The Samhain Legacy · An interactive atlas
Philip Maxwell wrote his novels to be followed. When the trilogy first came out, its footnotes sent readers to his website to see the real history behind the story. That site has gone. The places are still there.
Follow the ley lines of Anglesey, then sail west with a Welsh prince, through the stones, legends and history behind the books.
Or begin the journeyAct one
Today · Manhattan, New York
It begins a long way from the standing stones. Josh MacMaddock has no interest in where his family came from. He works in marketing, he lives in Manhattan, and the past is somebody else’s problem.
Then gunmen open fire on a New York street, and a cream envelope with British stamps arrives.
Ynys Môn · Anglesey, North Wales
The letter leaves Josh an estate on Anglesey, a low green island off the north-west corner of Wales. The Romans called it Mona. The Welsh still call it Môn Mam Cymru: Môn, the mother of Wales.
For the Celtic peoples of Britain and Gaul it was the heart of Druid learning, and its fields are scattered with the burial chambers and standing stones of people who were here thousands of years before them.
AD 60 · The Menai Strait
In AD 60 the governor of Britain, Suetonius Paulinus, marched on Anglesey to destroy the Druids. His infantry crossed the strait in flat-bottomed boats; his cavalry swam beside their horses.
The historian Tacitus describes what waited on the far shore: women in black running between the warriors with flaming torches, and Druids with their hands raised to the sky, calling down curses. The soldiers froze, then attacked. The sacred groves were cut down.
1942 · Llyn Cerrig Bach
In 1942, workers building the runway at RAF Valley dug peat from a small lake and spread it on the sand. Out of it came swords, spears, chariot fittings, cauldrons and a slave chain, which they used to tow lorries out of the mud before anyone realised how old it was.
More than 150 Iron Age objects had been thrown into the water as offerings, over several centuries, up to around the time the Romans came. It is one of the most important Druid-era finds in Britain.
c. 3000 BC · Bryn Celli Ddu
Bryn Celli Ddu began as a henge and stone circle, and later became a passage tomb, covered by an earth mound. In 1906 the astronomer Norman Lockyer suggested that it was built to face the sunrise on the longest day of the year. Few took the idea seriously.
He was right. At dawn on midsummer morning the sun shines straight down the passage and lights the chamber at the back.
1921 · Across Anglesey
In 1921 Alfred Watkins was looking at a map of Herefordshire when he saw that ancient sites (standing stones, burial mounds, hill forts, old churches) fell into straight lines that ran for miles. He called them leys.
Watkins thought they were old trackways. Others since have believed they carry currents of energy through the earth. On Anglesey, early Christians often built their churches on top of older sacred stones, and the lines run on across the water to the mainland.
“Imagine a fairy chain stretched from mountain peak to mountain peak, as far as the eye could reach…”
Alfred Watkins, 1922
Fiction · Liverpool Bay, the Irish Sea
The gas fields under Liverpool Bay are real. The night two men vanished from a rig out here is not.
When the trilogy came out, Philip wrote the newspaper reports of the disappearance himself and published them on his website, quoting a crew member who swore he saw brilliant flashes of light: “something was out there that night, something not human.”
AD 902 · Dublin to the Wirral
In 902 the Irish drove the Vikings out of Dublin. One of their leaders, Ingimund, sailed across the Irish Sea and tried to settle on Anglesey. The Welsh chronicles record that he held a place called Maes Osfeilion, before he was driven off again.
He moved on to the Wirral, where Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, let his people settle. Place names there are still Norse today.
Act two
1170 · Rhos-on-Sea
When Owain Gwynedd, King of Gwynedd, died in 1170, his sons went to war with each other over the crown. One of them, Madoc, wanted no part of it.
The legend says he sailed west from near Rhos-on-Sea with the ships Gwennan Gorn and Pedr Sant, found a great land beyond the ocean, came home for more settlers, and sailed again. He was never seen in Wales again. A plaque on the sea front at Rhos still marks the spot.
The Atlantic · Across the ocean
No one can prove Madoc made the crossing. But the story mattered. In 1580, Elizabeth I’s astrologer John Dee used it to argue that a Welsh prince had reached America first, so the New World belonged to the Tudor crown.
Over the next two centuries, settlers and traders moving west kept bringing back the same rumour: somewhere on the rivers lived a tribe of pale-skinned, Welsh-speaking Indians.
1953 · Fort Morgan, Mobile Bay, Alabama
Tradition puts Madoc’s landing at Mobile Bay, on the Gulf coast of Alabama. In 1953 the Daughters of the American Revolution put up a plaque at Fort Morgan, at the mouth of the bay: “In memory of Prince Madoc, a Welsh explorer, who landed on the shores of Mobile Bay in 1170.”
Act three
c. 2000 BC? · Salem, New Hampshire
On a hill in New Hampshire there are stone chambers, walls and standing stones that line up with the solstice sunrises and sunsets. At the centre is a four-and-a-half-ton slab with a carved groove running round its edge: the Sacrificial Table. Beneath it, a hidden shaft leads to an underground chamber, so a voice could seem to come from the stone itself.
Charcoal from the site has been carbon-dated to about 2000 BC. Many archaeologists think the structures are far younger, the work of 19th-century farmers. The argument has gone on for a century.
1810 · Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee
In 1810 John Sevier, the first governor of Tennessee, wrote down what the Cherokee chief Oconostota had told him decades earlier: that ancient fortifications in Cherokee country had been built by white people who had crossed the great water: “a people called Welsh”.
The walls are real: on Lookout Mountain, along the crest of Fort Mountain in Georgia, and at the Old Stone Fort on the Duck River. Archaeologists date them to Native American builders, centuries before Madoc. The legend has never quite let them go.
1186 · Falls of the Ohio, Louisville
The early settlers of Kentucky heard the same story from the tribes who traded at the Falls of the Ohio: long ago, a people they called the White Indians had fought a war of extermination here, and been driven onto Sand Island and slaughtered.
Pioneer accounts tell of a field of bones on the north bank, of six skeletons in brass breastplates bearing a mermaid and a harp, and of a broken tombstone carved with the date 1186. None of it has survived. The floods of the Ohio took the rest.
1796 · Up the Missouri
The survivors, the story goes, fled down the Ohio and up the Missouri. In 1796 a young Welshman, John Evans from Waunfawr, went 1,800 miles up the Missouri to find them. He found the Mandan people, but no Welsh.
Eight years later Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804 with the Mandans, at Fort Mandan, on the way to the Pacific.
1832 · The Heart River, North Dakota
The painter George Catlin lived among the Mandans in 1832 and became convinced they were Madoc’s descendants. He wrote of their pale skin, grey hair and blue eyes, and of round boats like Welsh coracles. He painted the Okipa, their great ceremony.
Five years later smallpox almost wiped them out. The Mandan people live on today as part of the MHA Nation at Fort Berthold, North Dakota, and their own oral history tells of their origins in their own words.
Mato Tipila · Wyoming
It rises 1,267 feet above the Belle Fourche River, the core of an ancient volcano. In 1906 it became the first national monument in the United States. To the Lakota it is Mato Tipila, Bear Lodge.
The Kiowa tell of seven girls chased by a giant bear. They climbed onto a rock and prayed, and the rock grew up into the sky, carrying them out of reach. The bear’s claws scored the sides. The girls became the seven stars of the Pleiades.
The trail goes on
Everything on this map is real, except the house and the rig. What Josh finds at the end of the trail is in the books.
From Philip’s original website, 2013
madoc.mobi is offline. These pages were saved by the Internet Archive.