13

The Power of Magical Places

FOUR-LANE ENDS, FOUR-WENTZ WAYS—THE MAGIC OF THE CROSSROADS

I started school one morning

I threw my books away

I left a note for teacher

I’m at the crossroads today.

Crossroads are places of transition, where the axis linking the underworld with the upperworld intersects this world on which we walk. As with all liminal places, they are places of physical and spiritual dangers. There, the distinction between the physical and nonmaterial worlds appears less certain, and the chance of encountering something supernatural is more likely. The term crossroads generally refers in folklore to a meeting of two or more roads or the branching of one into two or more, at whatever angle. The folklorists Theo Brown and Martin Puhvel note the fallacy of trying to see Christian veneration of the cross at the core of the crossroads mystique, even if it appears to be present (Brown 1966, 126; Puhvel 1976, 174, n. 1). Junctions of roads, whether a trifinium, or trivium, where three roads meet or a crossroads where four do, are places where the wayfarer is confronted with a choice of which way to go. That is why the word crossroads appears as a metaphor, such as “we are at a crossroads in history” and so forth. The names of some crossroads in England, four-lane ends and four-wentz ways, look at them not as places where two roads cross but as the end of four roads, roads that lead to a central point from the four corners of the world. Through the crossroads is the cosmic axis, leading below to the underworld and above to the upperworld. Thus a crossroads, especially when the roads are oriented toward the four cardinal directions, is a central place that links the four corners of the world with other spiritual dimensions, a place where one may access the domains of gods, spirits, and the dead.

Burials at liminal points such as crossroads, roadsides, and parish boundaries are notable in English tradition. Bob Trubshaw observed that in southern England many pagan burials of the Anglo-Saxon period are found near parish boundaries, which may postdate the burials (Trubshaw 1995, 4–5). Five hundred years after the downfall of Anglo-Saxon England, the executed dead who had been convicted of particularly horrendous crimes were sometimes gibbeted at crossroads. People who were gibbeted received no burial at all; their corpses were dipped in tar and then were hung in chains as a grisly warning to others. Ephraim Chambers’s 1727 Cyclopædia describes the gibbet as “a machine in manner of a gallows, whereon notorious criminals after execution are hung in irons, or chains, as spectacles, in terrorem.” Those executed at crossroads gallows and not left to hang as a warning to others were buried close by, often under the road itself, “out of the sanctuary,” not in consecrated ground (Glyde 1872, 28–29). The practice of gibbeting continued until 1834 (Pringle 1951, 68).

Until 1823, under Church of England laws, suicides, nonconformists, Jews, Gypsies, outlaws, and executed criminals were not to be given burial in consecrated ground. Jewish communities and nonconformist chapels owned their own burial grounds, but Gypsies, witches, and those assumed to have killed themselves sometimes ended up under the edge of the road or even beneath the road surface itself. In Suffolk, at a former crossroads on the Bury St. Edmunds–to–Kentford road, is the Gypsy’s Grave, otherwise known as the Boy’s Grave, a flower-bedecked plot reputed to be the burial place of a shepherd boy who hanged himself after being accused of stealing sheep (Lantern 10, 1975, 3; Burgess 1978, 6). Here, the Gypsy and the suicide are the same person. Another kind of outcast was the witch. Catherine Parsons recounted that when the famous Cambridgeshire witch known as Daddy Witch died, her body was buried in the middle of the road from Horseheath to Horseheath Green, opposite the “hut by the sheep-pond at Garret’s Close,” where she had lived. The site of her grave was said to be discernable from the dryness of the road at that place, reputed to be caused by the heat from her body (Parsons 1915, 39). The Horseheath Women’s Institute Scrapbook for 1935 states that one must nod one’s head nine times for good luck before passing over Daddy Witch’s grave (Porter 1969, 163). At nearby Bartlow was a bump at a crossroads where a witch was said to be buried (Porter 1969, 161).

