Titterstone Clee Hill

The Dog.

Mrs Pembro, of Bridgnorth, remembers her mother telling her a story about Titterstone Clee. Her mother was born on Titterstone Clee and one day, when she was a child of about eight or nine, she was walking, with her sister, to her uncle’s house, which was about five or six miles from her home. On their journey back home it was dark. They met a huge black dog. The thing they most remembered about it was the beautiful red and green collar with jewels on it which it was wearing. They thought about approaching the dog but it would not let them go near it. Then, suddenly, it disappeared.

They mentioned the dog to their family but nothing else was said about the incident until the children were grown up. Their father then revealed that someone had been murdered at that spot and other people had seen the dog.

I do like a nice Black Dog (one of our great spooky animals). This one’s mentioned in ‘Some Ghostly Tales of Shropshire’ by Christine McCarthy (1988).

The summer festivities of the county came to an end on the last Sunday in August with the Titterstone Wake, held on the most southerly of our beautiful hills [..]

Mr. Thomas Powell, to whom this book is indebted for many notes on South Shropshire customs, tells me that when he ascended the hill on the Wake-Sunday of 1861, he and his boy-companions, in obedience to custom, seated themselves one by one in the Giant’s Chair, and there sang ‘some rustic lines,’ which unfortunately he cannot now remember. This ceremony is not mentioned in the account given by an old carpenter, Richard Jones of Ashford, now over seventy, who attended the wake many times up to 1846, at which date he says it was fast declining. He, however, adds some interesting particulars, which show us how full of peculiar traditional observances these old hill-feast must have been ‘once upon a time.‘

The young men, he says, assembled on the hill by the Forked Pole, still standing as a guide-post for travellers, and there the young women met them. ‘Fine stand-up handsome wenches they were, and well-dressed too, nothing like’em now; but ye wouldna know ‘em the next day with a bag of coal strapped on their backs.’ (For in those days the coal from the Clee Hill pits was carried down the hill on women’s shoulders!) Well, the two companies met, and walked together in procession to a long ‘alley’ called ‘Tea-kettle Alley,’ walled on each side with blocks of mortarless ‘Dhu stone,’ the dark basaltic rock quarried on the Titterstone Clee. In this alley, – built, I presume, to give shelter to the picnickers, – they found the old women and married women making tea, for which a beautiful spring close by supplied the water, and also watercresses to add to the provisions they had brought, and to which they all ‘did duty’ at once.

Then the games began – kiss in the ring, racing and jumping for hats or shoes or neckties, wrestling, boxing, and so forth: to the inevitable accompaniment of beer sold on the hill. Often no work was done that week, but the whole time till Saturday night was spent in ‘keeping up’ the wake.

From ‘Shropshire Folk-Lore’ v2 by C. S. Burne (1885).
archive.org/stream/shropshirefolkl00jackgoog#page/n211/

The Titterstone Wake [..] was not held till the last Sunday in August – the end of harvest. It was customary there for the young men and young women to ascend the hill in separate parties, going by different routes and meeting at a recognised trysting-place, whence they proceeded to a spot known as Tea-kettle Alley, sheltered by tall blocks of basalt, where the elder women made tea with the water of the adjoining spring. Then the boys climbed the Giant’s Chair, and sat repeating a ditty which, alas! cannot be recovered, but which probably conveyed a challenge or defiance. Fights and similar contests were, as has been said, favourite features of the old-fashioned wakes, and we often meet with some ceremony of challenging all comers for the championship. Moreover, there was reported to have been a battle of the giants (battle = single combat) on the Titterstone.

From Charlotte S Burne’s article in ‘Memorials of Old Shropshire’ by Thomas Auden (1906).

“Until the mid-19th century the Titterstone Wake was held on the hill every last Sunday in August. Young women ‘fine stand-up handsome wenches they were’, would meet up with their menfolk and indulge in games such as the beguilingly named ‘Kiss-in-the-ring’.”

From “Shropshire – An Archaeological Guide” Michael Watson (2002 Shropshire Books).

See also:

mythstories.com/hlf/clee/partner.html#BAGR

This site comes free with “interesting” faux-medieval Casio keyboard soundtrack.

Titterstone Clee Hill is pretty imposing in itself. No wonder then that Bronze Age people chose it as a place to site some burial cairns. And later a univallate Iron Age fort was built here. There’s a ‘Giant’s Chair’ too but who can say when the giant built that.

On Titterstone Clee Hill “a wall thrown down” was put up at the time of the Revolution, when cannon would fire balls from there to Ludlow Castle. “Old women in their red cloaks” would go up into the enclosure. The hill was an island in the time of St. Paul.

Scraps of Folklore Collected by John Philipps Emslie, by C. S. Burne, in Folklore, Vol. 26, No. 2. (Jun. 30, 1915), pp. 153-170.

The view from up here is just amazing.