Before We Had Answers: When Witches Met At This Ancient Grave

SPEAKER_01 0:00 So we're walking down the path towards the Katiarok. This is it. This is the Dolmen, known as Le Trepie.

SPEAKER_00 0:08 It's such an impressive structure, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 0:10 It's incredible. And of course, this site is no stranger to other worldly occurrences. So this is the site where witches were said to meet and convene with the devil.

SPEAKER_00 0:22 So the reason I got you to park my parents here tonight is a couple of reasons. The first is it's about 500 metres from the Dolmen itself. And I don't want to walk there by myself or walk back by myself. So by making you park here, I'm not going to have to walk back from the home of the witches alone at midnight. And the other reason is that I think if we walk from this direction, we're walking through the local nature reserve, which, if there really were witches that congreg uh congregated at this spot, that's probably the path that a lot of them would have taken. I'm sure some of them would have approached from kind of from the coast down this way, but certainly the ones that were inland would have come through this kind of honestly, quite frankly, creepy wooded nature reserve. So that's our approach.

SPEAKER_01 1:06 We should say that we have been here once before. We have. This was eight years ago. We started a different podcast which we never released. And so we're sort of going back to the place that it all began. I don't know, are we risking going back a second time?

SPEAKER_00 1:21 Maybe we are. Maybe you only get one. Like maybe the witches are like, we'll let you off with the trespass the first time, but the second time you're. I don't know. We'll see. When we did this, like eight and a half years ago, I was not really very afraid of witches, if I'm honest with you. Um I think that like a lot of people encounter witches with, you know, like, well, the kids film witches and you know, fairy tales and things like that, and they're not very spooky. But in the last couple of years, witches have had such a resurgence in my favourite genre, which is horror films. And there has been some that like really live rent free in my head because they are just terrifying. And I after watching them, I really understand why people back then would have actually been terrified of witches.

SPEAKER_01 2:01 I can imagine being part of a community that doesn't understand why curses or uh so-called curses, maybe afflictions to their cattle or diseases were running through their family, or maybe, you know, certain crops were dying when they didn't usually at weird times of the year. You know, I can imagine why suddenly witchcraft seemed like a very real, sensible answer to those tragedies and to those losses. And if you then believe something supernatural is causing it, that would strike fear in your heart.

SPEAKER_00 2:33 And I think it says something really innately human about fearing the unknown, like so many uh events that turn humans against each other, kind of categorizing someone as the other. And you know, the the the the witch hunts manage to turn people against their own wives, daughters, best friends, you know. Um, really quite scary stuff when you think about it. We're now walking, by the way, past the uh the final house. I think that we're gonna walk past. We're now officially leaving civilization. The robe will shortly run out, and we'll be on a a dirt track, and then the sky will slowly disappear until it's just us and the trees walking the same path that witches may have walked. We're going in. Yeah, this is it. Just round this corner, uh, it opens up to a nice view of the west coast of Guernsey and some beaches and the dolmen itself. Just hope we're not gonna intrude upon any rituals or afternoon teas or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 3:31 Or get mistaken for people who are about to start a ritual. So we just settled down into the ancient dolmen, the cateal rock. This is what we did before.

SPEAKER_00 3:43 I'm Ollie. And I'm Zach. Um and yes, we are sat underneath this uh very imposing stone structure. And it's yeah, just past midnight.

SPEAKER_01 3:53 Yeah. So it it feels like it's just past midnight. Yeah. It's dark, um, we're lit here by just torchlight. And we're sort of huddled under this dolmen, which does feel really quite oppressive in a way. I mean, this is uh an ancient burial grave actually from the the Neolithic times, so you it has its its roots are are not exactly savory.

SPEAKER_00 4:18 Yeah, and uh I I do feel like I'm doing something wrong, like I'm trespassing or doing something slightly disrespectful. But I I hope our focus on the history and how important this place is to Gangsi history uh you know helps not offend anything.

