Hampshire and Isle of Wight Folk Tales

by Michael O'Leary

  The eldest sons soon forgot the tradition, which they saw as a foolish self-indulgence of their late father, but the youngest son continued taking the three bunches of primroses to the top of Three Tree Hill. This involved, of course, walking on the eldest brother’s land. One midsummer the eldest brother confronted him, and demanded to know why the biggest farm was doing so poorly whilst the youngest brother’s strip of a farm did so well; it had the greenest corn and the fattest pig in all of Hampshire – ‘a roight proper’ ampshire ‘og.’ Had the youngest brother put the evil eye on the eldest brother’s farm?

  The younger brother told him not to be foolish – he was only doing what they had promised their father they would do. This put the eldest brother into a fury, ‘a roight firk’, and he told his brother that he would build the biggest barn in all of Hampshire. He claimed that he couldn’t find a beam big enough to support the roof, but, were he to fell one of the three trees, he could have the beam. The youngest brother begged and pleaded with the eldest not to do it, but nothing would stop him. He took some men, horses and carts up to the top of the hill. With a felling axe, he struck the first blow. The tree gave a terrible cry, for all the world like the scream of a woman, and the men and horses turned tail and fled down the hill. The farmer continued hacking at the tree, until, with a terrible groan, it fell. Now, however expert a tree feller may be, things don’t always go to plan. I once saw a council tree gang (after becoming self-employed they were no longer called a tree gang, instead they were called arboricultural tree surgeons, which I think involves a tautology) fell a tree using all the correct equipment – safety harnesses, hard hats, ropes pulling the correct way – and yet the tree spun and fell the wrong way, flattening someone’s greenhouse with the most glorious scrunch. The same happened to the eldest brother; the tree spun, fell the wrong way, and flattened him.

  Dear oh dear. After that, the middle son took over the biggest farm, and everyone called the hill Two Tree Hill. When six of the seven oaks in Sevenoaks were blown down by the great storm of 1987, the town didn’t become known as One Oak – in the past, names must have been more fluid!

  The youngest son continued the tradition, taking two bunches of primroses to the top of Two Tree Hill – and sometimes he’d fancy he caught a glimpse of two green ladies dancing sadly around the two trees. Then, one midsummer, he was accosted by his other brother, who demanded to know why his farm did so poorly whilst that of the youngest did so well. Once again, the youngest brother told him not to be foolish and drove his older brother into a ranting ‘firk’, so that the enraged farmer said he needed firewood, and one of those trees would supply several years’ worth of firewood.

  Ignoring the pleading of his brother, the middle son took the men, horses and carts up with him to the top of the hill, and he swung that ‘gurt’ big felling axe. The tree screamed, the men and horses fled down the hill, and the tree fell. This time it fell in the right direction, but, before it did so, a whole limb sheared off, fell, and flattened the middle brother.

  The usual, rather sentimental, version of the story ends there. The youngest brother takes over the farm, is rewarded for his dutiful tradition bearing, and a lonely green lady dances around the one tree on One Tree Hill. But all is not well with the world, and sometimes all is not well for the youngest sibling; ‘howl, howl, howl, howl!’ Cordelia is dead. The story doesn’t end there.

  Unlike Cordelia, the youngest brother did survive until old age – but all would not be well for a later generation. Time passed, and down through the generations went the farm, whilst the cities grew and expanded, and Hedge End became a commuter town on the edge of Southampton. The farm was not a rich one – indeed, it was hardly a farm. By the 1970s, it was a rough patch of land with a few horses stabled on it and an electricity sub-station. The farmer used to wear a coat with baling twine instead of a belt, though everyone reckoned he had money stashed away somewhere. He used to drink in the Barleycorn in Hedge End; I remember having a few drinks with him there one time.

  Then the motorway was built and the countryside to the north and east of Hedge End was obliterated by industrial estates and out-of-town shopping outlets. Huge DIY stores, the biggest hypermarket in Hampshire, a warehouse of a shop piled high with leather sofas – shops that reduce hapless customers to blind and helpless rages, and destroy marriages.

