Milk and Stone: The Witch of Mitchell's Fold

One of the best things about people - and we've always been this way - is that when the world doesn't make sense, we make up stories until it does.

The moon turns red? A jaguar is eating it. Mushrooms grow in a perfect circle? Fairies were dancing there. A ring of ancient stones stands on a lonely Shropshire hill, placed by hands whose names we'll never know?

Well. There must have been a witch.

*

The stones at Mitchell's Fold are over three thousand years old. Nobody knows exactly why they were put there, or how, or by whom. But our ancestors - blessed with the same curiosity and imagination that makes us human - looked at that circle on the hill and decided it needed explaining.

And so, the story goes like this.

*

The crops had failed. The whole area was tipping toward famine, the kind that hollows people out and makes them desperate. And then, in the way that only happens in the best kind of stories, something miraculous appeared: a magic cow.

She grazed on Stapeley Hill and gave endless milk - more than enough for the whole village, morning and night, no matter how little rain had fallen or how thin the grass had grown. All you had to do was bring a pail and she would fill it.

There was one rule. One pail per person, once per day. That was all she asked.

For a while, it worked. The village survived the famine on magic milk, which is not something many villages can say.

But not everyone was pleased to see them thriving.

There was a witch - old, sharp-eyed, and deeply irritated by other people's good fortune - who decided she would put an end to it. She climbed the hill in the dark and milked the cow through a sieve, so that every last drop fell uselessly onto the ground. She did it again the next night. And the next.

The cow, patient and magical as she was, endured it for as long as she could.

And then she vanished. Just like that. Never seen again.

*

When the villagers found out what had happened, the witch ran.

She made it as far as the top of the hill before justice - or something older and stranger than justice - caught up with her. The same magic that had given them their cow turned the woman to stone right where she stood, rooted to the hillside for eternity.

The villagers, not ones to take chances, built a circle of stones around her anyway. Just to be sure.

*

Those stones are still there.

The witch, if she was ever really among them, is harder to spot - though some say one stone stands a little differently to the others, a little more like a person frozen mid-run, caught in the moment everything went wrong.

You can visit Mitchell's Fold on the slopes of Stapeley Hill in the Shropshire hills. It's been standing there for three thousand years.

It'll probably manage another few thousand yet.