Witchcraft In Sussex

 Paiges Meadow.Rumoured place of animal disappearance.

Ashenground woods,Pierces and Eleven Acres were in exsistence when the Romans built the road that runs through them.Ashenground Woods,Blunts Wood and Paiges Meadow have never appeared before on any internet website to do with Witchcraft,yet tucked away is a secret sinister unwritten history till now ,here on our website.In the years between the 1980s and 1990s I heard a lot about this particular area in West Sussex which is to be found in a place called Haywards Heath.I not only heard a lot I explored the areas for myself at various times of the day and dusk and I can honestly say Witchcraft is practised in the woods.How do I know this? I was there,I saw people and I heard them ,after they left there were muddy footprints and they always met near the railway line.The rituals were quiet with no props and no one ever knew except me and them that they had been there,the foot prints could have been simply dog walkers.Then the stories became ever more sinister.

Apparently there was a man of the cloth who had to leave the area because he had flipped in his head.He was of Italian origin and loved to walk in the woods each day,soon he was returning to tell his parishioners that he had heard screaming of many voices,and sometimes lone voices as though they were being hurt,it had frightened him so much he had gone stark staring mad,then I met a person who told me of people all dressed in black carrying mullion torches who walked the woods late at night and that local people were scared to go in the woods because of them.The atmosphere in the woods varied,it was peaceful in Ashenground,where as Blunts Wood felt as though it was waiting for something to take place and sometimes I would catch glimpses of railway workers down by the train tracks.I enjoyed walking there yet Paiges Meadow was not at all peaceful feeling,in fact it felt a very bad place indeed and I always felt watched there even though I could see no one at all.One day whilst walking there I passed an old fallen down oak and opposite it I saw a male dressed in motor cycle leathers with sun glasses on,staring hard at me.I looked down ,looked up again and he had vanished yet there was no where for him to hide. It was a further three months before I found the wells.There were quite a few of them going deep under ground and had been there a very long time,it was here that the priest had been heard shouting out to the voices he heard all around him.I knew the answer lay before me or so I thought,for the next situation confounded me beyond all rational explanation and still to this day there has been no answer.

   It was the following afternoon when I returned to Paiges Meadow,this time a woman approached me with a dog on a lead.She implored me not to go in the copse at the end of the meadow near to the old covent and that whatever else I decided to do I must under no circumstances go in there.She told me her other dog had gone missing in the copse at midnight and though she called he never returned to her,so she followed him into the copse and a massive wind sprung up with a huge growling noise that terrified her.I was trully fascinated for it was not far from the wells,so I decided to go and take a look for myself and to prove it was just someone frightened by the dark and the myths surrounding the woods.

  So I walked through the meadow the next day and down to the copse,I crawled a little through the entrance and saw stone slabs beneath my feet,I looked to the left and there was the old abandoned convent,trees hung down above me.I stood up and walked two paces further,a mighty wind sprung up and the growling,oh it was immense yet I could see nothing coming towards me at all.I stood my ground and refused to budge one inch,there was no way I was going to give in to that which sought to oust me from the copse that day.As I stood there the wind ceased the growling stopped and the copse became as peaceful feeling as the woods.I knew what the stone slabs were and why they were there yet to this day I do not know what caused the growling or the wind.As I returned through Ashenground,I saw something strange in the soil.It was a bent sixpence and in folklore it is said that a bent sixpence was fired at witches to kill them,sixpence was the price of a witches grave in the seventeenth century.Who had put the sixpence there?Was it coincidence that the coin had been bent?

Ashenground  woods has been used by witches for years and has long been linked with their practice.It is also said that some of their darker rites were re-enacted thereIts a wonderful place to work with its sweeping canopy of trees and long winding lanes and in the daylight hours is incredibly beautiful. There is also two streams and a crossroads of which many tales are told of those who are buried there.Yet at night it takes on a different hue Once whilst in the woods at full moon I saw  a person kneeling by the crossroads,exactly what they were doing I could not tell.But after they had gone,I saw a small saucer with a piece of paper on it covered in writing .I did not like to pry in order to read it because I knew it could have been a spell or a message for someone.One of the first things you learn  in magic is not to remove anything you find,in case its the workings of someone else.In modern times Ashenground woods were rumoured to be one of the sites favoured by WhiteStone.During the 1990s I was told Arddhu had also considered it an option.Such is the drawing power of Ashenground.

                      Ashenground