Horseheath

Is there anyone on WAN, preferably with family in the village going back for a while, who knows anything about the local traditions? I'd like to have an email conversation for something I've been working on if there is. :-)

It's a Cambridgeshire village so I should imagine that drinking and fighting are the big ones!

I have a book of Cambridgeshire local customs & traditions that I picked up for 2 quid at the last Mill Road Winter Fair. When I get home I'll see if it says anything about Horseheath.

I used to live nearish this village but not in it. A lot of the villages in this part of Cambridgeshire have a "plough monday" tradition, whereby men carry the plough from one end of the village to the other, stopping in for drinks at people's houses and any pubs en route. There is often singing and morris dancing as they go on their way.

I've no idea if Horseheath do this, or if they ever did in the first place. They still do it in Balsham and West Wratting.

I dunno if any of this will help you, but still:

Faith in the carrying in the pocket of some 'magic' object to relieve the pain of decayed teeth is known to have persisted in Cambridgeshire until early in this century. Rabbits' teeth and bones and the skull of a hedgehog now in the Cambridge Folk Museum were carried for this purpose by a West Wickham and a Horseheath woman respectively until their deaths in c. 1910.

Well, that's a bit crap, really.

A ghost allegedly haunted Money Lane in Horseheath. It is a local tradition that a former occupant of Limbery's [1] once hid some money in the lane and that since his death he returns from time to time to look for his treasure or to see that it is still there. It is said that anyone passing down the lane on a night of full moon is liable to be hailed with the command: "Pick up your spade and follow me", but no one has been so brave as to obey.

[1] A farmhouse at the east end of the village. The Limbery family held one of the Horseheath Manors in the fourteenth century.

Ghosts and buried treasure? That's more like it, but what about witches? Yup, we've got them too:

[T]he earliest witch remembered in Horseheath went by the name of Daddy Witch.

It is said she was an ancient bony creature, half-clothed in rags, who lived in a hut by the sheep-pond in Garrett's Close, and that she gained most of her knowledge from a book called _The Devil's Plantation_. When Daddy Witch died, her body was buried in the middle of the road which leads from Horseheath to Horseheath Green ... Her grave is marked by the dryness of the road, said to be caused by the heat of her body.

In July of [1935] a fire spreading along the road stopped when it reached the grave, turned and went over the fields.

Is there nothing that can be done about a witch of such power? Well...

Mrs H., formerly of Horseheath, tells how her mother had a beautiful brood of young ducks, and when only a fortnight old, they were bewitched and covered with vermin. These young ducks just turned on their backs, kicked up their little feet, and were dying fast. Fearing she might lose the whole brood, the good woman sent to the shop for an ounce of new pins, and stuck them into one of the dead ducks. Then she made up a good fire, and at twelve o'clock at night, without telling anyone what she was going to do, she put the duck well into the middle of the fire, and before the duck had been burning ten minutes her fears were affirmed. The witch came screaming to the door, making the most agonising noise, for the pain caused by the pins in the burning duck had entered the witch, and we are told the rest of the ducks in the morning were found to be cured of their pest.

The witches are what I'm specifically interested in. It seems Horseheath and Bartlow both have a long tradition of this. Daddy Witch, from what I've been able to find, wasn't the earliest; most of her predecessors, along with her successor (whom she apparently trained) were known by the nickname Mother Redcap, as were witches in other parts of East Anglia - redcap, incidentally, is also a folk name for the fly agaric, which is supposed to have been an ingredient in witches' flying potion.

The last known Mother Redcap was also Horseheath's last known witch. However, there was a legend in the village that after she died a stranger went to her house, collected her four imps (one of them, oddly, was called Redcap; the others were Bluecap, Venus and Jupiter) and delivered them to another woman in the village (this supposedly took place well into the 20th Century). Another story says that a few years before her death, Mother Redcap was visited by a black man who wanted her to sign her name in a book. In return, he gave her a cat, a ferret, a rat, a mouse and a toad, which became her familiars and followed her everywhere she went. Getting these species to live together would certainly take some skill, if not actual magical witchy stuff; another witch from this area named Jazeb Few (who was a man) also had a troupe of animals, including rats which he'd send out to play tricks on his neighbours. This has got me wondering if Snowy Farr might have been the last practitioner of a lost local animal-training tradition.

(By the way, the thing I'm working on is a collection of Cambridge myths and legends. That's why I asked if anyone on here knew any good Cambridge ghost stories ages ago, too.)

