Kennixton is one of the first buildings visitors reach at St Fagans, and it is hard to miss: a tall stone farmhouse washed a deep, rusty red. It came from Kennexstone in Llangennith, at the far western tip of the Gower peninsula, where it was built around 1610 and extended twice. Its last owner gave it to the museum in 1951 and it was rebuilt the following year, one of the first buildings to be moved.
The red is the point of interest. The museum's analysis found that the original pigment was made with lime and ox blood. Wikipedia quotes the museum's view that this "may have been intended as a kind of charm against witches", while noting it could equally have been a way of showing that the family was well off. Red has long been thought to repel witches and the evil eye in British folk belief, most famously in the rhyme about rowan and red thread.
The VoiceMap ghost tour of the museum picks up that theme. Kennixton, it says, was a prosperous farm for centuries but has a strange side: there are signs inside and outside that its owners feared evil spirits. As well as the red walls, it points to the berries of the rowan tree in the garden, rowan being the classic British protection against witches, and to carved figures that can be seen just inside the front door.
There is no ghost story here, only the evidence of what a Gower farming family may have done to keep one out.
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