The facts are plain and sad. Tommy and his father came up from the Rhondda by train on the first Saturday of August 1900 and set out to walk the four miles from Brecon to Cwm Llwch farm, where Tommy's grandparents lived. Near the Login, a camp used by soldiers training on the hills, they met Tommy's cousin William, and the two boys ran on ahead together towards the farm. Halfway there Tommy got upset and wanted to go back to his father. The boys split up. William reached the farm; Tommy never came back.
The search started that evening and ran for weeks. Soldiers from the camp, police, farmers and volunteers went over the valley and the lower slopes again and again. Nobody looked seriously at the high ridge. It did not seem possible that a small boy, lost and frightened in the dark, could have climbed that far.
What broke the case is the part that has kept it alive in local memory. A woman living just north of Brecon is said to have dreamed of the place where he lay. On 2 September she and her husband borrowed a pony and trap, went up onto the mountain, and found his body on the spur below Pen y Fan, some 1,300 feet above where he had last been seen. The National Trust, which now looks after the Beacons, tells the dream as part of the story while hedging it with 'is said to'. Other retellings name the couple, but those names are not in the sources used here.
The inquest recorded death from exhaustion and exposure. The jurors waived their fees, and the money started a memorial fund that paid for the granite obelisk which still stands on the spot, and which walkers now use as a landmark in mist. How Tommy got so high has never been explained, and whether a dream really led a stranger to him is something no inquest could settle. This record is here for the dream alone; it should be read with the child's death in mind.
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