A stream enters the valley of the Dyfi at Mallwyd, and a capital road ascends it, crosses a shoulder, and descends into the valley of the Banw, leading ultimately to Welshpool. It was in the Cwm that opens upon Mallwyd and its ramifications that lurked the “Red-haired Banditti of Mawddwy.” After the cessation of the Wars of the Roses many lawless men, bred to deeds of violence, found time hang heavy on their hands, and lacking employment, a certain number of outlaws or felons gravitated to this wild region, and made their headquarters in this valley, whence they sallied forth, marauding, cattle-lifting, and murdering. Robert Vaughan, the Welsh antiquary, who flourished shortly after, says that they never tired of “robbing, burning of houses, and murthering of people, in soe much that being very numerous, they did often drive great droves of cattell somtymes to the number of a hundred or more from one countrey to another at middle day, as in tyme of warre, without feare, shame, pittie, or punishment, to the utter undoing of the poorer sort.” The occupants of manor- and farm-houses had to fix scythes and spiked bars in their chimneys to prevent the marauders entering their houses by descending the wide chimneys at night. And within the memory of man many such have been removed. At last a commission was issued to Lewis Owen, Baron of the Exchequer of Wales, and Sheriff of Merionethshire, to clear the country of them. In pursuance of his orders, Owen raised a body of sturdy men, and stealing up the valley on Christmas Eve, 1554, when the robbers were keeping high revel, he fell on them and secured eighty, whom he tried and hanged on the spot. The mother of two of the worst scoundrels vowed vengeance on Owen, and “baring her breasts” before him, shrieked in his face, “These yellow breasts have given suck to those who shall wash their hands in your blood.” The headquarters of the band were at Dugoed Mawr on the Cann Office Road, and the place of the execution, a mound about thirty feet high, now overgrown with trees, on the Collfryn Farm estate. On All Hallows’ Eve, 1555, hardly a year after the summary execution, Baron Owen was returning from the Montgomery Assizes with his brother-in-law and two servants, when he found the road blocked at a spot, since called Llidiart-y-Barwn, by fallen trees. They had been felled by some of the survivors of the band, who had waited for an opportunity to revenge the death of their fellows. The spot is two miles from Mallwyd on the Welshpool road.