Short Stories & Tall Tales

THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE LANE

...when witches walked abroad...even in Long Hanborough

Who can say what really happened all those years ago? Just three elderly ladies living at the edge of a village or something more? History is strangely silent on what produced the Unpleasantness that gripped the village for one fateful summer. If you come to our village and go to the end of the lane, you will see nothing save old walls and an overgrown copse. But you would do well to respect the old wives tales that carry more truths than history books ever will. Take a moment to realise you are standing in front of the House of Three witches.

The house was very small even by rural 18th century standards and built of weathered stone, brown and grey with mosses and creepers clinging on like claws. The inhabitants were three old women, witches according to the testimony of those who lived in those times. Nothing is written so all we have is word of mouth, an oral tradition passed down the years. They would usually be seen when the sun was setting when they would walk abroad, roaming the village looking to procure ingredients for their diabolical business.

How the witches came to be there is not recorded. By road, by carriage, by field or river or by night on their broomsticks, history is strangely silent. But arrive they did. By all accounts they dressed in ragged hemmed cloaks and torn dresses, clutching long canes and wearing large bonnets that kept their faces in shade. One was always in deep red, the colour of blood, one in dark green as dark and as green as the surface of a stagnant pond and the other, the one that frightened the children the most was in black. Were they ugly? We can only speculate but they say one glance from a single eye could transform the most incurious bystander into anything they wished.

The house at the end of the lane was in fact half way along. It was always seen as at the end because that was where the village ended and it was the last house in Wood Lane. But the track continued all the way to the villages beyond, skirting the outer eaves of Mill Wood where the towering Horse Chestnuts rose like giants. And high in the treetops the hundred rooks, gathered in great families, shrieking their warnings. They were the guardians of this ancient remnant of Wychwood a mighty forest that once covered most of England. The trees were densely packed and the shadows gathered tighter the further anyone went in. Only the hundred rooks knew what lay in the deepest parts of the wood, where time is unchanged from the days when Earth was God and Faerie Folk walked openly.

To begin with the witches were just a curiosity, a brood to be pointed at and kept well clear of. No-one entered their over grown front garden which had become the home for discarded balls thrown from the village urchins and stray cats. There was a rumour that the cats were not in fact strays but were once little children who had tried to retrieve a ball...who knows?

What is known is that by June 1795 the three witches had already taken up residence in a house that seems to have no real history. Some said they had it built which seems unlikely, others that it had been standing empty for years until they arrived and there were few who even declared the house had never been there at all until they arrived. Their presence went unnoticed for a while but as sightings increased and their weirdness realised, a sense of dread fell upon the house and travellers would hurry by heads down.

But this story is not about their uncertain arrival but how and why they finally left. What became known as The Unpleasantness crept upon the village gradually, like a rain cloud spoiling the end of a long summer's day. The folk of Long Hanborough were a naturally taciturn lot, blessed with a solid earthy contentment at the richness of the seasons and the providence of the earth. The first stirrings of malcontent can be traced back to some queer goings on during the summer of 1795.

6th JUNE 1795: A solitary figure plodded wearily toward the Swan. The air was starting to thicken with evening as the Earth turned and pushed the sun's rays below the tops of the oaks and chestnuts that guarded the thatched stone walled inn. In his late forties Bill rubbed his eyes knowing full well that the job was getting away from him. He'd soon be forced to hand the reins over to the boy. He knew no other life but shoemaking. It was steady work and much like the undertaking business, there would always be a call for it. As he crossed the dusty rutted lane he caught sight of Ned shutting down the Forge, putting the furnace out sending up clouds of steam, obscuring two drays he had been shoeing.