It’s been a long mile, trudging uphill in the rain, across uninspiring fields, past rickety ruins of long-abandoned farm buildings, mud slowly working its way up my waterproof trousers.
Sometimes walking is like this: you take the rough with the smooth, the dreary with the wonderful. On this occasion, though, it feels like a message. After two days’ walking under azure skies in the nearby Yorkshire Dales, I’ve come to Pendle, scene of one of Britain’s darkest, cruellest trials, and it’s hammering down… “Welcome to witch country!”
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I’ve been staying at HF Holidays’ Newfield Hall, near Malham, using the walking tour operator’s reassuringly detailed route cards to explore the National Park by myself. Today, however, I’ve ventured into the Forest of Bowland National Landscape to visit an area I’ve heard about over the years, but never seen. I’m starting to wonder if I’ve wasted my time.
Then, 30 minutes out of Barrowford, I crest the brow of a hill and everything suddenly changes. It’s still raining but ahead now is a rolling, more intriguing landscape of patchy woodland, walled enclosures and scattered farmsteads. And there’s something else as well; a brooding presence. I can’t see it as it’s smothered by cloud, but I know from the map it’s there: Pendle Hill.
Arriving in the Dales
There are no witchy encounters on my first day in the Yorkshire Dales, but I visit a weather-sculpted rock formation with links to a wizard.
I park near the ruins of 12th-century Bolton Abbey and mindful of the information I’d heard an HF guide impart to a group of walkers that morning – who knew the average person should pee three times during a day-long walk? – I fill my bottle at Cavendish Pavillion’s water station and head upstream beside the River Wharfe. While a pair of goosanders sail down the river, the high-pitched song of goldcrests rings through the trees.
“Do you know what that is?” a couple of walkers ask me, pointing enthusiastically at a black-and-white bird with a long, almost comical orange bill.
“Oystercatcher,” I reply in a flat tone. You get them all over the place where I live in northern England. “But have you seen the red kite?” I ask, suddenly reanimated. “Yeah,” comes the downbeat response.
Apparently, they’re “all over the place” where the couple live in Gloucestershire. Regional bias aside, we’re at least able to agree their earlier sighting of a kingfisher was something to get excited about.
Tarns and tors
Climbing to Barden Fell, I make my way through heather and cotton grass to Simon’s Seat. This tor-like collection of crags and boulders was supposedly named after Simon Magus or Simon the Sorcerer, a biblical figure who, according to some, then became a hero of the druids.
Why Simon Magus? Who knows. Maybe someone had once stood gazing spellbound at these rocks standing proud of the moorland and decided they could only be the result of magic. Keen to put hands to rock, I stash my poles away and clamber up the grippy gritstone to the trig pillar and soon find myself gazing spellbound at the magical views.
Nature often behaves in weird and wonderful ways in the Yorkshire Dales, defying expectations. On another walk near beautiful Malham Tarn, the lake’s outlet stream flows south for a few hundred metres and then simply vanishes.
The Watlowes Gorge, hemmed in by steep rock walls that glinted in the sunshine, leaves me wondering where the river that had created this spectacular valley had gone. I painstakingly negotiate a vast plateau made up of massive blocks of rocks divided by potentially ankle-twisting fissures.
What forces created such features? Then, after descending a long flight of steps, I look back at a majestic wall of rock, 80 metres high, curving around idyllic, sheep-filled meadows. The famous Malham Cove.
“It looks like there should be a waterfall here,” I hear another intrigued walker say to her companion. The stream that appears at the base of the cliff, seemingly out of nowhere, holds a clue to this and other mysteries.
The Dales is a landscape that owes its existence to limestone. The sinkholes near the tarn, the dry valley, the limestone pavement, the spring are all the result of limestone’s high levels of porosity and permeability.
The last glacial period played a hand, too, but it’s the rock’s inability to hold surface water that causes streams to disappear underground and then flow through subterranean passages, only reappearing when they encounter impermeable bedrock.
Pendle witch trials
I often wonder what our ancestors made of such unusual phenomena, particularly the superstitious folk of the 17th century. Anything inexplicable was put down to malevolent forces. Crop failure? Sorcery! Herbal cures? Witchcraft! That black cloud blanketing Pendle Hill on my third walk? Evil afoot!
