Tomb of the Grey Lady

The Grey Lady of Rhuthun (Ruthin) - LL15 2NU

Quest: Walk the walls and ramparts at twilight, spot the Grey Lady, photo

She moves in the early hours when the mist comes off the river Clwyd, or as evening settles, neither fully present nor fully gone, caught between this world and whatever lies beyond the castle wall.

She was the wife of the second-in-command of the garrison — a woman of rank and intelligence, living within the tight world of a Norman castle in occupied Cymru, where power was everything and humiliation was the sharpest weapon available. When she discovered that her husband had taken a peasant girl as his mistress, she took a war-axe and beheaded the girl.

She was tried for murder and her own head followed soon after. Then they buried the Grey Lady outside the castle walls, and in a cruel act of injustice they buried the mistress's head with her. The two women, murderer and victim, interred together in the same ground, inseparable in death. No clergyman of the district would give her consecrated ground. She was buried in the unblessed earth, in a grave that can still be found today behind a locked gate in the castle grounds.

One of these two women did not accept the verdict.

A Grey Lady walks the banqueting hall where she once dined as a woman of consequence. She walks the battlements where she once looked out over a conquered Welsh landscape and perhaps wondered how she had come to be part of its conquest. She has been seen by scores of visitors across generations: a presence, a figure, a cloud of unfinished business.

Locals call her the Grey Lady, and assume her to be Lady de Grey. Recent close-up sightings, however, have suggested that she is a woman of common appearance. For why would Lady de Grey have more reason to return than a murdered Welsh serving-maid, finally rising again to rule the castle of the conquerors?