Pendle Hill: Witches, Executions and the Dark History Beneath Lancashire’s Brooding Landmark

Pendle Hill rises over Lancashire like something that has been waiting. More than four centuries ago, the villages beneath it became the setting for one of England’s most notorious witch trials. Ten people were hanged. An elderly woman died in a dungeon. A nine-year-old girl helped send members of her own family to the gallows. Today, you can walk the same landscape, past reservoirs, old villages, a supposed witch’s grave and places whose names survive from the trials. The witches are long gone. Their hill is not.

There is something almost suspiciously beautiful about Pendle Hill. From a distance it rises broad and dark above the patchwork fields of Lancashire, its long summit seeming less like a conventional peak than an enormous shoulder pushed through the surrounding countryside. Sheep graze beneath it. Dry-stone walls divide green fields. Villages gather in its shadow. On a clear day, walkers climbing its slopes can look towards the Yorkshire Three Peaks and out across great sweeps of northern England.

There is nothing inherently sinister about Pendle Hill. And yet few hills in Britain carry quite so much darkness in their name. Say Pendle, and sooner or later somebody will mention witches.

In 1612, a series of accusations made among families living in the Forest of Pendle spiralled into an investigation involving alleged curses, talking animals, clay figures, murder by magic and a supposed gathering of witches at a house called Malkin Tower. By August, the accused had been transported to Lancaster Castle. Ten people were subsequently hanged, and one of the most disturbing witnesses against them was a little girl called Jennet Device.

The story that survives is extraordinary, but there is something important to understand before entering it. Nobody was burned on Pendle Hill. In fact, nobody was executed there at all. The ten condemned at Lancaster in 1612 were hanged on the moor above Lancaster, many miles away. Even Malkin Tower, the house now synonymous with the Pendle witches, has disappeared so completely that nobody can say with certainty where it stood.

The hill became the symbol. The horror happened in the lives of the people beneath it.

A country already frightened of witches

To understand what happened beneath Pendle Hill, it helps to understand the England into which the accused had been born. This was not a society in which witchcraft was regarded as harmless superstition. In 1604, during the reign of James I, Parliament passed a new Witchcraft Act. Among other offences, invoking evil spirits or using witchcraft supposedly to kill or seriously harm another person could carry the death penalty.

James himself had written about witchcraft and demonology before becoming king of England. Fear of demonic conspiracies existed alongside religious tensions, suspicion of Catholics and the recent memory of the Gunpowder Plot. Lancashire had an additional problem. It was remote.

Pendle Forest was not a forest in the modern sense of dense woodland, but an old royal hunting district of scattered farms, hamlets, moorland and difficult roads. People depended heavily upon neighbours. They also quarrelled with them. And in communities where illness could arrive without explanation, children died, livestock suddenly sickened and medicine remained rudimentary, misfortune could acquire a human face surprisingly quickly.

Two elderly women would eventually sit at the centre of the Pendle story: Elizabeth Southerns, better known as Old Demdike, and Anne Whittle, called Chattox. Both were poor widows. Both had reputations associated with charms and supernatural abilities. And their families appear to have been rivals.

Thomas Potts, the clerk who later recorded the trials, described Demdike as an 80-year-old woman who had supposedly practised witchcraft for around half a century. But Potts is not a neutral narrator. His book, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, was commissioned by the judges involved in the prosecution and published in 1613. Its language is ferocious. The accused become monsters, agents of the Devil and threats to decent society almost before their evidence has been described.

It is our greatest source for the Pendle trials. It is also a source that needs to be handled with enormous caution. Modern historians have argued that the way the proceedings were recorded was shaped by contemporary politics, royal attitudes towards witchcraft and the desire of those involved to justify what they had done. Behind the demons of Potts’s book were real people.

And their destruction began with something remarkably ordinary: a handful of pins.

The pedlar on the road to Colne

On 18 March 1612, according to the surviving trial account, Alizon Device, granddaughter of Old Demdike, met a travelling pedlar named John Law on the road near Colne. She wanted pins. Precisely what happened between them is uncertain. One version suggests Law would not open his pack for such a small transaction. Another says Alizon lacked the money to pay.

What everyone agreed upon was that the encounter ended badly. Alizon became angry. Law walked away, and shortly afterwards he collapsed. His condition sounds remarkably like a stroke. The testimony describes him becoming paralysed, with serious loss of movement and initially of speech. But this was 1612. Law and his family believed something else had happened. They believed Alizon Device had bewitched him.

What followed becomes stranger still. Questioned by local magistrate Roger Nowell, Alizon reportedly admitted responsibility. According to Potts, she described encountering a black dog which spoke to her and offered to harm the pedlar. She supposedly commanded it to lame him.

At her eventual trial, the same John Law was brought before her. Potts describes Alizon falling to her knees, crying and asking his forgiveness. He gave it.

The court hanged her anyway.

