Dylife, high on the moor between Llanidloes and Machynlleth, was once a busy lead-mining settlement. In the early eighteenth century a blacksmith called Siôn, or John Jones, came there from Ystumtuen in Cardiganshire to work at the mines, leaving his wife and children behind. At Dylife he took up with another woman.
When his wife, Catherine, and their two children came to see him, he took them to an open mine shaft and threw them down it. Robin Gwyndaf's collection of Welsh folk tales gives the time as three in the afternoon on 23 October 1719. The bodies were found, and Siôn confessed. He blamed, it is said, some other woman and the Devil.
He was hanged on the hill above the village, which has been called Pen y Grocbren, Gallows Hill, ever since, and his body was left in an iron gibbet cage as a warning. The story told at Dylife is that because he was the only smith in the place, he was made to forge the irons himself.
In 1938 the iron head-piece of a gibbet was dug up on the hill with a human skull still in it. It is now in the collection at St Fagans. Later reports from the Dylife mine workings, including a 1986 account of a pale glowing shape underground, are recorded separately on this site.
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