The end of the road

The sign on this seaside cottage says Troed-y-rhiw, foot of the hill, but when it was bought by Edith Carew in 1934 it was known as Penfeidr, the end of the road. For her it was indeed the end of a long and chequered road, and one of which we still do not know all the ins and outs.
On February 1st 1897 Edith Carew was sentenced to death in Yokohama for the murder of her husband Walter by arsenic poisoning. The case was reported by the New York Times to have been one that puzzled the ingenuity and skill of physicians, lawyers and detectives.
Edith had been a well-bred West country girl (her father three times mayor of Glastonbury) who in 1890 accompanied her considerably older husband to a modest colonial posting out East. From then on the story reads like one of Somerset Maugham's seedier fictions, with the marriage beset by Walter's financial mismanagement and chronic ill-health and with romantic affairs on both sides. Edith spent much of her time out horse riding with a young solicitor; Walter was pursued by a mysterious lady from his past.
Initially it seemed that Walter had died a natural death but Edith was arrested after it was discovered that she had purchased arsenic - oh yes, she agreed, but at her husband's request: he was in the habit of self-medicating with the poison, which at that time was the chief remedy for the venereal disease he had suffered for many years.
As the case unfolded so the appalling state of the marriage was laid bare. With modern forensic techniques, who knows, maybe the final verdict would have been different. In the event, Edith's death sentence was commuted and instead she served 13 years in prison.
She spent the last 25 years of her life reclusively in this tiny hamlet, a cul-de-sac that leads only to the sea. It is said she created a oriental garden behind the cottage - you can see clumps of bamboo there even now.