Pendle Hill

The Witch's Hill

There is a hill in east Lancashire that carries its history like a weight. Pendle Hill rises from the lowland fields south of the Ribble Valley, a brooding, whale-backed mass of dark gritstone and rough grass, visible for miles in every direction. It is not a beautiful hill in any conventional sense. It has none of the elegance of the Lake District peaks to the north, none of the drama of the Yorkshire Dales to the east. It is blunt, heavy, and solitary -- a great hump of millstone grit shouldering its way out of the Lancashire plain, permanently half-shrouded in cloud.

And it is famous. Not for its geology, not for its views (though both are remarkable), but for what happened in its shadow in 1612, when twelve people from the farms and hamlets around its base were accused of witchcraft, tried at Lancaster Castle, and -- ten of them -- hanged. The Pendle Witch Trials remain one of the most thoroughly documented and most disturbing episodes of judicial persecution in English history. Four centuries later, the hill still carries the association. You cannot look at Pendle without thinking of the witches. The landscape will not let you forget.

The Hill Itself

Pendle Hill stands 557 metres (1,827 feet) above sea level, a prominent outlier of the Pennine chain. Geologically, it is a mass of Millstone Grit -- the coarse, dark sandstone that forms the backbone of the Pennines -- capped with a layer of harder gritstone that has resisted erosion while the softer rocks around it have worn away. The result is an isolated eminence, a hill that stands apart from the main Pennine ridge, commanding attention from every approach.

From the west and south, Pendle presents its most dramatic profile: the long, level summit ridge rising to the abrupt, steep escarpment of the Big End, the hill's southeastern face, which drops sharply to the village of Barley below. From the north, seen from the gentle limestone country around Downham and Clitheroe, the hill appears as a great dark wall, its summit often lost in low cloud. From the east, it merges gradually into the higher Pennine moorland. But from almost any direction within a twenty-mile radius, Pendle is the dominant feature of the landscape -- the hill that anchors everything around it.

The summit itself is a broad, flat plateau of peat and rough grass, often waterlogged, swept by wind. On clear days the views are extraordinary: west across the Lancashire plain to the Irish Sea, north to the limestone hills of the Yorkshire Dales, northwest to the fells of the Lake District -- Ingleborough, Whernside, and the Howgills visible on a good day -- and east across the dark gritstone moors of the South Pennines. On such days, the summit cairn at the Big End feels like the pivot point of northern England, a place where Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Cumbria converge at the horizon.

On the days that are more typical -- low cloud, driving rain, a bitter wind from the west -- the summit is a bleak and disorienting place, the flat plateau stretching away in every direction into grey nothingness. It is on days like these that Pendle feels most like itself.

The Pendle Witch Trials: 1612

The events of 1612 began, as such things often do, with poverty, feuds, and fear.

The area around Pendle Hill in the early seventeenth century was remote and economically marginal. The farms were poor, the land was difficult, and the population was scattered across isolated hamlets and smallholdings. It was also an area where the old Catholic faith had survived the Reformation with particular tenacity -- the great Catholic families of Lancashire had maintained their allegiance to Rome, and the rural poor existed in a cultural borderland between official Protestantism, residual Catholicism, and older folk traditions of healing, cursing, and charm-making.

Into this landscape, the authorities projected their anxieties about witchcraft, disorder, and religious nonconformity.

The Families: Demdike and Chattox

At the centre of the story were two families: the Demdikes and the Chattoxes, both living in desperate poverty in the Forest of Pendle (not a forest of trees, but a medieval hunting ground -- open moorland and rough pasture). The matriarchs of these families -- Elizabeth Southernes (known as Old Demdike) and Anne Whittle (known as Old Chattox) -- were both elderly women who had reputations as cunning women, practitioners of folk magic, healers and cursers. Whether they believed themselves to possess supernatural powers, or whether they simply exploited local superstition to extract food and favours from their neighbours, is impossible now to determine. Both were blind or near-blind, both were destitute, and both lived on the margins of an already marginal community.

The two families were rivals. Accusations and counter-accusations of theft, cursing, and maleficium had festered between them for years. When Roger Nowell, the local magistrate, began investigating reports of witchcraft in early 1612, the Demdikes and Chattoxes readily accused each other. The cycle of denunciation, once begun, proved impossible to stop.

Malkin Tower and the Widening Investigation

A key moment came on Good Friday 1612, when members of the Demdike family and their associates gathered at Malkin Tower -- a farmhouse or cottage somewhere on the slopes of Pendle Hill, its exact location now lost. The purpose of the gathering is disputed: the accused said it was simply a family meeting; the prosecution alleged it was a witches' sabbath, a conspiracy to blow up Lancaster Castle and free the prisoners already held there.

The Malkin Tower meeting alarmed the authorities and widened the investigation dramatically. By the time the arrests were complete, twelve people had been accused: members of the Demdike and Chattox families, their neighbours, and -- most unusually -- Alice Nutter, a gentlewoman of some social standing from Roughlee Hall, whose inclusion among the accused has puzzled historians ever since. Alice Nutter was no destitute old woman. She was a property owner, a woman of means. Why she was accused, and why she refused to speak in her own defence at trial, remains one of the enduring mysteries of the case.

