildings by masons who never quite forgot. The truth is probably more interesting than that. The medieval Welsh saw no clean line between the church and the forest. The same craftsmen who carved Christ in glory carved the leaf-spitting face on the boss above his head. Both belonged. The Green Man is what happens when a culture takes its forests seriously — when oak and ivy are not just décor but ancestors.
He has had a quiet second life in modern Welsh and English culture. The poet Geoffrey Grigson wrote about him. Kingsley Amis put him in a novel. Folk musicians have built whole records around him. He turns up on pub signs from Powys to Pembrokeshire. And every May, in villages from Hastings to Holywell, somebody still dresses up as Jack-in-the-Green and dances him through the streets.
Wear the Green Man and you wear the oldest agreement we have with the woods of these islands — the face in the leaves, the eyes that follow you out of the carving, and the quiet medieval promise that the forest is also watching back.