The Skirrid Mountain Inn

The Skirrid Mountain Inn stands in the village of Llanvihangel Crucorney, about four miles north of Abergavenny, beneath the Skirrid hill and the Black Mountains on the edge of the Brecon Beacons. It is one of several pubs that claim to be the oldest in Wales, and its own tradition traces an inn on the site back to the 12th century. The building itself, according to work by the Glamorgan-Gwent Archaeological Trust, is mainly mid-to-late 17th-century.

Its reputation rests on a cluster of dramatic legends. Owain Glyndŵr is said to have rallied his men in the cobbled courtyard during his 15th-century rising. The first floor is said to have served as a courtroom where capital sentences were handed down for crimes like sheep stealing, and as many as 180 people are supposed to have been hanged from an oak beam above the stairwell, where grooves are pointed out as rope marks and a noose still hangs. The notorious “Hanging Judge,” George Jeffreys, is often said to have presided there after the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685.

None of this is documented. Even the inn’s Wikipedia entry calls the court and the hangings undocumented, and there is no hard evidence that Jeffreys held court there; his “Bloody Assizes” of 1685 sat in towns in the west of England. Yet the stories have given the inn a cast of ghosts: Jeffreys himself on the upper floor, his hangman as a tall black shadow on the stairs, John Crowther, said to have been hanged for sheep stealing, and a former servant named Fanny Price. Staff and guests report footsteps, laughter, sudden cold, the smell of perfume, the rustle of a dress, the sound of marching, and glasses flying off shelves; a former landlady told the BBC in 2002 that glasses flew around the kitchen.

The inn appeared in the second series of Most Haunted and on Extreme Ghost Stories, and it remains a working village pub with rooms, much visited by ghost hunters and walkers on the nearby Offa’s Dyke Path.

A shadowy figure near the stairwell, footsteps and laughter, sudden cold, perfume and rustling skirts, marching soldiers, glasses thrown or smashed — reported by landlords, staff and overnight guests.

The staircase and “hanging beam,” the upstairs former “courtroom” and bedrooms, the bar and the kitchen.

The Skirrid appears on most lists of Britain’s haunted pubs and has featured on Most Haunted and Extreme Ghost Stories; its noose and hanging beam are among Wales’s most photographed ghost-story props.