  One Tree Hill, and the land around it, was surrounded by these shopping outlets, with the motorway thundering past. Now the land was worth millions, and the money men did everything to try and get the farmer to sell. He held out for a long time, but who could resist all that money? In the end he sold – but on one condition. This was that every midsummer, a bunch of flowers should be taken to the top of One Tree Hill. You can imagine the looks of contemptuous amusement on the faces of the money men, but they agreed. In fact, why not? Wouldn’t the corporate owners of the land, and all the retail stores in the area, look good – look ever so ‘green’ – if every midsummer the children from a local primary school went to the hill next to the superstore and put a bunch of flowers there? A photographer from the local paper would be there, and the children could be entertained by something pseudo-bucolic like Morris dancing, or, God help us, storytelling. That’s what happened. And one year I did the gig, sitting under the tree telling soppy stories about green ladies, whilst a man from the paper took lovely photos. It wasn’t right though, I could feel it. You see, the tree was dead; all the construction in the area had lowered the water table and the roots could no longer find any sustenance. It was the next year that my old mates, the arboricultural tree surgeons, came and felled the tree – because it was a danger to life and limb. Nothing bad happened to the tree surgeons; after all, the tree was already dead.

  As for the farmer, well, he didn’t quite know what to do with all the money. He bought himself a Spanish-style hacienda in the Meon Valley, and he amassed the biggest collection of country songs in the UK – all on vinyl, including several original Dolly Partons. He then decided to spend some of his money on a world tour, and this involved a 4x4 trip out into the jungle in Indonesia. That was in 1998, the year that there was a forest fire so massive that smoke drifted over Singapore. A burning tree fell on the 4x4 and killed the farmer – I read about it in the Southern Evening Echo. It made me feel so sad; I always thought that he was a decent man, but sometimes life just isn’t fair.

  KATE HUNT, THE WITCH OF CURDRIDGE

  Of course, life never has been fair; not least for all those women accused of being witches. If we travel eastwards from Hedge End we come to Curdridge, with its singular triangle of woodland trapped between Lockhams Road, Chapel Lane and the A334. Then we come to Kitnocks Hill.

  Kitnocks Hill has a strange reputation locally – or it used to when I lived in the area. When I was a greenkeeper down the road at Shedfield, my workmates told me that you could meet the ghost of a witch called Kitty Knox if you got the bus back from an evening spent drinking in Southampton, and you were ‘three sheets to the wind’. It was on account of her that so many drinkers ended up in the ditch. I think I met her myself once, though my memory of events is a little hazy. I certainly ended up in the ditch.

  There appear to have been two witches in Curdridge – Kitty Knox and Kate Hunt – though I think that Kitty Knox may be a generic name for any witch, and maybe Kitnocks Hill should be called Kate Hunt’s Hill.

  Kate Hunt was angry with the world – and probably she had good reason. The world showed little time or consideration for an old woman who lived alone. And maybe people struggling to survive, after a terrible civil war, were made to feel guilty by an angry old woman whose poverty was greater than theirs. Be that as it may, when a local landowner felled some trees and they fell across her garden – a patch of land vital for her survival – he offered no apology. The people said that Kate Hunt then cast a spell, and that is what shifted the trees from her garden to the lane; if the horses and carts were unable to get past, it was all the old witch’s fault.

&nb
sp; It was said that Kate Hunt spurned the use of broomsticks as a mode of transport, but would ride to Bishops Waltham on a farm gate. If something had happened to a gate, and the cattle had got out into the lane, why not blame old Kate Hunt, that spiteful, angry old woman? Anyway, she would be wicked enough to go to such a sinful metropolis as Bishops Waltham. Nowadays Bishops Waltham is ten minutes down the road from Curdridge, but I remember a conversation I had with a ninety-six-year-old man in Shedfield in 1977, and his memories from a time between the wars was that Bishops Waltham was some sort of an occasionally visited sin city. In Kate Hunt’s time, maybe it was!