People who committed suicide or were conveniently labeled as suicides were buried at the crossroads or by the roadside. It was customary to bury them at a crossroads, especially on the parish boundary, though there are instances of roadside burial too. John Galsworthy’s short story “The Apple Tree” tells of a suicide’s grave at a crossroads. The records of such burials go back to the sixteenth century; a parish record from Pleasley in Derbyshire from 1573 tells how a man found hanging was buried at midnight at the highest crossroads with a stake in him (Roud 2003, 443). Another in the parish register at Palgrave, near Diss in Norfolk, dated December 30, 1587, records a man named John Bungey being buried in the road (Burgess 1978, 7). As with the Pleasley man, a stake was sometimes driven through the body of a suicide buried on a roadside, in the road, or at a crossroads. In 1814 “an unknown man found dying of poison, self-administered, in Godmanchester, Huntingdonshire, was buried at the crossroads leading to Offord” (Peterborough Weekly Gazette, July 30, 1814). Hangman’s Lane in Norwich was another such place of a suicide’s burial, recalled by correspondent “R. M. L.,” who told in 1896 how his father remembered “seeing a suicide carried past his house at twelve at night, to be buried at the cross roads at Hangman’s Lane. An immense crowd followed, to see the stake driven though the body” (Norfolk and Norwich Notes & Queries, August 15, 1896).

Certain trees are reputed to have grown from the stakes hammered through the bodies buried by the roadside. At Redenhall, Norfolk, was one, a willow tree called Lush’s Bush that marked the grave of a woman who poisoned herself in 1813 after being suspected of infanticide; she had a stake hammered through her heart (Lantern 12, 1976, 9; Spellthorn 3, 1979, 2). Another tree with an unlucky reputation, Cruel Tree at Buckden, which was finally cut down in 1865 during roadwork, was believed to have grown from a stake driven through the body of a murderer who suffered burial at the crossroads of the Great North Road and Mere Lane on the parish boundary of Brampton and Buckden, Huntingdonshire (Tebbutt 1984, 18).

There are many further examples of the practice recorded from other parts of England (Russett 1978, 16). In 1886 the Tyneside folklorist William Brockie wrote:

In the Mile End Road, South Shields, just at the corner of a garden wall . . . lies the body of a suicide, with a stake driven through it. It is, I believe, that of a poor baker, who put an end to his existence sixty or seventy years ago, and who was buried in this frightful manner, at midnight, in unconsecrated ground. The top of the stake used to rise a foot or two above the ground within the last thirty years, and boys used to amuse themselves by standing with one foot upon it. (151–52)

Some crossroads bear the name of the person buried there; for example, Chunk Harvey’s Grave at Thetford in Norfolk and Alecock’s Grave at Stanton, Suffolk. Dobb’s Grave, at the junction of the parishes of Brightwell, Foxhall, Kersgrave, and Martlesham, is reputed to be the grave of another shepherd who hanged himself (East Anglian Miscellany 2, 1910, 692). Bond’s Corner, a crossroads near Grundisburgh, Suffolk, is explicitly said to be the grave of a suicide (Burgess 1978, 7). Clibborn’s Post at Tewin, near Hertford, marks the grave of the highwayman Walter Clibborn, buried in 1782 with a stake through his body (Lucas 1990, 103).

In 1823 burial on the roadside or at crossroads was prohibited by law in an Act of Parliament that made it unlawful for any coroner who had reached a suicide verdict at an inquest to order the body to be buried in any public highway. The tradition of ramming a stake through the body was also prohibited. From then on, suicides were to be interred in churchyards or other burial grounds, at night between nine and midnight, without religious rites and ceremonies. The stipulation of night burial and riteless interment was abolished in 1882 (Roud 2003, 444).

Suicides were thought to become earthbound spirits that were dangerous to living people (Tebbutt 1984, 17). Thomas Sternberg records how in Northantson on Christmas Eve, “rustics, also, carefully avoid cross-roads on this eventful night, as the ghosts of unfortunate people buried there have particular license to wander about and wreak their evil designs upon defenceless humanity” (Sternberg 1851, 186). More generally, Marie Trevelyan noted a belief that in Wales the dead appear at crossroads at Halloween (Trevelyan 1909, 254). A tradition from the highlands of Scotland tells us not to shun the junctions of roads on Halloween, but if one sits on a three-legged stool at the meeting of three roads then, one will hear the names of those doomed to die in the coming year. Also, one may see the spirits of the dead if one stands at a crossroads with one’s chin resting on a forked stick. First will be seen passing the shades of the good, then the shades of those who have been murdered, then the damned. In Wales on teir nos ysbrydion, a threespirit night, one can also go to the crossroads and listen to what the wind has to say. One may thereby learn all the most important things that concern him or her during the forthcoming year (Puhvel 1976, 169–70). Girls wishing to identify their future lover would scatter hemp seeds for nine nights at a crossroads, chanting:

Hemp seed, hemp seed, hemp seed I sow

Hoping my true love will come here to mow.

