A Cunning Cottage

The house of a warlock? Yes and no. This is the cottage once occupied by Charles Walton in the Warwickshire village of Lower Quinton. Charles, aged 74, was savagely murdered on a frosty February morning in 1945, his throat slashed by his own billhook and his body pinioned to the ground by his pitchfork.

An entire mythology has grown up around this still unsolved murder, begun by the very Inspector called in to investigate the case then fuelled further by none other than Margaret Murray, controversial promoter of the modern witch-cult hypotheses, still very much believed in by many modern pagans today.

Both of them wrote of their belief that Charles had been ritually killed as part of a fertility rite by a secret cabal of local witches and warlocks, a wild and discredited theory but the truth of it is even stranger and arguably more interesting regarding the survival of magical traditions in Warwickshire.

I delve deep into the case of Charles Walton along with a good look at the witchcraft-related traditions of Warwickshire in my new book The Magic Of Mercia, available now at https://www.lulu.com/shop/hugh-williams/the-magic-of-mercia/paperback/product-yv7drdq.html?q=Magic+of+mercia&page=1&pageSize=4