Warwickshire folklore & legend - From the shire to the witchcraft murder

Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog

Sarehole Mill, Cole Bank Road, Birmingham, B13 0BD

This is where it begins - or rather, where it began. Between the ages of four and eight, the future author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings lived in a small house close to this 18th century working watermill on the edge of Birmingham. The mill, the miller's son who terrified the young Ronald with his white dusty clothes, the great millpond, the surrounding fields and lanes - all of it fed directly into the imagined landscape of the Shire. Tolkien himself later described the Shire as being set in "more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee", and said of his childhood here that being placed at that age in a quiet Warwickshire village had engendered in him a particular love of what he called the central Midlands English countryside. 

The mill today is a Birmingham Museum Trust site with a small but well-kept Tolkien exhibition. Step inside, then walk the millpond and take your time. Behind the mill, a short path leads down to Moseley Bog - a remnant of the forests that once spread across this whole landscape. Walk down through hawthorn archways and the deeper you go towards the curled and knotted streams at its heart, the darker the shadows between the vine-shrouded trees become. This is Tolkien's Old Forest on the borders of the Shire.

Note: Sarehole Mill is open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays only, 11am–4pm.

Travel

• 20 miles, 45 minutes

Stop 2: Guy's Cliffe House and cave

Guy's Cliffe House, Coventry Road, Warwick, CV34 5YS

A mile north of Warwick on the banks of the Avon, Guy's Cliffe is one of the great atmospheric sites of Warwickshire legend - and one often overlooked. This is where, according to the most enduring version of the tale, Guy of Warwick - one of those figures, like Robin Hood and King Arthur, whose existence is more legend than history, retired after a lifetime of slaying dragons, defeating the monstrous Dun Cow of Dunsmore Heath and fighting the Danes' huge African champion Colbrond in single combat on behalf of King Athelstan. Having won glory, wealth and his beloved Felice, he was suddenly seized with remorse for the violence of his past life and left everything to become a hermit in a cave overlooking the River Avon.

The cave is still there, cut into the sandstone cliff above the water, and the ruined house above it - built centuries later around the site of his legendary hermitage - is one of the most romantically derelict buildings in the county. Guided tours run on Heritage Open Days; the grounds are accessible at other times. The atmosphere, particularly in low light with the Avon moving below, is extraordinary - a place where legend and landscape have fused so completely that it is hard to say where one ends and the other begins.

Travel

• 2 miles, 5 minutes
• 25 minutes south along the river path

Stop 3: Warwick Castle

Castle Lane, Warwick, CV34 4QU

Warwick Castle has been the physical home of the Guy of Warwick legend for centuries, and it wears the connection with characteristic confidence. The castle holds what is claimed to be Guy's two-handed sword - an immense weapon far too large for any ordinary man, which is rather the point - and for many years kept what was said to be a rib of the Dun Cow. A rib bone was indeed on display, though it was almost certainly a whale bone - a good illustration of how legend passes as history. The Dun Cow itself, described in the old tales as “a huge cow, the size of a double decker bus”, met its end on Dunsmore Heath at Guy's hands, and the place names of east Warwickshire still carry the memory: Stretton on Dunsmore, Dunchurch, and a string of Dun Cow pubs that mark the old route of the chase.

For students of Tolkien, the castle has an additional pull. Warwick and its castle could be architectural influences on Tolkien's vision of Edoras and Minas Tirith in The Lord of the Rings. Whether or not that connection holds, the massive circular towers and curtain walls above the Avon make it a formidable piece of medieval engineering either way.

Travel

• 10 minutes

Stop 4: The Catholic Church of St Mary Immaculate

45 West Street, Warwick, CV34 6AB

Before leaving Warwick, it is worth making a short detour to St Mary Immaculate Catholic Church on West Street. Built in 1860 in red brick and Bath stone, it is a modest Victorian church - but on 22 March 1916, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien married Edith Mary Bratt here. Edith had converted to Catholicism to marry him, a decision that cost her her lodgings when her anti-Catholic landlord threw her out. Middle-earth was rooted in Middle England, and this quiet Warwick church is part of that story.