Afterward, they would look at men traveling the road to see which one it would be (Trevelyan 1909, 236).

Another Welsh belief asserts that on May Eve, witches dance at crossroads with the devil (Trevelyan 1909, 152). Writers on the famous German magician Doctor Faustus tell us that he went to a crossroads in a forest near Wittenberg to raise the devil: “Toward evening, at a crossroads in the these woods, he drew certain circles with his staff; thus in the night between nine and ten o’clock he did conjure the Devil.” It was traditional in Wales for the pallbearers at a funeral, when carrying the coffin, to set it down at each crossroads and pray (Trevelyan 1909, 275). The rite is recorded in Ella Mary Leather’s The Folk-Lore of Herefordshire: “On the Welsh side of the county, in the Golden Valley, in the Kington district, two curious funeral customs prevailed within living memory. The coffin was taken on a roundabout way to the church, and it was put down for a few moments at every cross road, the mourners standing still” (Leather 1912, 122).

The crossroads is a “favourite place to divest oneself of diseases or other evil influences” (Crooke 1909, 88). It is customary for used materia magica to be disposed of at a crossroads. Also, the crossroads is the conductor of the baneful energy emanating from the evil eye, dispersing it to the four quarters of the world and thus preventing it from injuring the person or object of its focus. Folklore tells us that warts and other diseases can be got rid of at crossroads. A tradition recorded in Shropshire is that a person suffering from warts must rub an ear of wheat against each wart, wrap the wheat ears in a piece of paper, and then throw it away at a crossroads. The warts would disappear, transferred to whoever found the piece of paper and picked it up (Burne and Jackson 1883, 200).

A ritual recorded by Evelyne Gurdon in Suffolk in 1893 tells: “You must go by night alone to a crossroads, and just as the clock strikes the midnight hour, you must turn about thrice and drive a tenpenny nail up to the head in the ground, then walk away backward from the spot before the clock ends striking twelve, and you will miss the ague; but the next person who goes over the nail will catch the malady in your stead” (Gurdon 1893, 14).

Alice Kyteler, tried as a witch at Kilkenny in Ireland in 1324, was said to have killed animals, dismembered them, and flung parts at crossroads “as an offering or sacrifice to a devil of very low degree” (WoodMartin 1902, vol. 2, 174). The devil appearing at the crossroads is a theme in both European and American tradition. In German-speaking lands, he appears as a black man who will ask questions. One must answer his seven questions correctly without replying ja or nein. If one passes the test, one is rewarded with treasure (Drechsler 1903, 108; Peuckert 1961, 47 and 1963, 190). In American magical tradition, the fork of the road is where all devils meet. Great things can happen there (Hyatt 1974, vol. 3, 2286). Classified among hoodoo practices is the claim that one can go to a crossroads to become a competent musician, dancer, or “slick person” (successful gambler). This can be accomplished by means of going to the crossroads alone, where one stands at the center of the crossroads, then walks up all four “forks” in succession, after which “you can play anything” (Hyatt 1978, vol. 5, 4008, #10524). One may go to the crossroads at midnight for nine successive nights (Hyatt 1978, vol. 5, 4008, #10534) or nine Sunday mornings before daybreak (Hyatt 1978, vol. 5, #10535), from whence we get Leroy Carr’s blues song, “Blues before Sunrise.” Other versions of the going-to-thecrossroads-alone motif tell how one must go there on nine mornings in succession (Hyatt 1978, vol. 5, 4009, #10530, 10532–3), facing the eastern quarter where the sun rises, “the house of the rising sun.” Hoodoo “hands”^*2 for specific purposes are made facing the rising sun. Here, house has its meaning as a division of the horizon.

The commonest tradition is that one meets a black man identified as the devil who will give one the ability to play the banjo or guitar. According to one source from Brunswick, Georgia, one must go to the “three-forked” road on Sunday at midnight or 4:00 p.m. and stand with a banjo or guitar “to attract the Devil,” and if you can stand what you see by yourself, you will be a worldly success (Hyatt 1978, 5, 4006, #10508). Sometimes the black man/devil will tune the instrument, after which the initiate can play well; that is, the “Devil learn you all the tricks they is going” (Hyatt 1978, 5, 4006, #10538). Like similar European rituals, one can go to the crossroads and, by cursing the Trinity, become an “underworld man” (Hyatt 1978, 5, 4004, #10497); alternatively, one can curse God and sell one’s soul to the devil (Hyatt 1978, 5, 4004, #10498) with the words “Devil take me, I sell my soul to you” (Hyatt 1978, 5, 4004, #10500). The rite is said to be alluded to in Robert Johnson’s song “Cross Road Blues,” recorded in San Antonio, Texas, on November 27, 1936, in the nonmagical key of B (Charters 1973, 50–51). Unsuccessful at the time, this song has since the 1960s spawned an industry centered on the crossing point of Highway 49 and Highway 61 at Clarksville, Mississippi.

