Pendle Hill
Pendle Hill is a prominent moorland mass rising to 557 metres from the Lancashire plain south of Clitheroe, a hill whose dark and brooding profile and its association with the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612 have combined to give it an atmosphere of dark legend that persists to the present day and makes it one of the most evocative and most visited moorland hills in northern England. The trials of the Pendle Witches, in which twenty people from the hamlets around the hill were accused of witchcraft and ten eventually executed, represent one of the largest and most documented witch trials in English history and have given Pendle Hill a reputation that is simultaneously historical, folkloric and commercially celebrated. The witch trials arose from a complex of local disputes, poverty, fear and the zealotry of the new witch-hunting climate encouraged by James I, whose personal interest in witchcraft produced the Witchcraft Act of 1604 under which the accused were prosecuted. The principal accused came from two local families, the Demdikes and the Chattoxes, whose competing claims of magical power and mutual accusations created the chain of events that led to the Lancaster Assizes. The detailed account written by the court clerk Thomas Potts in 1613 provides an unusually complete record of the trial and the testimonies given. George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement, climbed Pendle Hill in 1652 and experienced a vision from the summit that he described as seeing a great people to be gathered, an event that inspired his subsequent mission and makes Pendle Hill a place of Quaker pilgrimage as well as a site of witch legend. The summit walk from Barley or from the north side via Nick o' Pendle provides excellent moorland walking with outstanding views across Lancashire to the Fylde Coast and the Irish Sea.