The lady [in this narrative] was no less than a princess and queen. She lived as long ago as Saxon times in a city on Eddisbury Hill. The hill can be seen to this day to the south of Delamere Station and only a mile away.
Ethelfleda, for that is the lady’s name (now reduced to Ethel), was a daughter of Alfred the Great, and she ruled over the kingdom of Mercia right up to the banks of the Mersey. She married Ethelred (not the Ethelred of history). [...] She ruled the city of Eddisbury firmly and well. But after she died, it fell into all sorts of lawlessness and disorder, so that it was destroyed, and not one stone stands upon another. But broad lines, marked by the turf in darker green where the damp is arrested, still shew the presence of foundations, and there is, or was, an old draw-well, partly filled up and fringed with thorns and briers.
[...] Why the spirit of the lady should haunt a woodland brook more than a mile away, and why the turbulent souls of the departed city should stream down the hill at night (according to the testimony of a well-known farmer, long since gone to his rest), seems purposeless and inconceivable. does the lady go to meet anyone, and are the turbulent souls afflicted with insatiable thurst?
“Dinna thee goo thear – there’s a buggin thear,” said an elderly native, as I struck into the forest on a summer night, along the well-known Buggin Walk, by a woodland brook! Turning back to the old gentleman for particulars of identification I was told the lady was of commanding presence, with long, golden tresses – dressed, of course, in a white costume, but not of the prevailing fashion – that the lady seemed to be expecting someone – in short, this was the Lady Ethelfleda! [...] J. A.
From the Cheshire Observer, 6th March 1915.