SPEAKER_01 4:34 Anything or anyone. Yeah. And what I can't quite fathom is how our ancient ancestors were able to move these rocks into this formation. Like yes, you could have had multiple people moving the rocks, but look how ginormous they are. They're absolutely incredibly gigantic, balanced uh on a knife's edge almost.

SPEAKER_00 4:56 Yeah, there are there is no right angles in this construction. Um, and it's it's incredible that it sat like this for so long, and you do get that sort of paranoid feeling when you first sit in here that some malignant force could decide to to bring it tumbling down on top of you, or even like a strong breeze. Uh and yet this thing has stood throughout all sorts of you know, gale force winds, natural disasters, yeah. Yeah, everything the island's thrown at it.

SPEAKER_01 5:23 Yeah, and and you can kind of imagine why a site like this becomes so tied to witchcraft. Because in the 1500s to 1600s, what what do you have to explain a structure like this? And of course, um this site is no stranger to other worldly occurrences. So this is the site where witches were said to meet and convene with the devil. So at around this time of night, the witching hour, cloaked figures would have gathered around this ancient monument, uh, this ancient burial ground to conduct their sinister business. So it was the Black Mass that they would have been meeting to convene, uh also known as the Sabbath. Uh it was a parody, it was an inversion of the Catholic Mass. And it was led by the leader of the coven in the form of a black cat or a goat. And and I can't see I can I can't see goats in the same light whenever I go to like a farm. Tell me about it, especially the black ones. Yeah. I'm always like, are you the devil? Um and yeah, it was at these ceremonies that newcomers would uh pledge their immortal souls to become bond slaves of the devil, and in return they would enjoy supernatural powers. And once the deal was done, the fledgling witch would receive the mark of the devil. Some believed this was a brand inflicted by a hot iron, and uh, you know, others uh believed it was caused by the devil literally raking his claws across the initiates.

SPEAKER_00 6:54 Yeah, I imagine if it was real, there may have been no need for that hot iron. Um but I can also imagine that back then you would take that deal. You know, if you are uh, you know, a woman back then and you have very strict societal roles and suddenly you are offered ultimate freedom, yeah, the power to, you know, defeat your enemies, wrong, you know, write all the wrongs done to you, travel the world on br on broomstick.

SPEAKER_01 7:19 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:20 Um I could imagine that would be a very enticing deal.

SPEAKER_01 7:23 It's empowering in a time when you had very little of that power.

SPEAKER_00 7:27 Absolutely. Uh esteemed local folklore expert Mary uh Degari wrote that on still nights, such as this very still night, um, the coven of the Catioroch could be heard mocking the Priory of the Virgin Mary, um, which is actually located just a stone's throwaway on Liu Island. Oh, I think uh just across yeah, just across the little causeway that way.

SPEAKER_01 7:48 So Liu Island being this tiny little um the sort of Bailiwick of Guernsey is a group of islands, and Liu uh is just a very, very small one you can walk to when the tide is right.

SPEAKER_00 8:00 Only when the tide is low. Yeah. And if you get the timing wrong, it can be quite dangerous too, because the tide sweeps in across that causeway.

SPEAKER_01 8:06 And yet they built a priory on it, on this tiny island. How odd.

SPEAKER_00 8:10 That's right. Maybe they needed the protection of running water from something that met nearby. Yeah. Um So Mary Degari claims that the monks at the Priory would often hear uh the witches shrieking across the water. To the mother of our lord they shrieked their challenge, claims Degari, shaking their clenched fists in the direction of the sacred fane. So pretty spooky stuff. And if the Sabbath was given to worship and ritual, a second meeting named the Hawk was all business. And it was at these clandestine gatherings that the witches would exchange knowledge of curses and spells and discuss who among the local population might deserve to befall these things.

SPEAKER_01 8:53 The question really is: do we actually have any evidence that they genuinely did gather here at the Katiorok?

