Ghyll:Dŵplat
"Dŵplat" is the name of a stream, and of a meeting house on the stream, in one of the many unnamed villages that lurk in the high green valleys of the north. Context usually disambiguates the two.
Both the stream and house are regarded as magical by the locals, and a plethora of legends are associated with them. The heptagonal-walled meeting house is thought to be many centuries old, being a rich tapestry of gimmickry and occultiana: even its heptagonality is thought to be associated with some ancient seven-stage ritual in which the seven participants must remain equidistant from one another.
The stone benches inside the meeting house are riddled with riddles. For example, the famous Stol'n Riddle: "when you steal one of these, you have to take more than you really want, yet you leave a larger one behind. What is it?" It's said that if all the riddles of the house were to be solved, they'd form one super-riddle which, when solved, would lead to buried treasure.
The stream is thought to have curative properties, and neither dries in summer nor freezes in winter. The source of the stream has never been traced, and it's a common joke in the village to tell newcomers that the stream is in fact circular.
A ghost is sometimes seen in the meeting house in the early winter months, a curious fact about which is that it always appears to have the opposite gender to the viewer, regardless of their sexual orientation, and is never seen by more than one person at a time.
On one of the walls is graffitied a verse from Bordingbras his hatt!, which, according to a recent article in Quester and Phorrus, is in an early form of Modern Standard Ghyllian except for a single line in the same hand and ductus as the rest of the poem, yet which appears in no other recorded version of the poem. Since this version of the poem does not predate the original, the extra line's purpose is a befuddlement.
Citations: Bordingbras his hatt!, Modern Standard Ghyllian, Quester and Phorrus.
--Sean B. Palmer 12:21, 30 Sep 2004 (EDT)