Stop 5: Kenilworth Castle

Castle Green, Kenilworth, CV8 1NG

In July 1575, when Shakespeare was eleven years old and living just twelve miles away in Stratford, Robert Dudley staged nineteen days of waterborne pageants, theatrical spectacle and fireworks for Elizabeth I - the Lady of the Lake emerging from the mere, Merlin, mythological pageantry on an enormous scale. Scholars have argued the event left a direct mark on A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Elizabethan Garden at Kenilworth, painstakingly recreated by English Heritage from a 1575 eyewitness account, is worth visiting for that connection alone.

Travel

• 15 miles, 25 minutes

Stop 6: Stratford-upon-Avon

Shakespeare's Birthplace, Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon, CV37 6QW 

For centuries, scholars have located the fairy folklore of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Warwickshire countryside and the case is compelling. In Warwickshire, "Mab-led" was a living piece of local dialect meaning being led astray by a Will o' the Wisp. Shakespeare's Queen Mab was not a theatrical invention: she was part of the landscape he grew up in. So was Puck, whose other name, Robin Goodfellow, was the familiar woodland spirit of English countryside folklore. When he set his fairy court in a forest, he was drawing on a tradition his Warwickshire audience already knew.

Travel

• 8 minutes

Stop 7: Marie Marie Corelli's house

Mason's Croft, Church Street, Stratford-upon-Avon (exterior only)

Stratford itself has a more recent supernatural literary thread. Marie Corelli - the bestselling Victorian and Edwardian novelist whose mystical fiction drew on occult themes lived at Mason's Croft on Church Street, her house now part of the Shakespeare Institute. Elizabeth Gaskell, who went to school in both Stratford and nearby Barford, wrote Lois the Witch and the county shaped the story. The darkest currents in English literature have always found something useful in this landscape.

Travel

• 18 miles, 30 minutes

Stop 8: The Four Shire Stone

On the A44 near Moreton-in-Marsh 

Well worth a short detour, the Four Shire Stone is a twelve-foot pillar of honey-coloured Cotswold stone on the A44 near Moreton-in-Marsh, marking the ancient meeting point of Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Worcestershire. Worcestershire's boundary was redrawn in 1931 so only three counties meet here now. It is widely said to have inspired the Three-Farthing Stone in The Lord of the Rings, the boundary marker that stood at the meeting point of the Shire's four farthings — and on this itinerary, that connection feels entirely right.

Travel

• 5 miles, 10 minutes

Stop 9: The Rollright Stones

Long Compton 12:00pm Rollright Road, Long Compton, OX7 5QB

On the ridge where Warwickshire meets Oxfordshire, three prehistoric monuments stand above Long Compton carrying more supernatural folklore than almost any site in England. The Whispering Knights burial chamber dates to between 3800 and 3000 BC; the King's Men stone circle to around 2500 BC; the King Stone to the middle Bronze Age. A conquering king marched his army to within seven strides of the crest from which Long Compton would be visible - and with it, by the terms of a witch's prophecy, the throne of England. The ground rose up on the seventh stride. The witch turned the king to the King Stone, his army to the King's Men, his conspiring knights to the Whispering Knights, and herself to an elder tree. According to local tradition, the stones cannot be counted accurately - try three times and you will get three different numbers. Count the same number three times, and you shall have your heart's desire - or so the folklore claims.

For Tolkien scholars the Rollrights carry particular weight. Professor Tom Shippey's Road to Middle-Earth identifies them as Tolkien's model for his standing stones - jagged teeth out of green gums - and the long barrows on the surrounding hills, wreathed in fog on certain mornings, as the likely inspiration for the Barrow-Downs. The village of Long Compton below has its own dark tradition: in 1875 an eighty-year-old woman was murdered here with a pitchfork by a man convinced there were twenty local witches preventing him from working his fields. He was committed as insane. His beliefs, in that community, were not entirely his alone.

Arrive early. The stones in morning mist are exactly as unsettling as the legends suggest.