  It was thought that witches shape-shifted into hares, and silver was the only metal that could kill a witch. So, local young men cut a silver coin in half and loaded it into a gun, and, so they said, lay in wait for the witch-hare at Pink Mead Farm (Pink is still a common local surname). They said that they shot the hare, but it managed to escape. Well, they wouldn’t do anything so cowardly as shoot an old woman, would they? Later, old Kate Hunt was found dead at home, suffering from gunshot wounds.

  St Peter’s Church in Curdridge was built in the nineteenth century, 200 years after the lonely death of Kate Hunt, but one of the gargoyles on the church tower is said to represent her. Perhaps somewhere in England there should be a monument to all those women murdered by bullies and fools, murdered as scapegoats for the transposed emotions or inadequacies of others. Maybe, rather than a gargoyle, the monument should be that triangle of green at the top of Kitnocks Hill – a green that may also carry a lot of happier memories: a meeting place for courting couples, a place where returning travellers were welcomed home.

  At present, I believe, someone wants to build on it.

  A PHANTOM OF COMBUSTION

  There can, of course, be a certain charm in dystopia, and strange glimpses of an older Hampshire can sometimes be caught within the most alienating modern environments. If you are hurtling down the M27 from Southampton to Portsmouth, you will probably notice the River Hamble, the reed beds and the boats, but you probably won’t notice Bursledon Brickworks. This is a late Victorian industrial building with a tall, red-brick chimney, where the hard graft of brick making was carried out – this area near Fareham, with its clay soil, has a history of brick making.

  If you leave the motorway and seek out the brickworks, you’ll discover that it is now owned by the Hampshire Buildings Preservation Trust and is being restored by enthusiastic volunteers. Should you wander round the back of the brickworks, you’ll find yourself in Coal Park Lane. Here, in a semi-rural lane with a characteristic terrace of Hampshire brick cottages, you can imagine yourself in Hampshire before the Second World War. Should you wander further along the lane, you’ll discover that it becomes a flyover over the motorway, leading to boatyards by the river – just a field away from the surveillance cameras and secure perimeter fence of the Air Traffic Control Centre, a startling contrast.

  In the old part of the lane, there is a Victorian bridge crossing a railway line – a bridge with a sharp arch and a wall that provides a perfect leaning place for anyone wishing to watch the trains trundle underneath. Up until the 1960s, the bridge must have disappeared in a cloud of smoke every time a train passed beneath it. Sometimes, however, it is said that a cloud of smoke still envelops the bridge, late in the evening, and that a figure can be seen leaning on the parapet.

  The legend goes that an old woman called Polly Crook met an untimely end here. She was a pedlar by trade, and known as a fearsome and hard-drinking old so and so; not a woman to be crossed. One evening, old Polly took up station on the bridge after spending several days drinking that distilled apple cider that the French insist on calling Calvados, as if it is only to be found in that region of Normandy. Polly called it ‘good ol’ foirey scrumpy’ for ‘twasn’t it made out of best New Forest apples, and ’aven’t oi walked a buggerin’ lot of miles from there to yere?’. Anyhow, she settled herself on the old railway bridge, round the back of that brickworks, and got out her old clay pipe; I don’t know if ’twas the spark of her old tinder box, or the sparks from a steam engine chugging under the bridge bound for old Pompey, but, bugger me, didn’t the poor old soul spontaneously combust.

  THREE STONE COPSE

  If we wander westwards from Bursledon, through suburban streets, past convenience stores, over the odd patch of open land that divides settlements, we come to Titchfield. Titchfield is a pretty enough place, with a long history and a picturesque ruined abbey. It also has neighbouring market gardens that produce some of the finest strawberries in the world. Whilst the abbey is well known, Titchfield’s three stones are not at all famous. One story says that they are glacial erratics; another story says something else.

  Once upon a time, three noble daughters of Titchfield married the three sons of Baron Pagham. The marriages took place just before the men set sail with the mighty Sir Bevois of Hamtun, bound for Bouillon, in present-day Belgium. From there they were to join forces with other armies, bound on a crusade to Palestine.

