Witch
Where the Witches Met
A devil in the shape of a cat, and a meeting on the barrows.
See it clearly
- What's there
- Grassy Bronze Age burial mounds on the Downs
- Legend from
- 1667
- Tone
- Dark history
On the Downs ahead are the Five Knolls, the burial mounds where, in 1667, a Dunstable woman said witches met by night.
The Five Knolls are a cluster of Bronze Age burial mounds at the northern tip of Dunstable Downs. In 1667 Elizabeth Pratt of Dunstable, accused of bewitching two children of Thomas Heyward to death, named three other local women and said a devil in the shape of a cat had told her to help them. She claimed they met by night on the Downs at the Three Knolls, which the archaeologist Leslie Grinsell identified as these barrows. Pratt was sent to Bedford Gaol, where her name sits in the register beside John Bunyan's. The mounds also hold around 30 Saxon execution burials, and a medieval gallows once stood on the northernmost.