Viclore

Previously, I wrote a post called The Murder Gap: A British ghost story in Mexico. In this post I translated a story about a haunting in Wenlock Edge, Shropshire, into English from a Mexican magazine published in the 1980s. Despite the story being set in England and mentioning a person’s name, I couldn’t find any real mentions of it. The Paranormal Database confirmed the existence of the legend with a passing mention, but provided no source.

On a whim I searched for Shropshire folklorists and came across NearlyKnowledgeable. I dropped her a message asking if she had heard of the story, and she responded saying she thought that it may be a reference to the “Clattering Gat” which Charlotte Burne had written about. I found a copy of the book online¹, and found the reference!

Here’s her recounting:

The Clatterin’ Glat on Wenlock Edge (not far from Ippikin’s Rock) records another murder, but the story now-a-days told does not account for the name ‘Clattering’ being applied to the spot. It is a space (or ‘glat’) in the fence which bounds a certain coppy,’ or coppice, by the side of the road along Wenlock Edge to Church Stretton. Through it, as Mr. Hubert Smith informs me, passed an ancient pathway over the steep face of the cliff into Apedale. Years and years ago, it is said, a son murdered his father in the high-road close by, and dragged the body into the coppice, making up the gap in the hedge with some thorns, the better to hide what he had done. Next morning the ‘glat’ was re-opened and the corpse exposed; and ever after, if any one tried to fill it up, it was opened again during the following night by the fairies,’ says one authority: ‘no one could tell who did it, says another; but there is summat to be seed there,’ said a third, The expressions ‘there’s frittenin’, and ‘there’s summat to be seed there,’ said a third.

Interestingly here she included a footnote recommending that the legend be compared to one described by Benjamin Thorpe, published in 1851. Again, a copy was available online², and I found the related story:

THE MAN IN THE ÖXNEBIERG.

At Rolfsted there is a mount called the Öxnebierg, by which there runs a rivulet, but between the mount and the rivulet there is to be seen a pathway trodden down in the corn, and which, according to the testimony of three men, who lay one night on the mount, is known to be so trodden by ‘the man in the Öxnebierg,’ who rides out every night on his dapple-gray horse, which he waters in the rivulet.

There was a similar path from the mount down to a spring in a garden at Bækstrup. It passed through a break in the hedge, which, how often soever it might be filled up, was always found open again on the following day. In the dwelling to which the spring belonged the mistress was hardly ever in good health ; but her husband, in consequence of advice given him, having filled up the well and dug another in another place, the woman from that time recovered her health, and the hole in the hedge was no more opened.

Based on the similarities between the story recounted by Burne and the one appearing in Duda, it seems that this may have been the source! As Charlotte Burne was the first female president of the Folklore Society, it is likely that her work would have been prominent to have ended up in the hands of a writer in Mexico. In the future I’ll be keeping an eye out for any other stories taken from the book!

Footnotes

1. Shropshire Folk-lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings By Charlotte Sophia Burne https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LOiBAAAAMAAJ ↩︎
2. Northern mythology : comprising the principal popular traditions and superstitions of Scandinavia, North Germany, and the Netherlands by Benjamin Thorpe https://archive.org/details/northernmytholog02thor/ ↩︎