A 67-year-old regular is back at the bar of a local pub – but he won’t be chatting with too many of the other customers.
The rat of Abercych became famous in the 1950s with numerous reports of a three-foot long rodent which had been spotted around the village.
Descriptions of the beast beggared belief and it became known as the first ‘super-rat’ – a fearsome beast which could cut through a branch with a single bite.
Sightings of the creature caused increasing alarm and soon the hunt was on to track down the beast. Some feared the entire village could become overrun with giant rats.
But it finally met its match on the riverbank outside the Nag’s head Inn where it was hunted down by the then 88-year-old landlord David Morris, who had been out digging potatoes, and managed to spear the creature with a garden fork.
The rodent weighed in at a whopping 10½lbs and was stuffed and mounted on display in the pub, where it has remained, except for a short break, ever since. The inn became famous as ‘the pub with the rat’.
After its capture the ‘rat’ was identified as myocastor coypus, a giant aquatic rodent from South American, so how it ended up in Abercych, nobody knows.
“He’s a bit of a monster and is certainly a talking point for visitors when they come in,” said Dewi, the current landlord of the pub.
“He has been for a walk for the last couple of years but has now reappeared and he’s part and parcel of the history of the place. It’s great to have him back.”
