by Fleur Kinson
Winning Article from Ottakar’s Local History Series 2001
“May Hill that Gloucester dwellers
’Gainst every sunset see”
- Ivor Gurney
The graceful arc of May Hill, topped with its distinctive crown of trees, means home to anyone native to Gloucester or the Severn Vale. Returning from a journey to anywhere in the north, south, or east, May Hill’s appearance on the horizon will be the happy sight which lets you know your travels are almost over.
Long before there was Gloucester, there was May Hill. The great dome-shaped mass was pushed up to its 1,000-feet eminence about 250 million years ago. Geologically, it is one of the Malvern Hills, but to any of the thousand generations for whom it has functioned as a landmark, it has its own, very separate identity.
What makes the hill most recognizable is, of course, the tall coppice on the summit. It is commonly said – and written – that this cluster of trees was planted in 1887 to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Yet a clergyman writing his diary more than 60 years earlier mentions “May Hill, a conspicuous round-topped hill distinguished by a plantation on the summit.” The famous Jubilee planting may well have been nothing more than a Victorian bolstering of an existing feature. Whenever it first became prominent, the coppice ensures that May Hill is immediately identifiable in any landscape.
A hill by any other name…
Enquiry is overdue into the oft-encountered assertion that May Hill was originally called ‘Yartleton Hill’ and that its present name grew up from the hill’s association with May Day games. Eighteenth Century maps and texts fluctuate between the two names, and even admit that both are used – but which name, if either, is primary? Was ‘Yartleton Hill’ just one inhabited slope of May Hill, as is ‘Glasshouse Hill’?
No one yet seems to have made the connection between ‘May’ and the name of the Anglo-Saxon tribe who once inhabited the region around May Hill, the Magesœtan. Any etymologist would tell you that the Teutonic syllable ‘mag’ evolved into the English sound ‘may’. Might part of the name of the local tribe have long ago become associated with the hill? By interesting coincidence – or otherwise – the Anglo-Saxon word-stem ‘mag’ means ‘having power’ (and is directly connected to the English verbs ‘may’ and ‘might’). Thus a case could be made that, etymologically, May Hill means ‘powerful hill’ – which will no doubt delight modern-day hippies who believe the hill to be riddled with ley lines!
Pagans, Ghosts, and Witches
The hill has a long history of pagan activity – in the form of May Day celebrations. Early Britons viewed May 1st as the first day of summer, and this called for intense partying and symbolic shenanigans. The historian F.D. Fosbrooke notes in 1807 that “there is, or was, a custom [on May Hill] for the youth to meet… on May-day… and contend, in a mock-battle… The youth divided into troops; the one in winter livery, the other in the gay habit of spring… The spring was sure to obtain the victory, which they celebrated, by carrying triumphantly green branches, with May flowers, proclaiming and singing… ‘We have brought the summer home’.”
In recent decades, local troupes of morris men have taken to dancing at dawn around May Hill’s summit on May Day, welcoming in the summer. Whether or not the summer is flattered by this little display remains unknown.
With its vague mystical associations, it is perhaps unsurprising that May Hill – and the village of the same name which nestles halfway up its flank – should have more than its fair share of ghost stories. There is the figure with the red lantern who haunts Folly Lane. There is the white-bearded old man who wanders near the chapel. And there is the spectral chap who follows anyone walking up Glasshouse Hill in moonlight, and then vanishes.
One of May Hill’s longest modern-day residents, Mr. Joe Watkins, reassures us on the subject of ghosts:
Now if you go out at dead of night
Don’t worry, fear or fret.
I’ve wandered this hill for over 50 years
And I ain’t seen one yet.
Tales of witchcraft on the hill are not unknown. In 1905, a Cinderford woman in her 70s caused quite a kerfuffle. Ellen Hayward had only recently befriended May Hill resident John Markey when several members of his family went mad. His wife disappeared for days, and returned distraught, clutching a hazel stick and babbling that it kept witches at bay. Local hysteria followed, and no one in May Hill or nearby Huntley went out for several days unless armed with a hazel branch!
