On 8 May 1648 a Parliamentarian army under Colonel Thomas Horton met a larger but poorly armed Royalist force under Major-General Rowland Laugharne in the fields around St Fagans, west of Cardiff. It was the biggest battle of the Second Civil War in Wales and it was decisive: the Royalists broke, and many were killed or taken prisoner. Local tradition held that the River Ely ran red with blood.
That phrase survived for more than two centuries. Marie Trevelyan spoke to an old woman from the Vale, who died aged 99, whose family was known for long lives. She was a descendant of a woman who, in the memory of Iolo Morganwg, claimed to remember the Battle of St Fagans herself. The old woman told Trevelyan that buried money found near Penmark Place in her childhood had been "hidden away by somebody before going to the great Battle of St. Fagan's, when the River Ely ran red with blood."
The modern ghost stories are about the battle's dead. Future Inns says there are reports of "ghostly echoes of fighting" at St Fagans, and that soldier apparitions were allegedly caught in a photograph in 2016; a 2019 blog describes the same picture as showing two soldiers in the background. Dark Wales Tours reports figures in military uniform in the lanes and paths around St Fagans Castle and suggests the battle's casualties may be among the museum's ghosts.
The 2016 photograph has not been found, and the phantom-army story is attached to almost every battlefield in Britain. It is recorded here because the battle is real and its memory in the district is well attested.
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