The Real Witch, Nan Hardwicke

Inspiration for my poem Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare

Photo by Rosie Sun on Unsplash

Nan Hardwicke was a real person, a real witch living in North Yorkshire. She is mentioned in Peter Walker’s book, Murders and Mysteries from the North York Moors, a book my dad used to read to us when we camped on the moors in my childhood. She’s mentioned in William Henderson’s 19th C. book, Notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders. She’s always mentioned briefly, as a witch hare, fleeing from hunters, living in a cottage in Danby, or in a farm near Danby. She is ethereal in the sense that she’s hard to pin down as a person, her legend is all that remains.

My own version of Nan Hardwicke the witch, the inspiration, or rather the poem itself, arrived in my life fully formed, sliding into my head one day not long after the birth, and death, of my daughter in 2010, during that long summer of maternity-leave-grief. This was a time of walking and wailing and noticing that I had slipped through the thin veil of normal life into an alternative landscape in which I was completely wild, completely animal. I had fallen away from the tight knit, baby-focussed community, the women with whom I had travelled the territory of years of infertility to reach the hallowed point of pregnancy, to get past the early scans, the scares, to reach the glorious third trimester, though I only had my toes over the edge of that marker, only to find myself suddenly outside it, my body emptied, by little person lost. I can see how Nan entered me then, how I found my experience of the wild transformative experience of pregnancy refleted in stories of transmogrification into the hare, her outsiderness, her unnatural being reflected in my new wandering status.

Nan arrived in my head and brought a poem with her. It was one of those poems that rushes out like a bleeding injury to spatter across the page. The poem is probably my best known, though in the niche world of poetry writers and readers, I’m not sure what that means, but it is certainly the one that has been anthologised the most. It appears, in fact, beautifully illustrated by Chris Riddell in the anthology Heroes and Villains, edited by Ana Sampson.

I’m just about to record a version of the poem as part of Mark Anthony Owen’s poetry project Iamb, which you should definitely check out the other poets featured, it’s an excellent project.

Here’s the poem in full:

Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare
In memory of M

I will tell you how it was. I slipped
into the hare like a nude foot 
into a glorious slipper. Pushing her bones
to one side to make room for my shape
so I could settle myself like a child within her.
In the dark I groped for her freedom, gently teasing
it apart to web across my palm.
Here is where the separation ends:
I tensed her legs with my arms, pushed my rhythm
down the stepping-stones of spine. An odd feeling this,
to hold another’s soul in the mouth like an egg;
the aching jaw around her delicate self. Her mind
was simple, full of open space and weather.
I warmed myself on her frantic pulse and felt the draw
of gorse and grass, the distant slate line
at the edge of the moor. The air span diamonds
out of sea fret to catch across my tawny coat
as I began to fold the earth beneath my feet
and fly across the heath, the heather. 

The real person, Nan Harwicke, can only be gleaned from the names and places and the slip of fur past the ankle that is all that is left of her, a few tiny mentions in a few scrappy manuscripts. She is one of a collection of witch-hares of North Yorkshire, the North York Moors in particular. Women like Peg Humphry from East Moors near Helmsley, who was chased in the form of a hare and injured, fled to her own house and, transformed back into a woman, was found to be injured in the same place as the hare had been. A witch, surely, named as such by the hunting party, by the landed gentry of the area, though Peg had a friend she took tea with sometimes, and that friend had a grandson who spoke about her as a kind and ordinary old woman. He did admit that some might know her as a witch, mind. Here is the age-old fixation with good and bad - the polarisation - you can either be a good person, a normal person, or a bad person, an unnatural person. You can either be a wealthy person, a person of class and able to control the narrative, or you can be a poor person, a person whose narrative is controlled.

But aren’t we all a little unnatural, aren’t we all a little good, a little bad, can a witch really not also be a nice person taking tea with a friend?

None of the witch-hare-women I’ve read about have been persecuted for being witches. Their stories are always told with a note of reverence, their legends are full of the magic, the yearning perhaps, of the transformation; how we all would like to fly like a buzzard, or run like a hare, how some people would like to return to the wild.

Though there were fewer witches executed for being witches in Yorkshire, there were women in Yorkshire burned or hanged for being witches. Mary Pannel was hanged at Ledston in 1603, Old Wife Green was burned at the stake in 1631, the gloriously named Petronella Haxley also executed in Pocklington, Isabella Billington was burnt in York in 1648, though her case a little different. Isabella, it seems, had not just been cursing cattle, she had crucified her mother then sacrificed a cock bird to the devil. Yikes.

Recently my work on a new project has brought me back into the realm of witches, or rather into the realm of the women healers, the elizabethan era in particular, where it seems you could be a woman healer, you could operate on people and animals, you could cure, you could even incant rhymes or spells, but if you were a poor woman, and not wealthy or a woman of the gentry, watch your back, because a rumour was as good as a noose to a woman without wealth.

I don’t want to jinx the project so I’ll say no more and instead quietly incant a little spell over the MS in progress. On this day when the veil is thinnest, perhaps my main character, herself a real woman, might come to me in the way that Nan did and guide me through it.

Other News

• For my paid subscribers I’ll have details of what’s coming up in November next week.

• And if you might like to know that my nature/landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake, features a few little bits of myth and folklore (werewolves!) and can be bought online, at bookshops, as an e book and an audio book in all the usual places.

• You might also like to know that in just four week’s time my new poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk will be published. I can’t wait to share it with you.

Until next time

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