Well, if you'd like to borrow my collection of Cambridgeshire myths and legends, you're welcome to it.

As long as you promise to use it for totally non-plagiaristic purposes, that is. ;)

Depends if you've copyrighted it. If so, I'll plagiarise it anyway, but with attribution.

Actually, it was written by Enid Porter in 1969. I wouldn't upset her - she knows about witches and stuff.

(Oh, and it has stuff to say about imps, too, particularly as they relate to witches.)

One of the pubs down that way used to be haunted by a poltergeist that the regulars named Enid. The same, d'you reckon? ;-)

I think you must be right. I looked up "Enid" in the index. She wasn't there ... but now my book seems to be radiating a particularly malevolent aura.

For some people, books are like that all the time. Will probably (ie "there's a very small chance, assuming I don't tire of this writing project and abandon it like everything else I start writing") want to go and take photos of supposedly haunted local places some time next year, if you fancy cycling out to have a look at local villages. You never know, we might even get to meet that ghost up Money Lane and be led to the treasure - or failing that, I know a nice pub in Bartlow.

Well, you should have a look at this book: it has an entire chapter on ghosts and witchcraft, and another on "local legends, curious characters and strange incidents", both of which should inspire us for some destinations.

I'll probably venture down to the pub this evening; so if you remember bring it with you. Found out some interesting stuff about the round barrow we saw when we rode along Fleam Dyke (er, I mean, didn't ride along Fleam Dyke - http://www.wereallneighbours.co.uk/idlechat/message.php?id=46161&page=...): there was a rumour for many years that it contained a golden chariot. When the barrow was excavated, the chariot "moved" to a nearby location; when that too was excavated it "moved" to its current location under the road.

This is from the Hidden East Anglia website:

Horseheath:
Daddy Witch's grave
"An ancient bony creature, half-clothed in rags" is how the 19th century woman known as Daddy Witch was described. Well-known in the area as one of the witches who would gather at midnight revels in the fields, she lived in a ramshackle hut almost surrounded by water, known as Daddy Witch's Pond. This was in a spot called Garret's Close or Garretfield, opposite the village sheep pond (almost certainly the pond at TL614468).
Upon her death in 1860, she was buried in the middle of the road that leads from the village to Horseheath Green (Howard's Lane), close to her hut. It used to be said that the heat from her body caused that section of road to remain dry, even after a heavy rain. The memory of her was apparently still alive in 1935, when a fire that was spreading along the road was seen to reach her grave, then turn away and continue to burn across the nearby fields. Also in that year the local WI recorded in their Scrapbook that local children were told to nod their heads nine times for luck as they passed the gravesite.
Sources:
Catherine Parsons: 'Notes on Cambridgeshire Witchcraft' in 'Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society' (1915), Vol.XIX, p.39.
Catherine Parsons: 'Horseheath: Some Recollections of a Cambridgeshire Parish' (unpublished manuscript, 1952, in Cambridgeshire Archives).
Enid Porter: ‘Cambridgeshire Customs & Folklore’, (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p.163-4.
Money Lane
At the east end of the parish is Limberhurst Farm, occupying the moated site of the former Limbury's manor house. A few hundred metres away is Money Lane, now a muddy bridleway across the fields, that joins the A1307 at TL630467. Legend says that, in this lane, a former owner of Limbury's once hid some money, and that his ghost now returns on occasion either to look for the money, or to check that it's still there. People passing down the lane on a night of full moon would sometimes hear a voice say 'Pick up your spade and follow me', but no one ever had the courage to comply.1 In fact, the name of Money Lane probably arose from the discovery there in 1854 of a hoard of Roman silver coins.2

I often wonder what's the story behind that derelict house on a bend of the A1307 just west of Horseheath. Over ten years driving that road, I saw it gradually deteriorate - it originally had a distinctive green tiled roof, now it's roofless. Clearly visible on Google Maps.

GHOSTS are a load of bollocks, it has been confirmed.

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-technology/ghosts-bollocks-...

Love that!

(And for the record, I'd like to point out that although I'm collecting local ghost stories, I firmly believe that ghosts are indeed a load of bollocks.)

Try contacting Polly Howart, she has written and spoken about ghosts and folk stories in the area. And the Linton and District Historical Society covers Horseheath, it might be worth sending them an email.

http://www.pollyhowat-storyteller.co.uk

http://www.lintonhistory.org.uk

Hers is a name I keep reading. I'd assumed she was a contemporary of Porter and therefore most likely no longer with us.