In a previous column I wrote of a mythical mediaeval character known as Jack O’Kent (no relation), who prowled up and down the Welsh/English boundary in the middle ages and who was on good terms with the Devil. He outwitted the Devil in various games and engaged in various throwing competitions with him. He and the Devil were characters in Welsh mythology. It has to be said that this devil was not the evil devil as usually remembered, but a somewhat backward character, easily deceived by the real villain, the devious O’Kent.

His speciality was throwing rocks, or rather stones, and he out-threw the Devil in throwing contests with some stones from the throwing venue at the Devil’s Pulpit, which was the Devil’s home ground on the Gloucestershire side of the Wye overlooking Tintern.

These stones, so the legend goes, reached Trellech near Tintern in Gwent, and that is where they still stand. Unfortunately, one of his stones was hurled in the wrong direction, and flew through the air to Wibdon, another reminder of the throwing power of these mediaeval mythical personalities. The stone is still standing, and is upright between the A48 and the Gloucester to Chepstow rail line, and can be seen best from a passing railway carriage.

I had never heard of Wibdon before, but I have found out that it is the name of an area or settlement that appears on some maps of the south western peninsula of the Forest. Amongst all the place names among the commons, meends, chases, and slades of this unforested part of the Forest there is a great range of similarly unusual place names.

My favourite is Plusterwine, but we also have Clanna, Stroat, Boughspring, Netherend, Stroat, Lancaut, which are all villages or other rural areas that overlap each other in this part of our area. These places with these exotic names were in the mediaeval ‘Twyford Hundred’, a name which is now extinct, but may be retained in a corrupted form as ‘Wyvern Pond’ in Woolaston. A wyvern was a mediaeval term for a sort of dragon that Jack O’Kent might have been interested in hunting down, but historical cartographers insist that over the ages ‘Twyford’ is corrupted into the name ‘Wyvern’. Apparently there was a brook running through that area which had two crossing points, which became ‘Two Fords’ before morphing into ‘Wyvern’. Nothing to do with dragons or the River Wye.