Adam and Eva - continuing my yarn for a sluggish train (Part Four: ‘The Pendle Witch Test’)

When his wife, Mandy, proposed that Adam should take her to the notorious Pendle Hill in Lancashire, a crafty idea popped into Adam’s head. He began to wonder if he could seek a divorce based on her witchcraft. His hopes were boosted when she extended an invitation to her best friend and weird pet-clairvoyant, Anita.

The Pendle Witches lived in the villages below Pendle Hill in the early 1600s and the wily old cures that they offered to local neighbours had brought suspicion, vengeance and eventually their merciless downfall.

Mandy’s demeanour around his beloved fish was far from Christian and was it really a coincidence that his chocolate milkshakes were turning sour? Adam and the two crones began the Witches' Trail from the charming village of Barley and it was outside a 17th century cottage that Anita suffered her first convulsions.

Whilst she was hollering and wailing about the ghost of a strangled black cat, Adam subtly took an incriminating photograph. Then, beneath their suspiciously pointy bobble hats, the crones strolled on to the ducking stools of the Lower Black Moss Reservoir, but despite Adam’s suggestion of a gentle paddle in the water, neither obliged.

On the 17th August 1612, after a three day trial at Lancaster Castle, ten witches were found guilty of witchcraft and their bodies were soon swinging from the gallows. Sadly, after a final request for a piece of carrot cake, it was only Mandy’s enormous tummy that swung grotesquely, as she waddled back towards the car . . .

Coming soon . . . Part Five: ‘A Far More Cunning Plan’

Catch up with Adam and Eva