Someone getting a bit of mileage out of the local folklore:
A Singular Legend.
Those prone to superstition, no less than students of folklore, will have a special interest in the finding of the body of the young man who is accused of having murdered his sweetheart on the lofty Cornish hill of Castle an Dinas. The ancient and ruined fortress stands in the parish of Ludgvan; and of the saint after whom it was named there has long been told in the district a singular legend.
Saint Ludgvan, the alleged founder of the church there, was an Irish missionary; and it is said of him that he brought a stream of water under the church stile for the purpose of bestowing on it certain miraculous qualities, one of which was that no person baptised with it should ever expiate any of his crimes through medium of a halter.
Consequently it has been accustomed to be believed that no man of Ludgvan ever suffers this disgrace; and the popular belief in the legend is certain to be strengthened by the fact that now a peculiarly cruel murder has been perpetrated at Castle an Dinas, suicide, to use the old phrase, has “cheated the gallows.”
The belief, it may be added, is so strong in the district that the inhabitants of neighbouring parishes have been known to carry away the water of Ludgvan for baptismal purposes; but proof of its efficacy when thus removed is wanting.
From the (geographically surprising) ‘East of Fife Record’, 24th June 1904. It’s a slightly peculiar interpretation that St Ludgvan would be complicit in people getting away with terrible crimes, perhaps he intended that the local people would actually turn out very good and not do anything meriting hanging. But there we are. The poor victim found in the ditches at Castle-an-Dinas was Jessie Rickard, shot by Charles Berryman.