Edmund Jones, a Monmouthshire preacher who collected accounts of apparitions across Wales in the eighteenth century, liked his witnesses sober and godly. David Walter of Pembrokeshire was, in his words, a religious man, and far from fear and superstition.
Walter was travelling alone through a field called Cot Moor, where there were two stones set up, called the Devil's Nags, which were said to be haunted. As he passed he was suddenly seized by something unseen and thrown over a hedge. Another day he went back, deliberately, and took with him for protection a strong fighting mastiff. As he came near the Devil's Nags there appeared in his path the apparition of a dog more terrible than any he had ever seen. He tried to set his mastiff on it, but the great dog crouched at his feet and would not go. Walter stooped to pick up a stone to throw, and at that moment a circle of fire sprang up around the phantom. In its light he saw the white snip down the dog's nose, its grinning teeth and its white tail. He then knew, as Jones puts it, that it was one of the infernal dogs of hell.
Wirt Sikes retold the story in 1880. The Devil's Nags are not easy to identify today; Cot Moor is in the Ambleston area north east of Haverfordwest, and the point on this map is an approximation for the moor rather than for the stones.
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