SPEAKER_00 9:00 So there was a pamphlet written by local historian John Linwood Pitts in the mid-1880s, and a 1901 book titled Guernsey Folklore from the then Guernsey bailiff, Sir Edgar McCulloch, uh the bailiff being Guernsey's chief civil official. So I guess kind of like a governor. So Pitts draws his work from surviving court records that describe supposed Sabbaths around the Roccain coast, which is not very far from here. It's uh it's just one, I think, two beaches that way.

SPEAKER_01 9:28 So Rockane, yeah, being probably close enough that it could have been confused or conflated with this meeting point at the Catiaric, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 9:38 Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Um, we're we're basically at Loray Bay, and I've absolutely heard that conflated as Roccain because it is bait but it's beaches on the same long sweeping bay, isn't it? Yeah. But Pitt says, uh and quote, that there is no doubt that very questionable assemblies of people did take place at intervals among the inhabitants of many countries. Probably these gatherings first had their rise in the old pagan times and were subsequently continued from force of habit, long after their real origin and significance had been forgotten. So whether he's describing the meetings that could have happened here specifically is obviously hard to know. Um, but this particular location is primarily associated with McCulloch's work and later the work of Mary Degari, who we've already mentioned.

SPEAKER_01 10:22 Yeah, so while it is definitely possible that people gathered here for dodgy stuff, yeah, there is quite a journey, I think, to take from questionable activities happening here to communing with the devil, right? Uh I think it's quite a leap. It is, it is. So how does how does one turn into the other? Um and that's really because um of confessions. So the confessions of witches were put on trial and tortured at the time. So the accused were were actually said to have gathered here at Le Catiaroc to dance around Le Trepier in honour of the devil. So under torture, they gave this as one of the locations.

SPEAKER_00 11:09 Yeah, of of course, and those confessions paint um a very vivid picture. The devil was said to sit enthroned upon the great capstone uh of La Trepier itself, towering above the gathering witches, uh, as they danced in circles below.

SPEAKER_01 11:23 And so this is Le Trepier, as well as as it is the Catiaroch. That's just another name for it, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 11:29 I I think so, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:30 Yeah, so this capstone above is where they were said to have danced.

SPEAKER_00 12:36 Yeah, well, it's certainly a large enough and magnificent enough slab of stone that you could imagine uh the devil himself seated upon it. It would certainly, you know, could could bear his weight.

SPEAKER_01 12:48 I suddenly feel quite small in here.

SPEAKER_00 12:51 Well, I think what's spooking me out is of course is we've got the light on in here to light ourselves, but that means that every single gap in the in this dolmen is just pitch black. Yeah. There could be people two or three feet away, and I I would have no clue, quite frankly. So there might be some very polite witches right now waiting for us to vacate, just like. There could be faces in the darkness.

SPEAKER_01 13:09 There could be. And actually, um when the devil took his form, apparently it was uh we we sort of alluded to it earlier, but as a gigantic black cat, and then the horned goat that he'd become was known as Balbereth.

SPEAKER_00 13:25 While it's a spooky image, you know, the the circle of witches um praying to uh to uh to this goat or cat, it's hard to take their words um fully at face value given the situation uh that they were confessing. You know, there were some really obscene practices uh for obtaining confessions at the time. The teachings of the Mallius Malificarum, which is Latin for the hammer of witches, was followed strictly in Guernsey between 1560 and 1640. The tome, written by German Inquisitor uh Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, sanctioned torture torture as a means to obtain confession, and burning as a method to purify the lost souls. And honestly, I I can't think of much of a a worse fate really than burning, and the torture must have been awful to get you to admit to a crime that would end up with you being burned.

SPEAKER_01 14:17 Oh, and endless torture until the crime was admitted, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:20 Yeah, I think there was no right answer apart from a confession. Yeah. A lot of the time. Um but the wave of witch hunting hysteria that spread across Europe for two centuries is often attributed in strong part to the Hammer of Witches, to this dangerous book. Um it might have contributed to the deaths of 44 in Guernsey, but the death toll around the world is estimated to stand between 40 and 60,000, which is, you know, 60,000 is getting close to the population of our entire island today. I think we're in the mid-60s.

