Princess Thaney was the daughter of King Lot of Gododdin. The
old King was horrified to find, one day, that his unwed daughter
was pregnant, and since she steadfastly refused to name the father
of her unborn infant, Thaney was told she must wed a local
swineherd. Refusing, she so angered her father that he had her tied
into a chariot and driven over the cliff face at Trapain Law.
However, the chariot floated gently to the ground and Thaney was
unharmed. Picking herself up, she found that even this miracle had
not deterred her persecutors in their endevour to rid themselves of
such an embarrassment. They seized her, flung her into an oarless
coracle, pushed it well out into the Firth, and hoped she would be
carried out to sea and drowned. In the night, however, a wind
blew up and the coracle was carried over to the Isle of May,
where it was surrounded by a vast school of fish which magically
escorted the coracle and its passenger to Culross, on the Fife
shore of the Forth. Here, the exhausted woman was found by St.
Serf and gently carried to safety and shelter, where her son was
born.
St. Serf baptized the infant Kentigern, and he grew to be a great man in the
British church. Thaney became a christian as well and, in time, she was canonized, though not
before she had been reunited with Kentigern's father, King Owein
of North Rheged. The dashing monarch had seduced poor
Thaney, then returned to his wife. The princess, however, had
fallen in love with him; and when, not long after Kentigern's birth,
Owain's wife had fallen ill and died, he sent for Thaney and she
gladly joined him. Much to her father's shame, the two were
married with the greatest pomp and ceremony.
