LILLA PENNANT’S real-life stories from the remote north Wales villages of Tremeirchion and Sodom — drawn from conversations she had with old residents back in the 1970s and ‘80s — have about them the faint whiff of witchcraft and paganism, allied to a nicely crafted atmosphere of rain and wind on the hillsides and moors thereabouts.

What they don’t have, though, is a great deal of substance. Despite vague allusions to long-held secrets that Pennant might be able to uncover, nothing much is ever revealed, at least in terms of old-time magic or druidic practices.  

The best we get is tales of herbal medicine and tea-leaf reading, allied to details of the lives of a series of eccentric, strong women.  

That may not be Pennant’s fault, for these things are often lost to history. But it does leave the reader with a nagging feeling of unfulfilled promise. It would have been perfectly acceptable for the author just to tell her stories without trying to weave in a false sense of suspense and expectation.

Even the biggest actual “secret” that Pennant unfurls — the extent to which poaching underpinned the lives and economies of the villagers from Victorian times right up to the ‘50s — is so well signposted that in the end it comes as little surprise.  

Nonetheless, the book is an interesting and valuable piece of social history. Its later sections on the all-pervading importance of poaching are a useful insight into long-established inequalities in Welsh rural life that forced successive generations into dangerous illegality just to survive.  

It is also revealing in its portrayal of a set of people living on the very edge of comfortable existence, with the spectre of the workhouse, tramping, homelessness, emigration and hunger hovering over the landscape like a black cloud.

Although many of the recollections are inconsequential in themselves, collectively they build up into a stimulating picture of a life which, fortunately in many ways, sadly in others, is now long gone.  

The book itself is beautifully packaged, with evocative illustrations by Meyriel Edge and it makes one hunger for the simple way of life it chronicles, even if it was underpinned by hardship and suffering.  

Published by Y Lolfa, £7.99.