SPEAKER_01 14:48 And so to have wiped off the face of the earth, all of those people, at a time when populations weren't quite as big anyway, for a crime that doesn't exist.

SPEAKER_00 14:59 Oh, it it's absolutely um harrowing. And and even the 44 figure, you know, obviously pales in comparison to, you know, 40 to 60,000. But in a small island like Guernsey, you would absolutely know probably quite well at least one of those people. Yes. They you know would be a colleague or someone you went to school with, and and that's that would happen in today when we have a much higher population. Back then, I'm sure you know the the death of 44 people, and most of them women, would have affected everyone on the island in some way, shape, or form. I can imagine there was a real collective trauma uh around the event.

SPEAKER_01 15:34 Especially because these burnings and these hangings, they were public events often. Yeah. So the trauma of going to watch, you know, people wanted to go and watch it, but then you know, they must have been traumatised by seeing what happened to these people, especially if they were a neighbour or a friend or a friend of a friend.

SPEAKER_00 15:54 Absolutely. Um but almost everything we know about the supposed gatherings here come from confessions extracted during witch trials and before execution, they would have been tortured until they gave the answers their interrogators were were looking for.

SPEAKER_01 16:08 Yeah, and in fact, um the original court records that uh J.L. Pitts transcribed to make his book, he points out that uh there are repeated colons throughout the court records, and they're, you know, you might just think they're punctuation marks, but actually they seem to mark the pauses as the questioning stopped and then torture resumed, and then the confession continued.

SPEAKER_00 16:35 Oh I see, so you can actually see how many individual sessions of torture there there was before.

SPEAKER_01 16:40 How often they were returned to for for more torture sessions, yeah. So you know, it's clear that the stories of meeting at the Catior, they weren't volunteered, right? So they they were built piece by piece through leading questions. Um they they may have asked, you know, when did you first meet the devil? You're not giving them much of a choice there. Or what form did he take? Of course. Where did the Sabbath take place? And if you read it with that knowledge, these sort of remarkable confessions become not just accounts of alleged witchcraft, but sort of haunting records of human suffering.

SPEAKER_00 17:22 Of course, and of course, when you're under that sort of pain, you are going to reach for the myth that you're familiar with, aren't you? You are going to say he was a black cat or he was a goat.

SPEAKER_01 17:31 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:32 It was a, you know, it was a Sunday night, you're gonna say all the things expected of you.

SPEAKER_01 17:36 It was the categoric where everyone thought witches convened anyway. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:39 And it it made the most sense for you to say that. Yeah. Absolutely. And and of course, these trials didn't just happen, you know, in in a vacuum. Um, they took place during the reign of King James I. Uh, a monarch who firmly believed that witches were real. So if you imagine, you know, that culture spreads from the top, a monarch monarch who claims to rule by right of God. Um, and then that belief just spreads through the court, through law, just across the land, I guess. In 1597, the king even wrote his own book on demonology, arguing that witchcraft posed a genuine threat to Christian society. And you know, when when the king himself believed the devil was recruiting followers, it's perhaps no surprise that judges, priests, and and ordinary people did too. And we we see that sort of thing even in this day and age with judges tending to follow the president, yeah, for example, because you know that that is just where the ultimate power lies.

SPEAKER_01 18:30 Yeah, because you sort of fall in line. I I I a lot of the time it's not about belief, it's about um the line of power.

SPEAKER_00 18:38 Absolutely about protecting yourself and your position.

SPEAKER_01 18:41 Yeah, exactly. And so I do always wonder how many people believed witches were real in that period of time, and how many feigned beliefs so that they felt a part of the community and so they felt they were on the same page as everybody else and they were following the letter of the law.

SPEAKER_00 19:02 Right, and so that themselves or their own wives or daughters or mothers wouldn't be accused. Yeah. Because if you're a dissenting voice, then surely the You must be a witch. Yeah. Yes, the attention turns on you.

SPEAKER_01 19:15 And um one thing that becomes quite obvious when you read the original confessions is just how ordinary many of the supposed acts of witchcraft were.

SPEAKER_00 19:25 Oh really?

