It is presumably possible that this transaction was not as straightforward as the entries in the port book suggest, that the Privy Council's suspicions were aroused as to where the guns were really going, and that it was for this reason that they decided to take firm action against Samyne the following year. We cannot tell. On the other hand, there are no further shipments of ordnance from Cardiff in the port books, either coastwise or overseas, and in the next reasonably well preserved coastal book, that for 1620-1, there is no sign of Samyne at all. Instead, Thomas Erbury, who had a furnace and forge higher up the Taff valley at Pontyrhun and Pontygwaith in Merthyr Tydfil parish, dominates the scene with shipments of bar iron to Bridgwater, Watchet and Bristol.26 Such evidence as there is suggests that Pentyrch had indeed been suppressed. Samyne himself remained in the Cardiff area: between 1617 and 1621 he was involved in a dispute with the dowager countess of Pembroke over an estate at Pare Coedmachen, in the parish of Peterston-super-Ely about three miles south-west of Pentyrch furnace, where he had enclosed a former forest and built a house, presumably that of which part survives today. He stayed in Cardiff until his death some years later: letters of administration were issued to his widow Bridget in February 1632.27 A further indication that gunfounding had ceased in the Cardiff area by the 1620s comes from a petition by the merchants of Bristol to the Privy Council, presented in October 1625, which complained that they could not get ordnance to arm their ships except from London at great expense. They suggested that guns might be cast at Cardiff by crown officials and sold at Bristol, Barnstaple and elsewhere. The Council agreed to allow gunpowder to be made at Bristol but referred the question of ordnance manufacture to Lord Carew, the Master of the Ordnance, and the matter did not proceed further.28 The only evidence for a revival of Pentyrch furnace later in the seventeenth century comes from the highly unsatisfactory testimony of the Merthyr antiquary, Charles Wilkins, who, writing in 1903, claimed that when the furnace was rebuilt early in the nineteenth century, a 'plate' bearing the date 1643 was found.29 Given the notorious unreliability of this source, it is difficult to know what to make of this statement. It could refer to a dated cast-iron lintel from the tapping or blowing arch of the original furnace and thus imply a mid-seventeenth-century revival of smelting at Pentyrch; equally, Wilkins may have got the date or the site wrong or the 'plate' may have been a chimney back or similar casting. Or the whole episode could be complete invention on his part. Similarly, it is difficult to know what to make of lolo Morganwg's statement that the works were 'laid asleep, and in that sleep died' in the reign of James II.30 Since, in the next sentence, he refers to Caerphilly furnace, which was established in 1680 as a direct replacement for that at Tongwynlais, he may have meant that only the latter site continued to operate