Day 5 - The Whichford Pitch Fork

 Do you ever dream that someone is driving a pitch fork through your throat while trying to slice a crucifix into your chest with a broken wine glass ?

Me neither.

But it could happen – considering our night in Long Compton.

After a long, grey, drizzly day walking through the countryside from Shipston on Stour, we were happy to reach the village edge and our cottage-like room on the Yerdley Farm.  The walk that day had a different feel. 

A persistent mist enveloped the church yards, the old manor houses, and spinneys of trees, easing only at dusk as we entered the last leg which went through the ethereal Whichford Wood.

Our arrival coincided with supper time.  We were hungry and chilled so we took our host’s

advice and reserved a table at the Red Lion Inn.

We were also hungry for Internet access and opened the IPad as soon as we ordered our food.  You don’t have to Google very long to find references to Long Compton’s greatest claim to fame and stories that fit the mood of the day and drizzling outside.

Witches.

This association with witchcraft and witches goes back to the Middle Ages, and most accounts can be easily placed in the bucket of superstition and general nuttiness of the era.  But one story from the late 19^th century is harder to shake off, particularly when you are sitting in the Red Lion Inn.

Evidently, on the 15^th September in 1875, a deranged farm hand attacked and brutally murdered a 79-year-old woman mid-day as she left the baker’s with a loaf of bread.

He plunged a pitch fork into her throat and then proceeded to carve crucifixes into her face and chest with a machete-like hook.   Most people were, of course, horrified.  But some just nodded saying “oh, I guess she must have been a Long Compton witch.”  These grim measures were, evidently, the established means of dispatching a witch.  The delusional defendant eventually starved himself to death in prison, but not before telling the world that there were more witches in and around Long Compton.

We laughed.  But also topped up the wine glasses a bit after reading that the recited facts of the case came from the Inquest held where we were sitting in the Red Lion Inn.

The rain picked up again in time for our walk back to the Farm, passing the church and its odd lynch gate building that has sheltered funeral processions for centuries and likely that of our pitchforked witch.  Again we were glad to get inside, turn up the heat, and plot the next day's walk which would take us by the famous neolithich monuments known as the Rollright Stones.

Looking at the Ipad references to the site, Michele said “hey, I guess you knew the Stones were made by a witch ?”