The black man who taught the guitar at the crossroads, perhaps personating the devil like the president of the initiations in the Horsemen’s Hall in Scotland and England, was a transmitter of secret knowledge to musicians, such as the proper tuning of the instrument to play the blues (Hyatt 1978, 5, 4010–11). The blues are played in many different tunings, not the standard one, which is generally taught to those who wish to learn the guitar. Variously called Sebastopol tuning, cross tuning, cross Spanish, slack tuning, Bentonia tuning, Piedmont tuning, and so on, these often minor key tunings are generally unknown to the beginner, who struggles in vain to reproduce the sounds of established musicians playing in them. In both European traditional music and the blues, tunes concerned with the world of spirits and the dead are played in minor keys; for example, the Irish tune “The King of the Fairies” and the blues songs “St. James Infirmary” and “Devil Got My Woman.”

CHURCHYARDS AND GRAVEYARDS

Churchyards and graveyards are places set aside for the dead. They are places of dread because we all know that one day we will die and end up in one. They are also feared because perhaps the spirits of the dead reside there, and they might affect us in some unfavorable way should we go there at night or on the wrong day of the year. Graves and tombs contain the remains of individuals who led particular lives. The graves of famous and infamous people are noted features of graveyards and places resorted to by pilgrims, tourists, the curious, and practitioners of magic who intend to contact the spirits or use bones, graveyard earth, and fragments of coffin as materia magica. The materials of the churchyard are deemed to possess magical and physical qualities; for example, coffin dust is said to be toxic (Newman 1948a, 127).

Fig. 13.1. Carved head, about two inches long, found in a churchyard in Hertfordshire

Because the spirit was once present in the body, the tomb is not just a nondescript place to deposit the corpse but rather a symbolic location that becomes associated with the individual buried there. Traditionally, the tomb or grave is the dwelling place of the shade or ghost of the individual. It must be kept clean and adorned with flowers and other offerings so that the memory of the deceased will be kept up and also that the shade might not wander from the grave and do mischief. Malevolent spirits that manifest as the vicious bar guest or bogeyman are held to be those who are not honored as worthy ancestors but are instead ignored or vilified. One belief about the bar guest, black ghost, or bogeyman is that he is the ghost of a suicide or murderer, of an unjust oppressive landlord, or of a murder victim who is thus denied rest in the proper place for spirits and instead must wander the Earth aimlessly and do mischief, for many are the tales of strange appearances suddenly seen perched on the top of a gate or fence, whence they sometimes leaped upon the shoulders of the scared passenger.

There are apotropaic ritual devices to ward off evil spirits from a place or to pin them down so they will not wander. A cross on a grave, apart from being a marker that someone is buried there, also serves to prevent spirits from manifesting. In many religions there are special days on which family and ancestral graves or tombs are swept, cleaned, and tended, thereby maintaining the protective power. All Souls’ Day is the customary one in the Catholic tradition, held on November 1, at the time of Samhain; it is observed in some countries as the Day of the Dead.

But graveyards are also places where the materia magica needed for certain purposes can be obtained. The necromantic conjuration of spirits of the dead in graveyards and the use of bones in magic by witches or bonesmen was always an argument for cremation, though it was illegal in Great Britain until the nineteenth century. As Sir Thomas Browne wrote in Hydriotaphia in the mid-seventeenth century, “To be gnawed out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned in to pipes, to delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations escaped in burning burials” (Browne 1658, 152). Clearly people did take human bones from churchyards and use them. Writing in 1851 about the T-shaped “lucky bone” carried in Northamptonshire, Sternberg also noted that the kneecap of a sheep or lamb, worn as an amulet, was a remedy to ward off cramps. But he also mentions one instance he found of someone who possessed a human kneecap for the same purpose (Sternberg 1851, 24–25), which parallels the human knucklebones used in American hoodoo and carried by British bonesmen. Digging in graveyards for human bones for magical purposes is, of course, forbidden.

