In Sketches of the Bucks Countryside (1934), Horace Harman gives an account of an unusual kind of witch he heard on the taproom of the Harrow, on the road from Bishopstone to Stone. An old resident got talking and the conversation turned to witches. He said there had used to be ‘little witches’ about the fields, sitting on gates, and on the hurdles of the sheepfolds:
Sometimes when a shepherd went to look at his fold of sheep he would see every one of them looking up.. and had all got their heads turned in one direction As he got nearer he would see a funny looking little man sitting on the top bar of one of the hurdles, with a body shaped something like a toy balloon, with long legs, and a ‘pickid’ nose; and there he sat making all sorts of faces at the sheep. While he was doing that they could not take their eyes off him. When the shepherd got close to the fold the old witch would shout: ‘Hippy! Hippy! Over the hedge I go!’ and off he would gallop on the hurdle across the field and jump over the hedge, just like the wind. Then the sheep would start feeding again, and the shepherd would see no more of him for some time.
On another occasion, he asked an old coujntryman who lived near Bishopstone if he had ever seen ‘those little witches that went about the fields’. He answered, ‘No, I nivver did, but…I sin they little people as dances about in the moonlight.’ He said that, some years before, he had been night watchman at Eythrope House, and every night between midnight and one in the morning he had had to be ‘at the pavilion’. He always had a big dog with him in case he encountered poachers. One night, when the moon was getting towards full, he was standing under some laurels so no one would see him, when he heard a rustling in the leaves. He thought it was rabbits, but the dog kept growling and tugging on his chain. He tried to make him keep quiet, but the dog would never stay silent for long, so he went to see what was causing the noise.
What he thought was rabbits was little men:
‘I could see ivvery one of em as pleean as daylight and… they nivver took a bit of noatice a me ur mi dog, thought some an em come quite neuur the bush. They danced and jumped and cee-apered all round the pleeace and pulled such funny feeaces as I coont kaip my eyes aw fem. I looked at em fur some time and when it was time fur me to goo I left em a-gooin-an jest like they did when e fust see em.’
Harman asked if he had ever seen them again, and he said many times, but always by moonlight. They were not quite half the height of a walking stick and their heads seemed too big for their bodies. They had long faces that they pulled about every which way, with ‘pickid’ noses (like the ‘little witches’ Harman had been told of). They all wore short jackets, and had only very short thighs but long thin shanks so they seemed to be all legs. Every one was knock-kneed, but they could run like the wind.
He had heard that they came out of the cellar of the old house at Eythrope, which had been pulled down many years before, and he had not heard of anyone seeing them for a long time. He said that Eythrope used to be ‘a very funny pleeace’ and he knew a man who had seen a ghost there. He added that he expected the ghosts and little devils, as he called them, had something to do with Lord Stanhope when he lived at Eythrope House. Unfortunately, he did not enlarge on this, leaving us none the wiser. The little men in his account sound like Victorian or Edwardian fairies, though from their descriptions they clearly also had some connection with the ‘little witches’.