Witchcraft

The Terrible Tailor of Glanbran

Near Glanbran, Cynghordy, north east of Llandovery

18th century

Glanbran was a mansion in the hills north east of Llandovery, seat of a branch of the Gwynne family. Not far from it, according to a story passed down by the preacher Edmund Jones and printed by Wirt Sikes, there lived a tailor who added to his trade of mending breeches the loftier, if wickeder, business of working magic.

The squire, Mr Gwynne of Glanbran, was a huge man, six feet tall and afraid of nobody, and he took to mocking the little tailor. "Thou have the courage to look upon the devil!" he sneered. "Canst thou show him to me?" "That I can," the tailor answered, his eyes flashing, "but you are not able to look at him." Gwynne roared that if the tailor could look at him, so could he. "Very well," said the tailor. "If you are able to look at him I will show him to you."

It was the middle of the day. The tailor went straight into a small grove in a field nearby and drew a circle in the usual way. After a while he came back and said, "Come with me and you shall see him." The two crossed the field to the stile by the wood, and suddenly the tailor cried out, "Look yonder! There it is!" In the circle Gwynne saw, in Jones's words, one of the fallen angels, now become a devil. It was so horrible that he was never afterwards able to describe it, and from that day on he had a proper respect for the tailor.

Cynghordy is a hamlet on minor roads north east of Llandovery; the Glanbran estate land is private.
Evidence
Long-standing local tradition
Access
Open ground
Location
52.044, -3.739 (Parish-level only, treat as an area)

Sources: Wirt Sikes, "British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions" (1880), Project Gutenberg [public-domain]

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