Dorrington Witch

The Dorrington Witch is one of a cluster of Lincolnshire transformation tales collected by the folklorist Ethel H. Rudkin (1893–1985) during her fieldwork among villages between Metheringham and Ruskington in the 1920s and 1930s. Rudkin published a selection in Lincolnshire Folklore (1936), and a substantial body of material survives in her archive at the North Lincolnshire Museum at Scunthorpe. Her fieldwork represents the most systematic collection of Lincolnshire oral tradition ever undertaken, drawn directly from local people rather than literary sources.

In the specific Dorrington tale, a woman locally suspected of witchcraft was known to take animal form. One night a villager encountered a rat on the road and gave it a hard kick in passing. The following morning, the suspected witch was found indoors, unable to leave her bed, covered in bruises and injuries corresponding exactly to the kick—the classic Lincolnshire 'wound transfer' motif. This belief—that injury sustained in animal form would manifest in human form on the witch's return—recurs consistently across the county's witch lore. A closely parallel story from Rowston, about two miles away, concerns a witch who transformed into a hare, was shot with a silver bullet, and was found dying of a gunshot wound in human form the next day.

The tale is recorded in Lincolnshire Life, April 1986 (Mary Borrows, 'Ghosts, Witches and Wild Men in the Valley'), and is indexed on the Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project website. Dorrington appears in the lincolnshire_leads.json manual leads file under the category 'Witches & Wizards.'