Beside the road from Bunbury to Whitchurch is a cottage decorated with grotesque heads, some carved on the house itself and others on posts stuck in the garden. The folklorist Christina Hole was told in the 1930s that they were put there by the owner in the early nineteenth century; his name is now forgotten, but local tradition claims that he was a poacher, transported to Australia for allegedly killing a gamekeeper.
It was said that when he returned many years later, he carved these heads as likenesses of those concerned in the case against him—the squire, the magistrate, the police, and others—and cursed each of them as he did so; they all soon died. She was also told that this cottage was built in a single night, in accordance with an old law that if a man could build himself a dwelling on unclaimed land between sunset and sunrise, and have smoke rising from the chimney at dawn, it would become his property, together with as much land round it as the distance to which he could throw an axe. Whether such a law ever really existed is rather doubtful.