  The three daughters were left without their husbands, and spent their time doing embroidery and complaining about the servants. One night, a terrible storm hit the south coast; ships were dashed against the treacherous rocks of the Isle of Wight, trees were ripped from the ground, and the hovels of the villeins were torn at by wind and rain. Out of this fury came three young knights, who knocked on the door of the three young women and asked for shelter. The three women followed the laws of hospitality and invited them in, and the knights dried themselves in front of the great fire. They ate a fine meal, washed down with copious amounts of wine. That night, the three young women somewhat extended the laws of hospitality and took the knights to their beds.

  It was that night that the three husbands lost their lives during the siege of Jerusalem.

  The faithless wives were given divine punishment and turned into three stones – the three stones that gave their name to Three Stone Copse in Titchfield. (More recently they have been moved to an open wooded space at the side of West Street.) Then again, maybe the stones should be the three knights, punished for taking advantage of the three young women; or the three husbands, for gallivanting vaingloriously and destructively off to the Holy Land in the first place. Or were the three knights the shades of the three husbands? Either way, it is said that sometimes, at midnight, the three stones cross the road from one side to the other. Personally I rather wonder whether, condemned to a life of embroidery, the three young women might have thought that it was all worth it for such a night (with a knight)!

  SHORT ROAD

  Down the road from Titchfield is beautiful Titchfield Haven, an old harbour and a bird sanctuary. Just east of here is Hillhead. In Hillhead there is a road called Short Road. Local legend has it that it got this name because it is very short.

  TALES OF SANDY LANE

  North of Titchfield, east of Curdridge, we have Shedfield and a sunken lane called Sandy Lane. Sunken lanes are paths that have sunk below the surrounding land, under the pressure of generations of feet and cart wheels; the flow of water running off from the fields furthers the process, as the lane provides a channel. There are many sunken lanes in Hampshire, and there are many that are more beautiful than Sandy Lane. Yet Sandy Lane is a very particular place.

  When I was a greenkeeper in the 1970s, being myself part of the process that was suburbanising the countryside, our machines were stored in an old barn on the edge of a copse, just off Sandy Lane. First thing in the morning, a barn owl would glide into her nest like a huge moth. I still love Sandy Lane, though now the cottages have been taken over by bankers and computer programmers, and much of the lane is bounded by the ‘green desert’ of a golf course. Somehow, though, there is something about the lane that still has the feel of old Hampshire.

  Sandy Lane seems to be special to a lot of people. In the 1920s, John Swinnerton Phillimore (whose descendants lived until recently in Shedfield House at the end of Sandy Lane, as did his ancestors) wrote ‘The
Lane’. This lovely poem carries the spirit of those old Hampshire sunken lanes:

  The lane runs deep in rabbit-riddled banks.

  How many hundred years of wheel and hoof

  And plodding feet that good cowhide makes proof

  Have grooved this rut, which lurks and winds and thanks

  The burly stools of oak, the lissom ranks

  Of maple and spindlewood for eaves of roof

  So large they almost fend high noon aloof?

  Up in the hedge the wind may play his pranks;

  Here the dead-calms of the after-sunset hour

  Hold every scent afloat, immobilised,

  Along the leafy-margin’d air-lagoon.

  Briarbush and honeysuckle and elderflower –

  Each in his turn, you capture, analysed

  In such retort, the essential sweets of June.

  When I worked there, an old man called Jim Privett told me stories about old Sandy Lane – an area that throughout most of his life was deep country. He told me about the Apple Tree Man, who had to be wassailed every Twelfth Night – stories very much like those collected by Ruth Tongue in Somerset. I also heard that when so many men failed to return from the trenches after the First World War, the custom died out. Since then you must never pass the Apple Tree Man on Twelfth Night; he’s hungry, he’s neglected, he needs the respect that is his due, and he’s vengeful. Jim told me this with the deadpan face that he would assume when he told stories that he didn’t take too seriously.

  In the daytime, a sunken lane is a lovely place to be. At night, though, when the trees are waving in the wind, and clouds are flying across the face of the moon, it can be different – and there may be more things to avoid than the Apple Tree Man.