Some time after the fairy door closed, the people of the valley decided that if they could not visit the island they could at least find out what was in the lake. Men and boys set to work digging a channel through the bank at the lower end of Llyn Cwm Llwch to let the water out.
They had not got far when the water in the middle of the lake heaved, and a figure came up out of it. The Rev. Edward Davies, writing in 1809, called it a terrific form that ordered them to stop or it would drown the country. The version Ivor James heard in Brecon in the 1890s was stranger: a man in a red coat, sitting in an armchair on the surface of the water. In yet another telling it was an old woman. The words were the same in each case, and in Welsh they rhyme: if I am not left in peace in my place, I will drown the town of Brecon.
The diggers left, and the lake was not drained. James pointed out to Rhys that the red coat sounds like a soldier's uniform and may date that version to the last couple of centuries. He also noted that there was a similar story about a well in the castle wall at Llanddew, Gerald of Wales's old parish north of the town. Whatever its age, the threat was taken seriously enough to survive: Brecon sits on the Usk well below the Beacons, and the idea of a mountain lake emptying down onto it was not so far-fetched to people who lived under those slopes.
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