Mother Shipton is England's most famous prophetess, said to have been born Ursula Southeil around 1488 in a cave beside the River Nidd at Knaresborough in Yorkshire. Legend gives her a suitably uncanny entrance into the world: born during a violent thunderstorm to a poor and friendless mother, she was reputedly a strange and ugly child, rumoured to be the daughter of the Devil, and grew into a woman whose gift for prophecy and whose forbidding looks earned her a reputation as both seer and witch.
The story
The prophecies attributed to her — many of them composed and embroidered long after her death in 1561 — foretold the dissolution of the monasteries, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Great Fire of London in 1666, and, in later much-altered verses, iron ships, carriages without horses and even the end of the world. Diarists such as Samuel Pepys recorded that her name was on people's lips as the Great Fire raged. Whether she ever uttered most of these words matters less than the enduring power of her legend as the voice of common prophecy.
Her cave and the neighbouring Petrifying Well have drawn visitors for centuries; the well's mineral-laden water, dripping over a great stone lip, slowly coats and turns to stone any object hung beneath it — teddy bears, gloves, hats — which folk belief long took for witchcraft and which the legend bound to Mother Shipton herself. Opened to paying sightseers as far back as 1630, it ranks among the oldest tourist attractions in England, and keeps the memory of the Knaresborough prophetess vivid to this day.