SPEAKER_01 19:25 Yeah. So, like, you know, you don't you don't have fireballs, you've got you don't have flying broomsticks and things like that, like you might imagine. Actually, it was maybe an you know a neighbour refused milk from somebody, and then and then suddenly um their cow stops producing milk. Right. So you they they feel like, oh, I I must have been like I refused milk from that person, they've hexed my cow.

SPEAKER_00 19:51 It seemed like a tit for tat purse, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:54 Yeah, very sort of menial, sort of mundane, but these were the kinds of things that were registered. So, you know, maybe a bitter quarrel breaks out and not long afterwards someone falls ill or dies. We might call that coincidence today, but back then it oh c clearly it was because of that argument I had with and she cursed my family. Um, maybe a child suddenly becomes sick, um, livestock perish, or maybe a harvest fails, and again again and again, misfortune follows conflict, and the person who it sort of all seemingly comes back to is then sort of labelled a witch and then blamed for those misfortunes. So, like today we might look for like disease, we might be able to sort of examine a body and see if something happened. We might look for bad weather, we might just throw it up to simple chance and understand that it was chance. But before science offered those sorts of explanations, people still needed an answer to this kind of haunting question, which was, why did this happen? And witchcraft gave them someone to blame.

SPEAKER_00 21:04 Yeah, and and even today I think we we almost uh pay credence to sort of almost a human instinct to blame the unknown. You know, like I say, I'm kind of I'm an atheist, I don't really tend to believe in anything, but if I have a really bad, you know, run of luck, I'll still find myself saying, Oh, why me? Or you know, yeah, cursing the universe as if there is some external force doing it to me, when obviously it's just you know random chance, raw numbers, bad luck.

SPEAKER_01 21:27 And I I even sometimes think, oh, but I I haven't done anything bad recently. Why did that happen?

SPEAKER_00 21:32 You know, like it goes, yeah, karma, it goes through your mind briefly at least, doesn't it? Absolutely, absolutely. And um and let's not forget, as well, that an accus accusation of witchcraft might not always have been genuine. It might have just been a very useful means of getting rid of someone you simply didn't like or didn't want around anymore. So maybe an annoying neighbour, for instance, you know, you you maybe you might not be able to go around and evict them, or and you obviously murder has always been a crime throughout the ages, but you could get rid of someone by successfully uh accusing them of being a witch, and then suddenly maybe that land boundary dispute goes away.

SPEAKER_01 22:06 Yeah. And you're convincing a community to get behind that charge. Right. And so suddenly you're not having to do an awful deed to that person. You're getting the community to do it for you.

SPEAKER_00 22:18 Yeah, you you basically go from being the criminal to actually being the victim who is almost seen in the eyes of society as deserving some sort of pity or compensation almost. Yeah. And then you come out the other side as well with also with moral righteousness. Yeah. Because you have, you know, you've caught a servant of the devil and passed them on to the authorities.

SPEAKER_01 22:38 And I wonder at some point along the line, perhaps it did start as a petty grievance and you wanted to get rid of a neighbour. But then you start, I don't know, you start believing, oh maybe maybe, maybe I was right. Maybe it was witch. Maybe they are a witch. Maybe they are, and yeah, because uh, you know, you you hear stories of uh sort of mediums who started out as con artists. And then eventually they get so good at reading people and being able to correctly identify the names of dead people from their life that they start going, Oh, may maybe I can communicate with the dead actually.

SPEAKER_00 23:12 I I started off as a scam artist, but actually I've I have actually really got a gift for this. Yeah, I've picked it up, yeah, I've figured it out. And this is again another thing, another human truth. Everyone needs to be the hero in their own story.

SPEAKER_01 23:24 Yes.

SPEAKER_00 23:24 So even people who do really, really bad things often find an amazing way to justify them and still come out viewing themselves as the main character, as the hero. I think that it takes uh there's probably very few humans out there who acknowledge they're the bad guy. Yeah. They're happy being the bad guy. And I suspect witchcraft was a very convenient tool to do this sort of thing.

