OK. Margaret the Slave Driver wants info on Jenny Jones … and who am I to argue? So here (in translation) is the low-down on the tune known as Cadair (or Cader) Idris according to one of our experts, Huw Williams:

An original tune by John Parry (bardic name: Bardd Alaw), based on the style of old harp tunes, and written by him in Denbigh in 1804. It was first published in "The Welsh Harper, being an Extensive Collection of Welsh Airs" (1839). It is interesting how Charles J. Mathews, the famous entertainer, came to set the English words for the tune, and how it came to be known in English circles as Jenny Jones. According to "The Life of Charles James Mathews" (Charles Dickens; London 1879), Mathews visited Wales during 1824-1826, and he heard a harper playing the tune on his harp in a hotel in Llangollen. He had never heard the tune before and had no idea who had written it, but he liked it so much that he memorized it. In the farmhouse where he was staying in Pontblyddyn there was a maid called Jenny Jones and a farm servant named David Morgan. Mathews wrote a ballad for the tune, giving it the name of the maid. One night, he said, he sang the ballad in the house of friends in London, and at the end of the evening of entertainment, an old man came up to him and said that he had written the tune and that it had been awarded a prize in the 1804 Eisteddfod under the title Cader Idris. That old man was Bardd Alaw. Later Mathews used the ballad under the title Jenny Jones in a revue (review?) called, "He would be an actor", and it is said that the tune was whistled everywhere in the London streets after that.

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OK. Me again. I take it that the words everyone refers to are those by Ceiriog - which would put them around the middle to latter part of the same century. He churned out a lot of stuff typical of the time. Not my cuppa, really. The English (One morn from Llangollen's dim violet valley) follow the same general idea of the Welsh.

Hope that's of some interest!

Sian