Alizon’s confession might have ended with her. Instead, investigators asked more questions, and the answers began swallowing whole families.

Demdike, Chattox and the feast at Malkin Tower

Alizon implicated her grandmother. Then she spoke about Chattox. Other members of both families were questioned. Old grievances resurfaced. Mysterious deaths stretching back years were reinterpreted as murders committed through witchcraft. Clay figures supposedly used to destroy enemies entered the testimony. So did spirit familiars appearing as dogs.

Demdike reportedly described a supernatural being called Tibb. Elizabeth Device was associated in testimony with a brown dog called Ball. James Device described another spirit, Dandy. To a modern reader, the accounts can sound almost fantastical. To the authorities investigating them, they were evidence.

By early April, Demdike, Chattox, Alizon Device and Anne Redferne had been committed to Lancaster Castle to await trial. For Old Demdike, there would never be one. She died inside the castle before the August assizes began.

Then, on Good Friday 1612, something happened back in Pendle that transformed an already serious prosecution into what authorities interpreted as a witch conspiracy.

People gathered at Malkin Tower.

Malkin Tower has become one of the great lost places of English supernatural history. Despite the name, it may not have resembled a tower at all. It appears to have been the home associated with Demdike and the Device family somewhere in the Forest of Pendle. Its precise location has been lost.

But on Good Friday 1612, a group gathered there. According to the testimony later recorded by Potts, around twenty people attended. And one of the peculiar things about the surviving description is just how domestic the supposed witches’ sabbath sounds. They had dinner. There was beef, bacon and roasted mutton. The authorities alleged that the sheep had been stolen.

Then came the darker accusations. James Device claimed the gathering intended to free the imprisoned women from Lancaster Castle, kill the gaoler and even blow up the castle. His younger sister Jennet described those present as witches and said they had gathered partly in connection with naming Alizon’s familiar spirit.

Whether this was truly a conspiratorial gathering, a family meal, an attempt to discuss helping imprisoned relatives or something else entirely is impossible to know. What is certain is what happened because of it. The meeting provided investigators with more names. More arrests followed.

One of those drawn into the case was Alice Nutter of Roughlee, a woman of considerably higher social standing than the Device and Whittle families. The net was widening.

And the person who would help tighten it was nine years old.

Jennet Device climbs onto the table

Of everything recorded during the Pendle trials, few scenes are more disturbing than the appearance of Jennet Device at Lancaster Castle.

She was approximately nine. The woman standing accused before the court was her mother.

Elizabeth Device apparently reacted furiously when her daughter was brought forward to give evidence against her. Potts records Elizabeth screaming and cursing until Jennet became so distressed that she said she could not speak while her mother remained in the room.

Elizabeth was removed. Then the judges did something extraordinary.

They placed the child on a table so the court could see and hear her.

From there, Jennet accused her own mother. She said she had seen a brown dog called Ball appear before Elizabeth. She described conversations with the supposed spirit. She identified people who had attended the Good Friday gathering at Malkin Tower.

Her evidence helped condemn not only neighbours, but members of her own family.

The accused had enormous disadvantages. They were not allowed defence counsel. They could not call witnesses to speak on their behalf. Much of the prosecution rested upon confession, family accusation, hearsay and stories about events that had happened years earlier.

The court nevertheless convicted them.

On 20 August 1612, ten condemned prisoners were taken from Lancaster Castle and hanged on the moors above the town. Among them were Alizon Device, her mother Elizabeth, her brother James, Old Chattox, Anne Redferne, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, Jane Bulcock, John Bulcock and Isobel Robey.

The hill survived them all.

And then history performed one final cruelty.

Jennet Device disappears almost completely from the record after 1612. But there is a deeply unsettling possible epilogue.

Twenty-one years later, Lancashire experienced another witch scare. In 1633, a child called Edmund Robinson made accusations of witchcraft against a large number of people. Among the accused was a woman named Jennet Device.

Historians cannot establish beyond doubt that she was the same Jennet who had testified as a child in 1612. But the possibility is taken seriously. If she was, the symmetry is dreadful.

The child whose testimony had helped condemn her family would have grown into a woman who was herself accused of witchcraft after allegations made by another child.

The later accusations eventually began to unravel. But acquittal did not necessarily mean freedom. Prisoners could remain incarcerated because they could not pay their gaol costs.

The final fate of Jennet Device remains uncertain.

Which somehow feels appropriate for Pendle.

Its most famous child simply disappears into the darkness of the record.

The house that vanished, the cat in the wall and the Devil’s stones

Malkin Tower disappeared too. For centuries, people have tried to work out where it stood. There are competing theories, old field names, fragments of walls and archaeological searches, but no location has been conclusively established.

Then, in 2011, water engineers working near Lower Black Moss Reservoir uncovered something extraordinary. Beneath a grassy mound lay a remarkably well-preserved 17th-century cottage.