News of the incident spread as far as Westminster, and a question about witchcraft in May Hill was asked in Parliament. Poor Mrs. Hayward finally published a letter in the Dean Forest Mercury, imploring people to calm down and stating “I have no power or ability to bewitch anyone, nor do I believe in any such thing.”
Buried Treasure?
One of the most interesting stories about May Hill concerns subterranean chambers, a secret tunnel, and, you guessed it, buried treasure. The story is all the more interesting because, despite more than a century of scholarly mention, the chambers and tunnel remain unexplored and their alleged treasure unconfirmed.
There are no doubts about the existence or antiquity of the two underground chambers. The first is situated 1½ miles from May Hill in a field of Great Cugley Farm. Once a spacious cavern hand-cut out of the red sandstone, it was first noted in 1834 by engineer Stephen Ballard. He wrote of it in his diary: “It is not known when this [cavern] was cut or for what purpose. It extends under the earth a great way... There is plenty of room just within the entrance, a sort of apartment 10 or 12 feet wide out of which a small passage leads… I have no doubt it is an artificial passage for the tool marks are now plainly to be seen in some parts.”
In 1884, 50 years after Ballard made his observations, some horses passing over the cavern caused its roof to collapse. (Whether or not this occasioned the horses to tumble into the ancient chamber is unrecorded.) Shortly afterwards, local naturalist G.H. Piper visited the site. The damage was not so extensive to prevent him noticing, as Ballard had, that there was a very narrow passageway at the back of the cavern. “It is at the part of the cave nearest to May Hill: it inclines in that direction but its length or continuance is quite problematical.”
Which brings us to the subject of the second underground chamber, on the top of May Hill itself. Finding the entrance to this cavern is very difficult now because of tree and plant life, but it is believed to be about 500 metres southeast of the summit. In 1884, Piper interviewed a 71-year-old Newent widow, Mary Mayo, who had many memories of playing in the May Hill cave with other children when she was a child. She clearly remembered it was reached by a flight of 15 steps.
Belief in a passageway connecting these two underground chambers, the one at Great Cugley Farm and the other 1½ miles away on May Hill, was very strong and very widespread. Indeed, so certainly were these two caverns thought to be part of the same thing that a single name was – and still is – used of both of them: ‘Crockett’s Hole’.
Naturally there had to be treasure hidden in the passageway connecting the two caverns. Mary Mayo reported that when her two grandfathers had been young men in the Eighteenth Century, they had ventured along the cramped passageway for several hours. They encountered an underground stream, on the other side of which was a large box. While calculating how to cross the stream, they dropped the last of their candles into the water and were plunged into total darkness. In a state of terror, they managed to crawl back the way they’d come and finally emerged from the May Hill cavern into daylight, too shaken to contemplate any further exploration underground.
Even if Mrs. Mayo was making all this up, she was only adding to a long tradition of similarly tantalizing stories and/or histories. The scholarly and reliable Piper notes that “About the year 1665 one Fairfax, a disbanded soldier, advised by Lilly the astrologer, came down from London, and opened this hole, in hope of discovering great riches therein, which drew many people thither. Some of them went into the hole, and told incredible things concerning it; at last one Witcomb going in drunk and dying there, put an end to all further examination.”
Whatever else happened in the caverns or in their supposed connecting passageway, the subterranean chamber at May Hill featured in a rather sad local episode. In the middle of the Sixteenth Century, a group of local Protestants held secret meetings there, defying the edict of Queen Mary I that all her subjects be Catholic. A local man, Edward Horne, stumbled into one of the clandestine gatherings and converted to Protestantism. Now subject to severe persecution, Horne and his Protestant friend, Mr. Crockett (whose name became forever associated with the ‘hole’) used the underground chamber as a place of hiding.
Crockett’s fate is unrecorded, but Horne was eventually captured and put in prison. Managing to escape one night, he came home and kept himself concealed. When his wife gave birth to their son Christopher, there was a baptismal feast, during which the mother took a cutting of some meat and surreptitiously laid it by – presumably to give later to her husband. This small act was noticed by the keen-eyed midwife, who became suspicious, and cruelly demanded that the house be searched. Horne was found hiding inside a large kitchen vessel. A trial swiftly followed, and he was condemned to be burnt at the stake. A record tells us that as he burned to death,
“he sunge the 146th Psalme, untill that his lipps were burnt away, and then they saw his tonge move untill he fell downe in the fier.”