Fig. 13.2. Graveyard at Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England

In 1895, William Blyth Gerish published an East Anglian churchyard charm taught by the Chedgrave Witch to a Loddon girl at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The rhyme or charm gives a graveyard rite for a woman to gain a husband.

To gain a husband, name known or unknown,

Make your choice on a graveyard stone.

Quarter-Day’s night if there fare a moon,

Pass through the church gate right alone;

Twist three crosses from graveyard bits,

Place them straight in your finger slits,

Over the grave hold a steady hand

And learn the way the side crosses stand.

One is yourself and your husband one,

And the middle to be named of none.

If they both on the middle cross have crossed,

His name you win, and a year you’ve lost;

For he who lies in the namesake mould

His soul has sold—or he would have sold,

And you give a year which the dead may use

Your last year on earth-life that you lose.

(GERISH 1895, 200)

As amply demonstrated in previous chapters, the toad is popularly considered to be an evil animal, sometimes a transmogrified witch, a demon, or the devil, and the graveyard is a place where one might expect a toad to appear. Rites transgressive of the church using churchyard toads were recommended by witches to women who wished to entrap men who would be “compelled to accept the yoke of wedlock.” According to Mabel Peacock, the woman who wanted to marry a particular man had to go to church and take the eight o’clock holy communion. She should take the communion bread but not swallow it. “After you come out of the church, you will see a toad in the churchyard.” Then she had to spit the bread out so that the toad would eat it. After that, her man would be compelled to marry her (Peacock 1901a, 168).

In 1902 a similar but more complex rite was described from Devon. The writer was informed by an old woman whose mother as a girl had been taught by a Gypsy witch how to gain power over people. Like the previous rite, it also involved taking the sacrament and keeping it in the mouth until the end of the service. But then, upon coming out of church, the woman had to walk around the churchyard three times “saying the Belief and the Lord’s Prayer backward. Then you will see a great black toad, which is Old Satan. Give it the bread to eat, and after that you can do anything you wish to people” (Salmon 1902, 427).

MAGICAL ENCLOSURES

It is traditional to believe that the devil can be called up by making a circle on the ground while chanting a particular form of words. The circle can be marked using various materials: flour, chalk, soot, salt, or sand. People who discover such a circle often call it a “witch’s circle.” It is an ancient practice, and it is always much feared and worrisome to those who discover one. If such a circle is near a house, it may indicate that an on lay has been created there to bewitch the inhabitants. Circles were the focus of some witch trials; for example, at Haddenham in Cambridgeshire in 1615 when Dorothy Pitman was tried for witchcraft. One question she was asked was “whether she had at any time made any circle, or did she know of the making of any circle by ‘charmer, or enchantment,’ to do any mischief?” (Depositions and Informations, F.10, Ely, 1615, cited by Parsons 1915, 38, 45).

Fig. 13.3. A magical circle keeps the devil out when he is called up.

The circle, of course, is part of classic magic, protecting the magician inside from those dangerous entities she or he may have evoked. The chalked circle was known and feared by country people. Leather recounts a story about Jenkins, the son of a famous cunning man in nineteenth-century Herefordshire. He demonstrated the irrational and erratic behavior associated with witches and cunning men. One inexplicable event involved chalk circles.

Once he went to a hop-picking ball; he was the fiddler, but all at once he put down his fiddle and drew a hen and chickens on the floor in a circle with chalk. Thinking it was black magic and some evil spell might fall upon them none would step within it, and the dancing was stopped. The fiddler went on with his drawing; he drew a sow and pigs, then a flock of geese. There was no more dancing that night, for by the time he had done they had all gone out of fear. (Leather 1912, 59)

Parsons, in her account of witchcraft at Horseheath, tells that “a circle is drawn on the ground, with perhaps a piece of chalk . . . the Lord’s Prayer is said backward, and the devil suddenly appears within the circle, perhaps in the form of a cockerel, but all kinds of things are said to suddenly spring out of the ground” (Parsons 1915, 37). She notes that “the devil usually appeared in the form of an animal, such as a rat, mouse, or toad” (Parsons 1915, 32). “And if the person standing within the circle becomes so frightened that he steps out of the circle, we are told the devil would fly away with him” (Parsons 1915, 37). Another means of raising the devil, recorded in Herefordshire, was to put one’s hat on crossed sticks stuck in the ground and walk nine times around them, repeating the Lord’s Prayer backward. To lay him again, it was necessary to reverse the proceedings (Leather 1912, 40).

