Pendle Hill

The story began on 21 March 1612 on the road near Colne, when a young woman named Alizon Device asked a Halifax pedlar, John Law, for some pins. He refused; she cursed him; moments later he stumbled and fell, apparently with a stroke. Alizon, it seems, believed she had done it. Her confession to the local magistrate Roger Nowell drew in her grandmother Elizabeth Southerns, known as Demdike, her mother Elizabeth Device and brother James, and the Demdikes' rival family, Anne Whittle, called Chattox, and her daughter Anne Redfern. The two families, both poor and both trading on reputations as cunning folk, had been feuding for years, reportedly since a break-in at Malkin Tower, the Demdike home, over goods worth a pound.

With the first suspects in Lancaster Castle, James Device held a gathering at Malkin Tower on Good Friday, for which he stole a neighbour's sheep. Word reached Nowell, who treated it as a witches' sabbat, and a further eight people were summoned, among them Alice Nutter of Roughlee, a gentlewoman quite unlike the rest. The trials ran at Lancaster from 17 to 19 August 1612. The decisive witness was nine-year-old Jennet Device, who gave evidence against those at the Malkin Tower meeting and against her own mother, sister and brother. Demdike had already died in the dungeon. On 20 August ten of the accused were hanged on Gallows Hill above Lancaster, the largest single execution for witchcraft in English history and, thanks to the clerk Thomas Potts, the best documented.

The hill has other histories. In 1652 George Fox climbed it and had the vision that led him to found the Quakers. And in 2011 the discovery of a buried seventeenth-century cottage on the hill's flank, with the bones of a cat in its walls, set off a fresh round of speculation about where Malkin Tower really stood. Nobody knows; it is one reason the hunt for the witches' homes still draws investigators.

Pendle's biggest moment on screen was Most Haunted Live at Halloween in 2004, broadcast over three nights from 30 October to 1 November with Yvette Fielding, David Bull, Derek Acorah and the parapsychologist Ciaran O'Keeffe. The base was Clitheroe Castle, and the cameras ranged across Lower Well Head Farm, Bull Hole Farm, Tynedale Farm and Waddow Hall. At the castle Acorah quickly announced himself possessed by Roger de Lacy, a crusader; at the farmhouse said to be haunted by the witches, several crew members reported feeling choked and left the building one after another; and later Acorah claimed to be taken over by a spirit called Elizabeth. The broadcasts were dogged by technical trouble, which the team attributed to interference from the other side and critics to the difficulty of live television. Reviewers at the time, and Spooky Isles since, have treated it as one of the series' most entertaining and least convincing outings.

The team returned with a 2005 episode at Lower Well Head Farm and, years later, a Return to Pendle Hill special. More recently The Haunted Hunts spent a week around the hill for a series that searched for the site of Malkin Tower and investigated the farmhouses, reporting what they described as many sightings coupled with the historic events of the 1600s. Commercial ghost hunts now run in a seventeenth-century farmhouse near Black Moss reservoir at the hill's foot, where guests are locked in until morning.

Away from television, the claims are anecdotal: walkers describing figures on the summit at dusk, unexplained lights on the moor, and the feeling of being followed on the path from Barley. The sceptical view is worth stating plainly. The accused of 1612 were poor, mostly elderly and almost certainly innocent of anything but poverty and quarrelling; their "witchcraft" was extracted from a frightened child and a magistrate looking for promotion. Pendle's real haunting is that history, and it is felt most sharply not on the summit but in the quiet churchyard at Newchurch.

Pendle Hill is open country and free to walk at any time. The classic route starts from the car park in Barley village, near Nelson and about six miles from Clitheroe in Lancashire, climbs steeply by stone steps to the summit trig point and returns by the gentler path via Ogden Clough: around five miles and two and a half hours, extendable to nine miles by adding Newchurch in Pendle and part of the Pendle Witches Walk. The summit is exposed and the weather changes fast, so take proper boots and layers even in summer. Newchurch has the Witches Galore shop and tearooms and St Mary's church with its Eye of God; Roughlee has the Alice Nutter statue; Clitheroe has the castle from which Most Haunted broadcast and a museum. Parking in Barley fills early at weekends and in October, and the Halloween mass climb is now actively discouraged by the local authorities, so go on a quieter evening.

There is no accommodation on the hill, but the villages around it and the town of Clitheroe have pubs with rooms, hotels, B&Bs and cottages, and Barley itself has a campsite. For ghost hunting, book one of the overnight investigations in the farmhouses at the foot of the hill; the operators run them through the year with a rush of dates in October. Combine Pendle with Samlesbury Hall and Lancaster Castle, where the witches were tried, for a full weekend.