The 1612 Pendle witch trials began with a chance encounter between a young woman, Alizon Device, and a pedlar, which resulted in the latter collapsing with symptoms of what we now recognise as a stroke.
Alizon was accused of witchcraft and things quickly spiralled, with other family members and neighbours incriminating themselves and others. Simon Entwistle, a local tour guide, explains that the involvement of local magistrate Roger Nowell then caused things to take a “sinister twist”.
While most of the accused were peasants, three, including gentlewoman Alice Nutter, who pleaded not guilty, were involved in land disputes with Nowell.
“He used his star witness, Jennet Device [Alizon’s sister], to claim these three had attended a meeting to hatch a plot to free the accused witches being held at Lancaster Castle,” he explains.
The nine-year-old had been left in Nowell’s care while investigations were ongoing. “After four months of living in luxury, she was only too happy to incriminate others. Some say Nowell groomed her, putting ideas into her head.”
As well as seeing a way out of his land disputes, Nowell was probably also currying favour with James I. Paranoid after Guy Fawkes’ gunpowder plot, the Protestant king equated Catholicism with witchcraft – and Nutter, among others accused, was a Catholic. In the end, 10 people, including Nutter, were hanged.
A legacy of witches
As I walk past a statue of Nutter in the village of Roughlee, several passing motorists stop to take photos of it. Someone has placed a flower in her hands.
“The statue has become a symbol of female rights,” Simon explains. “She lost her life because she was a woman with a brain – a brain she was not supposed to use. She was in the same league as Emmeline Pankhurst, Edith Cavell, Grace Darling…”
He says local people have a lot of pride in Nutter and the other ‘witches’, with buses named after them and Scouts sporting shoulder flashes with witches on them.
As I wander the country lanes and farm paths, I spot a witch with black cat emblazoned on the side of a house, garden ornaments featuring cauldrons and broomstick-flying witches on footpath fingerposts, a pub sign, a commercial garage, even a car registration plate.
A trail through Aitken Wood just outside Barley, where many walkers park to climb the Forest of Bowland’s Pendle Hill, features sculptures depicting elements of the 1612 trial, including an eerie, life-size ‘Witchfinder’.
Wandering among withered and gnarly conifers, I also come across ‘The Chained Witches’, showing a ghostly procession of manacled prisoners being marched towards Lancaster Castle where the accused were held in abominable conditions – a chilling reminder of the trial’s human cost.
Pendle Way
Part of the 45-mile Pendle Way, as well as the 51-mile Lancashire Witches Walk, takes in sites associated with the witch trial, including Newchurch where the accused allegedly dug up graves to steal teeth from skulls. The sun appears by the time I reach the village but that doesn’t stop a slight shiver coursing down my spine as I enter the churchyard under the tower’s ominous ‘eye of God’.
One of the graves, with a skull-and-crossbones carving, is known as the ‘witch’s grave’, partly because it bears the name Nutter, but it can’t be Alice’s final resting place because bodies of those executed for witchcraft were thrown into pits on unconsecrated ground.
Back in Barrowford at the end of my walk, a visit to the Pendle Heritage Centre helps me put the trial into historical perspective. Located in a large, 17th-century house, it tells the story of the family who lived here, of herbal remedies, of religious persecution as well as the trial itself.
I’m a little unnerved by all I’ve learned in Pendle and feel I’d like to offload. This is the final day of my trip, though, so I’m heading straight home; after my previous two walks, I got to share my experiences with fellow walkers at Newfield Hall.
Some, like me, were enjoying self-guided trips, choosing from a large selection of walks; others were going out with volunteer guides. At breakfast and dinner, we all ate together, sharing our stories of being chased by cows, the best places to get coffee, the weather, the scenery…
Many, including some North Americans, were Newfield Hall regulars returning for the camaraderie, comfort and convenience of the HF experience. For most, though, myself included, it was the region itself that had lured us back.
The Yorkshire Dales National Park and the neighbouring Forest of Bowland National Landscape offer much in terms of history, landscape and wildlife. It would take a lifetime to uncover all their mysteries – and that’s discounting all the repeat visits simply to stand in Malham Cove, beside Gaping Gill or at the base of Pendle Hill and wonder – time and again – how, when, why?