In the West Country, such circles are known as gallitraps. As magical circles, gallitraps are traditionally created by a conjuring parson to entrap criminals. In his West Country researches, Brown saw the gallitrap in terms of an artificial entrance to the underworld (Brown 1966, 125). The word gallitrap is also used in the West Country to describe “a waste piece of land.” Gallitraps are uncultivated, usually triangular pieces of ground, such as the no-man’s-lands at trifinia of roads, which are also called variously in Scotland the Gudeman’s Croft, the Old Guidman’s Ground, the Halyman’s Rig, the Halieman’s Ley, the Black Faulie, or Clootie’s Croft, and the Devil’s Holt and the Devil’s Plantation in eastern England.

Sir Walter Scott wrote:

In many parts of Scotland there was suffered to exist a certain portion of land, called the gudeman’s croft, which was never ploughed or cultivated, but suffered to remain waste, like the Temenos of a pagan temple. Though it was not expressly avowed, no one doubted that “the goodman’s croft” was set apart for some evil being; in fact, that it was the portion of the arch-fiend himself . . . this was so general a custom that the Church published an ordinance against it as an impious and blasphemous usage. Within our own memory, many such places, sanctified to barrenness by some favourite popular superstition, existed, both in Wales and Ireland, as well as in Scotland. (1885, 78–79)

This fenced-off sacred place that is left to itself is redolent of the stafgarðr, “fenced enclosures,” recorded in Scandinavia of heathen times, which clearly also existed in the British Isles (Olsen 1966, 280).

A 1955 article in the Agricultural History Review told about “the Halieman’s Ley or Guidman’s Croft, which was a small plot of land unploughed and dedicated to the devil, in Ireland they were dedicated to the fairies” (quoted by Davidson 1956, 72). In Lincolnshire, “in the neighbourhood of Frieston, triangular corners of fields are filled with trees, and the groups are known as ‘Devil’s Holts.’ The belief is still current that these were left for the devil to play in, otherwise he would play in the fields and spoil the crops” (C. B. Sibsey, quoted by Rudkin 1934, 250). The trifinium, or trivium, the junction of three roads, sometimes contains a piece of uncultivated ground, commonly called a no-man’s-land or a cocked hat after the three-cornered hat popular in the eighteenth century (Brown 1966, 124). The expression “I knocked him into a cocked hat” talks of easily knocking someone off the road at a junction.

The custom concerning these special tracts of ground is for the farmer to promise never to till the earth there (McNeill 1957, vol. 1, 62; Pennick 2004, passim). Sir Walter Scott noted that it was not so much the hostility of the clergy that caused these tracts to be ploughed up, but economics: “The high price of agricultural produce during the late war render it doubtful if a veneration for greybeard superstition has suffered any one of them to remain undesecrated” (Scott 1885, 79). But not all were destroyed. In England the tradition existed through the twentieth century, and there are still gallitraps, devil’s holts, and devil’s plantations existing in the twenty-first. One can see stands of trees in circular enclosures or small mounds within arable fields that are uncultivated and go by the same name. These enclosures were also noted by Scott: “For the same reason [as the gudeman’s crofts] the mounts called Sith Bhruaith were respected, and it was deemed unlawful and dangerous to cut wood, dig earth and stones, or otherwise disturb them” (Scott 1885, 79).

Related to these special tracts of ground are the clumps of pine trees that stand isolated from other trees in many places in England and Wales. These are always Scots pines (Pinus sylvestris), which grow closely together—dark, tall, and visible from afar. These groups of pines were planted as markers on trackways and roads connected with the ancient craft of droving. Sheep and cattle have been herded across the British countryside for thousands of years, and by the medieval period flourishing businesses existed to drive herds of animals long distances. By the seventeenth century there were established routes from Wales into southeastern England and from Scotland to East Anglia and London. When the drove stopped for the night, the animals needed to graze, and there were stances where this could happen. Along the routes where the herds passed were farms where the drovers could pasture animals overnight to feed, for a payment to the farmer. These stopping places or stances were marked by clumps of Scots pine trees, planted to be visible from considerable distances in the open country across which the drovers brought their herds. Many remain today untouched in the manner of devil’s plantations.

Fig. 13.4. A devil’s plantation near Rugby, England