Witches of Garway Hill

Garway Hill, in southwest Herefordshire near the Welsh border, has long been associated with a community of 'wise women' or witches, remembered in the local rhyme: 'There'll always be nine witches from the bottom of Orcop to the end of Garway Hill, as long as water runs.' Rather than being feared as malevolent, these women were widely consulted by villagers for cures, charms, and guidance, a pattern recorded across the county by the folklorist Ella Mary Leather in her classic study 'The Folk-Lore of Herefordshire'.

One of the best-known tales tells of a widower from the Mynors family who mourned his dead wife for years until friends urged him to consult one of the wise women of Garway Hill. She told him a startling truth: his wife was not really dead at all — what he had buried was a fairy 'stock', a simulacrum left behind when the fairies took his real wife. Following her precise instructions, the man hid by the spring beside Garway Church on May Eve and won his wife back from the fairy host.

The tale ends with a flourish typical of Herefordshire fairy-lore: the couple's descendants were known locally for generations afterward as 'the children of the dead woman', a living reminder of the night the wise women of Garway Hill turned back the fairies.