SPEAKER_01 23:46 Yeah, and there's also uh a very human need to explain things which have no explanation. So I think they've run tests on people where they've sort of done something by instinct without thinking about doing it. And then when they're quizzed on why they did it, they will produce an answer. Sure. They'll produce some sort of answer that explains their behaviour, even if there was no actual sort of driver for it. Because people love to find an answer for anything, for everything.

SPEAKER_00 24:15 And and as soon as they've created that narrative, I'm sure they absolutely believe it too. They don't feel like they're spinning a yarn.

SPEAKER_01 24:20 No, they don't even realise they're yeah, faking it.

SPEAKER_00 24:22 Yeah. It's amazing. I I can believe it, yeah. It's it's it's really fascinating too.

SPEAKER_01 24:26 And um, you can imagine, you know, just imagine being one of those people who was dragged off by the court, being put in front of judges, being accused of witchcraft, because maybe your cows your your neighbour's cow died or something like that. You can kind of see why many confess to witchcraft, even if they hadn't done anything even adjacent to paganism, for instance. Because if you know that unless you confess the torture is going to continue, suddenly these stories become less about witches and more about ordinary islanders trapped in, you know, one of history's greatest moral panics. Like, what do I do? What do I do? I must confess so I can just have an easy death.

SPEAKER_00 25:09 Yeah, I I honestly can't imagine being in that situation. There must be this gradual slip from, you know, I'm sure at first you're in denial and and you argue your case and you claim you're innocent, and you think if I can just explain to them, just make them see that this is a mistake or a coincidence, they'll let me go. And then I'm, you know, maybe you see your friends and family one by one slowly turn against you, or um, you realize that no matter what you say, your answers fall on deaf deaf ears, and the person who's asking you the question, you can, you know, s probably see the hate they have for you in their eyes. And then there's probably this creeping realization that it's actually better not to fight for your life.

SPEAKER_01 25:48 You know, if you've seen it happen to somebody before, you know you know what happens and you know there's no escape. It must be it must have been dreadful to have had that accusation levelled against you.

SPEAKER_00 26:00 Yeah, actually being being falsely accused of being a witch and suffering that fate actually sounds worse than being got by a witch, actually when you really think about it.

SPEAKER_01 26:09 Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah. Humans are capable of of much worse than any s any supernatural being that we've invented.

SPEAKER_00 26:17 Unfortunately so, and thankfully we live in slightly more enlightened times, hey. Yeah, we think. I hope so. Um So there's uh another fascinating possibility too, though. So if we go back to Sir Edgar, uh he noticed some curious details in the original court documents, and that's that the devil always stood upright. Um so his paw would feel just like a human hand, and he would meet women alone in secluded places, uh, and before they were carried away to the Sabbath, they were often given a mysterious black uh ointment. So McCullough wondered whether these so-called encounters uh with the devil weren't supernatural at all. Could some of the so-called devils have been simply unscrupulous men in dis in disguise exploiting vulnerable women before stories grew into rumours, and then rumours into accusations, and accusations into confessions. Um we'll never know for certain, but it you know offers a strikingly human explanation for some of the island's darkest stories, and is perhaps even more scary that not only were these women innocent, they could have actually been victims. Yeah. And then, you know, rather than being believed or helped, they were then accused of being witches.

SPEAKER_01 27:27 But it also opens up the possibility of of women um potentially who wanted to be part of that kind of a witch's coven and were being led on by some sort of like you said, unscrupulous men. Of course. There was a desire perhaps to humans have always had this desire to be part of a a gang, a group, uh sort of something that you have to yourself, and maybe this was their th you know, they they thought, oh yeah, I'll join the witches. And then they see a man dressed in or they don't know it's a man dressed as the devil, as a cat, or whatever, and they think this is yeah, I'm I'm part of something.

