The story goes that a boatload of men and women came drifting into Red Wharf Bay, on the north coast of Anglesey below Llanddona. They had been thrown out of their own country for witchcraft and set adrift in a boat with no rudder and no oars, to live or die as the sea decided. When the people on shore saw them they tried to push the boat back out, and even after the strangers landed they were kept on the beach. Half dead from hunger and thirst, the strangers commanded a spring of fresh water to burst out of the sand. That settled it. They were allowed to stay.
They settled in Llanddona and did not reform. The men lived by smuggling and could not be beaten, because each kept a fly knotted in his neckerchief. When a fight went against them they untied the cravat and the fly flew straight at the eyes of the excisemen and blinded them. The women lived by begging and cursing. They would go round the farms with their hair loose and demand charity as a right, and nobody dared refuse. At fairs and markets no one would bid against a Llanddona witch for a pig, in case she bewitched it.
Owen recorded one of their curses, spoken at the well Owen calls Y Ffynon Ocr against a man who had crossed one of them: may he wander for many ages, and at every step find a stile, at every stile a fall, at every fall a broken bone, and not the biggest bone nor the smallest, but the chief bone of his neck every time.
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