With its steep flanks and gently shelving summit plateau, PENDLE HILL resembles a giant whale swimming serenely above the
industrial sprawl of the Ribble and Burnley Valleys. For centuries, its moorland top served as a sanctuary for textile workers from the smoggy mill towns below, who used to climb it in wooden clogs on Sunday afternoons for a blast of fresh air. Among them was a thirteen-year-old Tom Stephenson, future journalist, rights of way activist and Ramblers’ president, who made his first ascent on a February morning in 1906, and would later describe the view of snowy Pennine fells that greeted him at the top as a revelation.
Centuries before Stephenson’s seminal climb, Pendle was the scene of another historic eureka moment. In 1652, while the country was reeling in the wake of the Civil War, the Christian dissenter George Fox, travelling through the region on a preaching tour, felt, “moved of the Lord to go up to the top of the very great hill” he and his companions had seen from a distance. Once at the summit, he said, “the
Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered.”
The vision transformed Fox from an itinerant preacher into the founder of what would become a worldwide religious movement, the Society of Friends, or “Quakers”. Published posthumously, the account of his journey around the north of England would inspire the likes of William Pen and Oliver Cromwell, and provide guiding precepts for whole colonies in America: there still exists today a study centre in Pennsylvania called “Pendle Hill”.
George Fox visited the district at a time when Lancashire ranked among the most anarchic and ungovernable counties in England, “fabled” in the words of one local historian, “for its theft, violence and sexual laxity, where the church was honoured without much understanding of its doctrines by the common people.” And Pendle was the most notorious district of all in this Wild North-West – thanks to the famous Witch Trials of 1612, in which thirteen men and women from the area were found guilty of practicing satanic rites.
The catalyst for the famous trials was an alleged attack on a peddler named John Law, who claimed he had been paralyzed by one Alizon Devices after he had refused to sell her pins. Without being subjected to torture, Devices made a full confession – extraordinary in its frankness, and for the fact it incriminated three other members of her own family.
There followed an equally amazing set of revelations as the Devices not only admitted having committed murders by means of black magic, but also identified other practising witches in the Pendle area, most of them from the rival Chattox family. The Chattoxes, in turn, spilled more beans on the Devices and their associates, whether out of revenge or as a vain attempt to secure clemency no-one is sure.
Of the thirteen individuals found guilty at the subsequent trials, eleven were hanged within a couple of days of the verdicts. The elderly matriarch of the Devices, a much feared witch known as Owd Demdike, died in prison before her case could be heard.
The Pendle Witch Trials were not only the single largest number of convictions made during the witch hunts of James I’s reign. They were also the best documented court-room dramas of their day – due to the efforts of a clerk named Thomas Potts, who took detailed notes on the interrogations and proceedings, and then published them as the Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of
Lancaster. With its florid descriptions of demonic rituals and spells, the account lifted the lid on the murky world of seventeenth-century witchcraft, revealing how witches made pacts with spirit animals, or “familiars”, in exchange for secret powers which they would use to kill or inflict illness and injuries on adversaries.
The Wonderfull Discoverie inspired a rip-roaring novel by the Victorian author William Harrison Ainsworth, and a horror movie in the 1970s. Today, two longdistance walking paths and a bus route immortalize the memory of the Pendle witches, while a cottage industry in witchy nick nacks has sprung up to service a local tourist trade.
Pendle Witch fervour, however, reaches fever pitch at the end of October each year, with the nocturnal procession to the top of the hill held on the night of Halloween. Interest in the event soared after the ghosthunting television show Most Haunted filmed a Halloween Special there; presenters and mediums later claimed the events they experienced were among the most terrifying of their careers. While some of the old farms nestled at the foot of the hill definitely retain a spooky air, the top of Pendle itself is definitely an uplifting place. Reclined on
one of the outcrops overlooking the Ribble Valley, with the Irish Sea glinting in the distance, you’re more likely to hear the melancholic call of a curlew as it skims over the heather and peat bogs than the cackle of a wicked witch on her broomstick.
Townley’s Hypothesis - A lesser known claim to fame of Pendle Hill is that it was the scene of a ground-breaking scientific experiment
in 1661, when local scientist Richard Townley tested a machine on its sides that established a connection between atmospheric pressure and altitude. “Townley’s Hypothesis”, as his theory became known, later served as the basis of the more famous Boyle’s Law, and paved the way for the invention of the barometer. Robert Boyle (1627–1691) saw an early draft of Townley’s book Experimental
Philosophy in 1661, and, or so it is claimed, originally named his own theory “Townley’s Hypothesis”.