Starting Witch Country: A Journey through story and landscape and all things witch, with perhaps the most famous, infamous witches of England - the accused witches collectively known as the Pendle witches.

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 "In 1633 we find that Pendle Forest was still of bad repute, and that traditions of old Demdike and her rival Mother Chattox yet floated round the Malkin Tower, and hid, spectre-like, in the rough and desert places of the barren waste..."

Found in Witch Stories by Elizabeth Lynn Linton (1861)

“This little tree belongs to the family of the rose queen, and wears the royal robes of that family-white blossoms and glowing crimson fruit. Queen rose is its first cousin; the apple, the pear, and the hawthorn are its brothers… we will call this tree by its own good old name, which is nearly forgotten. It is the rowan or roan tree that is, the whispering tree; the tree that knows the secret spells and mage charms; the tree of the witches, or, as it is sometimes called, the witchen or wiggin tree.

These strange names tell us of the old times when many a poor old woman was thought to be a witch with secret power to do harm. If she was ugly, cross, and ill-tempered, if she lived by herself and kept a black cat, then the country people were sure that she was a witch with the evil eye, and they were afraid that if they displeased her in any way she would look at their cattle and make them sick with one glance of her eye. One way there was of preventing harm; for the witch could not hurt cattle if they were under the charm of a bough from the rowan or witchen tree. Sometimes the sheep. and lambs were made to jump through a hoop of rowan wood; the dairymaids drove their cows with a rowan stick, and tied rowan branches over the stables and cow-houses”

from The Stories of the Trees by Mrs Dyson, 1896