The Trial at Lancaster

The accused were tried at the Lancaster Assizes in August 1612 before Judge Sir Edward Bromley. The principal evidence came from a child: Jennet Device, the nine-year-old granddaughter of Old Demdike, who testified against her own mother, brother, and neighbours with a composure that the court found compelling and that modern readers find chilling.

Ten of the twelve accused were found guilty and hanged. Old Demdike died in prison before the trial. One defendant was acquitted. The executions took place on the moors above Lancaster.

The trial was meticulously recorded by the court clerk, Thomas Potts, whose account -- The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster -- was published in 1613 and remains the primary source for the case. Potts's account is detailed, legalistic, and entirely convinced of the defendants' guilt. Read today, it is a document of extraordinary power and horror: the voices of the accused, filtered through Potts's prosecutorial lens, still carry across four centuries.

George Fox and the Quaker Vision: 1652

Forty years after the witch trials, Pendle Hill became the setting for an event of entirely different character -- one that would shape the religious history of the English-speaking world.

In 1652, George Fox, a young itinerant preacher from Leicestershire, climbed Pendle Hill. Fox had been wandering the north of England for several years, seeking spiritual truth, rejecting the established Church and its clergy, and gathering a small following of like-minded seekers. On Pendle Hill, he later wrote, he experienced a transformative vision:

"As we travelled we came near a very great hill, called Pendle Hill, and I was moved of the Lord to go up to the top of it; which I did with difficulty, it was so very steep and high. When I was come to the top, I saw the sea bordering upon Lancashire. From the top of this hill the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered."

Fox descended from Pendle Hill and travelled north into Westmorland, where he preached at Firbank Fell and found the community of Seekers who would become the nucleus of the Religious Society of Friends -- the Quakers. Pendle Hill is thus regarded as one of the founding sites of Quakerism, the place where Fox received the vision that launched a global religious movement.

The contrast is striking: the same hill that witnessed the persecution of the alleged witches in 1612 became, forty years later, the site of a vision of religious liberation. Pendle Hill contains both stories, both histories, without resolving the tension between them.

Before History: The Ancient Hilltop

Long before the witch trials, before Fox's vision, before the medieval Forest of Pendle, the hill was a landmark in a landscape shaped by far older human presence. The Pennine uplands bear extensive evidence of Bronze Age and Iron Age activity -- burial cairns, enclosures, trackways -- and Pendle Hill, as the most prominent feature in its locality, almost certainly held significance for prehistoric communities.

The summit plateau and the col known as Nick o' Pendle -- the saddle between the main summit and the lower eastern end of the ridge -- have both yielded evidence of ancient use. Several barrows (burial mounds) have been identified on or near the summit ridge, though none have been systematically excavated. Their presence suggests that the hilltop was used for funerary and possibly ceremonial purposes in the Bronze Age, as was common for prominent hills across upland Britain.

Nick o' Pendle itself, the pass that carries the road from Clitheroe to Padiham across the hill's eastern shoulder, has been a route of passage for millennia. The name "Pendle" may derive from the Celtic penn (hill) combined with the Old English hyll -- making "Pendle Hill" a tautology, meaning "hill hill hill," each successive language adding its own word for the same thing. This linguistic layering speaks to the hill's enduring prominence: every culture that has encountered it has felt the need to name it.

Modern Pendle: Heritage and Haunting

Pendle Hill has become, in the modern era, a place of pilgrimage -- though the pilgrims come for many different reasons.

Every Halloween, hundreds of people climb the hill to mark the anniversary of the witch trials. The gatherings are part commemoration, part celebration, part tourist spectacle. Lanterns and torches move up the Big End in the darkness, and the summit glows with firelight. The event has grown steadily since the 1990s and now attracts visitors from across the country.

The Pendle Witch Trail, a heritage trail linking the villages and sites associated with the 1612 events, winds through the landscape below the hill. Markers at Barley, Roughlee, Newchurch-in-Pendle (where a carved "Eye of God" in the church tower is popularly associated with protection against witchcraft), and other locations tell the story of the accused and their accusers. The trail is well-maintained and well-interpreted, offering a sombre but compelling walk through the landscape of the trials.

Pendle Hill is also a working landscape. The lower slopes are farmed -- sheep grazing, hay meadows, stone-walled fields -- and the hill is crossed by a network of footpaths and bridleways. The hill falls within the Forest of Bowland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and its moorland summit is managed for conservation.

Visiting Pendle Hill

Pendle Hill is open access land under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, and can be climbed freely at any time.

Main Routes

The two most popular ascents are:

• From Barley (southeast): The classic route, climbing steeply up the Big End via a well-worn but rough path. The ascent is direct and relentless -- approximately 300 metres of climbing in less than a kilometre -- but the views from the top of the Big End are immediate and spectacular. Allow 1.5 to 2 hours for the round trip.

• From Downham (north): A gentler, longer approach through farmland and moorland, following paths and tracks up the northern flank of the hill. Downham itself is a remarkably well-preserved estate village, often described as the prettiest village in Lancashire, with no visible television aerials or road markings. Allow 2.5 to 3 hours for the round trip.

Practical Information

The hill rewards patience. On a clear day, the summit views are among the finest in Lancashire. On a grey day, with the cloud down and the wind up, the hill reveals its other character -- the brooding, solitary, faintly unsettling presence that has given it its reputation across the centuries. Both versions of Pendle are worth experiencing. The hill has room for all of them.