Boverton today is a village run together with Llantwit Major, with fragments of an old manor house among the farm buildings. In the nineteenth century people called it Boverton Castle and believed it had royal connections.
The tradition was that in the reign of Richard I the place belonged to the Earl of Gloucester, whose daughter Hadwisa married Prince John. When John, as king, divorced her in order to marry Isabella of Angoulême, she was said to have withdrawn to Boverton. There was even a local story that John, on the run from his barons, sheltered there with the woman he had wronged.
Early in the nineteenth century, workmen were employed to take down part of the castle. On a dark, hazy day they saw a tall, shadowy woman dressed in deep widow's mourning of an old style. Her face was hard to see, but her long dark hair fell in braids to her waist. She went from room to room slowly, as though grieving, and every now and then the men heard her sob. They were badly frightened at first, but she appeared so often while the work went on that they got used to her.
One of them described her to a very old person in the neighbourhood and got a matter-of-fact answer: "Oh, she is Wissie, the King's widow. I've often seen her." Trevelyan, who cites the 1839 book The Vale of Glamorgan for the story, suggests Wissie was a memory of Hadwisa. Once the dismantling was finished the workmen stopped seeing her, but for years afterwards people said the black lady haunted Boverton.
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