Inside was a sealed room.

And within one of its walls archaeologists found the remains of a mummified cat.

Animals, particularly cats, were sometimes concealed inside buildings as a form of protection against evil or misfortune. The discovery immediately produced speculation that the lost cottage might finally be Malkin Tower.

It has never been proven.

And perhaps that makes the story better. Somewhere beneath the landscape around Pendle lies the location of one of England’s most notorious gatherings. We simply do not know where.

The witches are not Pendle Hill’s only supernatural inhabitants either. The hill carries much older folklore. High on the moor are prehistoric burial monuments, including one associated with the wonderfully named Devil’s Apronful.

According to local legend, the Devil was carrying an apron filled with stones which he intended to throw at Clitheroe Castle. Crossing Pendle Hill, his apron string broke and the stones spilled across the ground. The resulting mound became the Devil’s Apronful.

There are even supposed Devil’s footprints nearby, marks in the rock incorporated into the same story. It is exactly the sort of legend that grows around an ancient landscape whose original monuments have outlived any memory of the people who created them.

Pendle did not become strange in 1612.

People had apparently been explaining its mysteries with supernatural stories for generations.

The church with an eye

For visitors following the witch story today, Newchurch-in-Pendle is one of its most atmospheric places.

St Mary’s Church contains a peculiar oval feature in its tower known locally as the Eye of God or Witches’ Eye. Local tradition says it was intended to protect the church from witchcraft.

There is a rather more practical possibility: the opening may simply have allowed somebody in the tower to see wedding or funeral parties approaching.

Then there is the grave.

Against the church wall lies an old Nutter family tombstone bearing a skull and crossbones. For years, local legend has identified it as the grave of Alice Nutter.

It almost certainly is not.

The date does not fit, the imagery was a relatively ordinary reminder of mortality, and a woman executed for witchcraft would be extremely unlikely to have been returned to consecrated ground for burial.

But stand in the churchyard beneath Pendle Hill and the legend becomes very easy to understand.

History leaves gaps.

Folklore cannot resist filling them.

Walking Pendle Hill today

And then there is the hill itself.

You do not need to believe in witches, ghosts or the Devil to understand why Pendle acquired its atmosphere. You only need to walk it when the weather turns.

The classic climb begins in Barley, a small stone village beneath the hill. From there the route initially feels almost benign, following lanes and paths through green Lancashire countryside before Pendle begins to rise more insistently ahead.

Then comes the Big End.

The traditional route climbs sharply up a stone-pitched path towards the summit. It is steep enough to demand attention, and there is very little mystery about why walkers remember it.

The official longer Pendle Hill route from Barley covers around seven miles and takes roughly four to five hours, continuing across open moorland, descending towards the Ogden reservoirs and eventually returning through the countryside around Newchurch.

On a good day, it is glorious. On a bad one, the character changes quickly.

Pendle’s summit is exposed. Cloud can lower across the plateau. Wind takes hold. Paths cross peat and open moorland where the cosy villages below disappear remarkably fast. Modern restoration has improved paths and waymarking, but the landscape remains wet, steep and exposed in poor conditions.

Then the cloud breaks.

And Lancashire appears beneath you.

It was somewhere on this summit in 1652, just forty years after the witch trials, that religious leader George Fox experienced the vision that became associated with the growth of the Quaker movement.

The same hill associated with devils and witches became a place of religious revelation.

Pendle has always depended upon what people bring to it.

Fear, faith, folklore, or simply walking boots and a waterproof.

The witches you meet today

The story remains everywhere. The Pendle Way uses witch imagery. There is a sculpture trail in Aitken Wood with plaques representing those executed. Roughlee has a memorial to Alice Nutter. A 45-mile Pendle Witch Trail follows the landscape from the villages around the hill towards Lancaster, echoing the journey the prisoners made to the castle.

Halloween attracts people to the hill. Ghost hunters come looking for the dead. Stories circulate about figures in the mist, strange sounds and uneasy farmhouses.

Those tales are part of modern Pendle folklore, but they are much harder to document than the history beneath them.

And perhaps Pendle does not need invented ghosts.

Its real ghosts are everywhere.

A beggar asking for a penny. A young woman wanting a few pins. An old widow dying in a castle dungeon. A mother screaming as her daughter prepares to testify against her. A nine-year-old child standing on a table while adults decide who will live and who will hang. A house whose location has been forgotten. A cat sealed inside a wall. Names preserved in a book written by the men who prosecuted them.

More than four hundred years later, you can walk out of Barley and climb towards the summit. Eventually the houses disappear behind you. The land opens. The wind becomes louder. And somewhere below are Newchurch, Roughlee, old farms and fields whose boundaries have survived longer than many of the people who worked them.

Pendle Hill does not look haunted because witches once lived beneath it.

It looks haunted because we know what people once did to one another there.

The landscape itself is innocent.

It simply remembers better than we do.