Eight weeks after Horne’s execution, Queen Mary died, and her successor Elizabeth converted the country back to Protestantism. Incensed at all that had befallen Edward Horne and his family, the local women put their now-unemployed Catholic priest facing backwards on his horse and drove the poor man out of town.
Living Memories
Set against histories such as these, the hardships faced within living memory in the village of May Hill seem trivial by comparison. But there are still locals who remember early 20th Century inconveniences.
For one thing, getting from place to place took altogether longer than it does now. A local man recalls: “Mr. Stanley owned a horse and wagonnette in which he transported May Hillites to Gloucester on a Saturday shopping spree. It started off at 8:30am from the Hill, arriving in Gloucester at midday and left for return at five o’clock, getting back to the Hill at 8:30pm.” Gloucester being at such a distance, domestic supplies were generally bought in Huntley or Newent - but there was an itinerant coalman, two butchers, and a mobile shop who called into the village once a week. There was no danger of going without fresh bread, as two bakeries operated on the hill (which is rather more industry than exists there now!).
A resident remembers “Children at May Hill had long distances to walk to school in all weathers on rough track roads, deeply rutted and thick with mud.” Another adds unflatteringly that “Boys from May Hill were very rustic compared with the Newent people and they wore big heavy boots. I remember one teacher saying that their boots were a pound of leather with six pounds of nails on the bottom.”
When the children had walked home from school and the men had walked home from their day’s work in the Longhope sawmills or Micheldean quarries, there was no chance of a quick shower to freshen up from their exertion. Like most English villages in the early part of the 20th Century, May Hill was without running water. Trips to the well were a regular feature of daily life, and the weekly washday, as you can imagine, did indeed last all day. Before the 1920s, a local resident at May Hill took it upon himself to visit each household in the village and politely enquire if the privy needed emptying. For a small charge, he would bury the contents at a safe distance. How musical to him must have seemed the noise of the village’s first flushing toilet!
No village in England remained untouched by the World Wars. As elsewhere, wartime memories in May Hill are particularly vivid. One local recalls: “A number of Norwegian sailors got stranded in Gloucestershire on a whaling boat when World War II broke out. They came to lodge on May Hill and camped in the village hall.” Later in the same war, “A group of German prisoners of war worked on the hill in the sawmills. They used to love visiting the local homes and helping with the chores.”
One man remembers: “The May Hill Home Guard were all armed with shotguns and rifles and took turns to man the lookout posts on May Hill. They always carried up jars of cider to console themselves and help see the night through.” It was noticed that the German planes seemed to use the top of the hill as a landmark, the planes turning immediately above it on their way to bomb Gloucester, Cardiff, and Coventry. One day the May Hill Home Guard had a major panic when someone excitedly told them that the Germans had landed at nearby Dursley. Relief soon followed when it was revealed the landing was at Guernsey, not Dursley!
As was the case for most small villages, the Second World War marked the beginning of a permanent change in May Hill. The young men who were lucky enough to come back from overseas service had been changed by their exposure to foreign lands and the horrors of war, and they weren’t content to live as their fathers had. The young women who had done ‘men’s work’ and shown their equal capabilities weren’t content to live their lives as their mothers had, entirely circumscribed by housework and child-rearing. Both sexes wanted a better standard of living. With post-war 20th Century’s technological and social advances, they were able to have it.
In modern-day May Hill village, quality of life is very high indeed. Brightly painted homes suggest an individuality and freedom of expression not easily accommodated elsewhere. A short walk away, the summit of May Hill itself affords an astonishing panoramic view of 10 counties or more. With or without eventful history, the hill is an inspiring place.
Seen from a distance, the distinctive tufted outline of May Hill has fostered affection in the hearts of millions of Gloucester folk over the ages. Its gentle curve is a constant reminder to even the most ardent city-dweller that Gloucestershire is a county of, above all else, astounding natural beauty.
Fleur Kinson
Grove Coach House
Taynton
Gloucestershire
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