SPEAKER_00 28:10 And you could imagine it too, that if you were trying to find the witches and you were whispering in maybe in the local pubs, or you know, when you were meeting your friends at whatever gathering, and one of them said, Yes, go out to the dolman at midnight, and there you will see, you know, a dark figure, and that's our lord, you know. I mean, in this atmosphere, yeah, and in those times with those beliefs. There is another possibility too, as well.

SPEAKER_01 28:34 So when we first uh recorded the the podcast that never went out eight years ago, we spoke to um a Guernsey historian Julian Lemfesty, if you recall. I do, yeah. And she suggests she's fantastic. Um she suggested that Locatiorok was um well may have been used by smugglers, so there was a kind of privateering past of Guernsey.

SPEAKER_00 28:56 This is my favourite theory about it. I I really like this one. This is good, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 28:59 So the smugglers maybe used it as a hiding place for their for their smuggled goods. And you know, stories of witches and the devil, they would have been a remarkably effective way of keeping sort of nosy locals away from the area and away from discovering all the goods that I mean stockpiling.

SPEAKER_00 29:20 You could imagine I'm now thinking about like the traitors, you know, the BBC show. Yeah. Where they've got their hood their hoods up and the torches and everything, you know. If if you're smugglers dressed like that, yeah, with your you know, your black hoods, and you're approaching from the coastline, which as we said earlier, is you know, is so close. I mean we can hear the the sea roaring right now. If you're a local and you see, you know, people walking towards the dolmen in the dead of night at the witching hour, yeah, you know, in hoods with the torches, you're not going anywhere near it.

SPEAKER_01 29:47 No, with all these stories rife as well, you're just thinking, right, that like no not even an official will would go near it.

SPEAKER_00 29:54 So it would be the perfect hideout. It's it's a pretty smart excuse, isn't it? Yeah. Uh it's a pretty smart alibi, I should say.

SPEAKER_01 30:00 I do wonder though, you know, there's this little part of me and and I don't think it is the case, but maybe the world was just a bit more supernatural hundreds of years ago.

SPEAKER_00 30:13 You know what? I it's one of my favourite tropes in fiction. It's like Game of Thrones, you know, magic's gone from the world, but it's slowly returning.

SPEAKER_01 30:21 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:22 And maybe, yeah, back then things just were a little more enchanted or hexed.

SPEAKER_01 30:27 And what's really interesting is the Katioric isn't the only place in Guernsey linked to witches gathering. So um, during the trial of Martin Toulouf, uh, another supposed meeting place appears, and that is the crossroads at Leset. Um, so anyone who's who hasn't been to Guernsey wouldn't know these crossroad crossroads, but the reason why I bring them up is because um crossroads have always occupied a special uh place in folklore for centuries, and they were seen as a um sort of places between worlds, neither one place nor another, and that was kind of a location where the ordinary rules of life would sort of break down, so really supernatural.

SPEAKER_00 31:09 Yeah, and and it's also one of these uh myths that I I believe spread across it's not just English folklore where crossroads are considered significant. I think it's multiple folklores. Oh right. Um, and again, like as an atheist, if I am out walking at night and it's kind of a a bit of a misty night, and I happen upon a country crossroad, and there is a figure standing there that beckons me over or asked to speak to me. I'm I'm not talking to them. I'm moving straight on. So, today we know there were no midnight covens casting spells uh beneath La Trepier, or we think we know. Yeah. Disease wasn't spread by curses, storms weren't summoned by witches, and mental illness wasn't possessioned by demons. You know, but we know these things with the benefit of centuries of scientific discovery.

SPEAKER_01 31:57 Yeah, and perhaps um there were never witches meeting beneath these stones, but there were frightened people, you know. There were ancient places no one understood, there were neighbours who disturbed one another, there were judges convinced they were fighting Satan himself, and there were innocent people who paid the price. This this it might not have been supernatural, but what happened was real and and it was gruesome.

SPEAKER_00 32:25 Really gruesome, I I think, once you take it down to the human level like that. Yeah. Absolutely. And in a time when the ruler of the kingdom had a bigger influence on the population than we can probably comprehend today, and before science offered better answers, people still needed explanations. And sometimes those explanations killed.