#building-folklore — Public Fediverse posts

Put It Back

Years ago, at the yard where I kept my horses, an old outbuilding gave up something a little bit unexpected.

A dried cat.

I don’t know exactly how old the building was. I believe it may have once been part of a row of terraced cottages that had otherwise been demolished, but I have never established that firmly enough to state it is fact. Nor can I now prove that the cat had been placed their deliberately. Mostly because… well, cats are cats. They chase mice, they crawl into holes, they investigate places from which they later discover they can’t get out. Sometimes, they hide away because it’s their time to die. So finding the naturally mummified remains of a cat inside an old building does not automatically mean somebody put it there to ward off witches.

Nevertheless, I remembered it. Because finding a dead cat preserved within the fabric of an old building is not something you easily forget.

Then, years later, I met another one. This time, I was volunteering at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery.

In early January 2017, renovation work was taking place at the former Post Office in the Quadrant in Buxton. During the work, the workmen disturbed part of the ceiling. And a dried cat fell out. Literally, it just dropped from the ceiling cavity during the work.

The owner of the building, Maxine Chuwen, saved it being thrown into the skip and eventually took it to the museum. I can vaguely remember it arriving. By then I’d already encountered one dried cat in an old building. Now someone walked into the museum with another. This one subsequently became part of the museum collection as DERSB:2017.1, it was cleaned and stabilised, researched and eventually, displayed. Since then, it has made it’s way into the archaeological history on something I think is absolutely wonderful.

Magical House Protection.

Welcome back to Old Magic. Pull up a chair…

When you start dismantling old British houses, occasionally you find things that have absolutely no business being where they are.

A single child shoe inside a wall…

A bottle beneath a hearth…

Marks carved beside a fireplace…

A horse skull underneath a floor…

A bundle of clothing above a ceiling…

A dried cat in a roof.

Sometimes, several objects appear together, and once archaeologists started to record where these things were found, an intriguing pattern emerged. They frequently occur at the vulnerable parts of buildings – chimneys, hearths and doors. Windows, roofs and floors. Thresholds. The places where the outside world could get in.

For people living in a world inhabited by witches, fairies, spirits, demons, illness, bad luck and things that went bump in considerably less metaphorical nights, a house was more than shelter. It was a boundary. Inside was us, outside was everything else. And boundaries needed protecting.

Let’s start with the shoes, because there are an extraordinary number of them. So many in fact, that Northampton Museum and Art Gallery maintains a ‘Concealed Shoe Index’, established by footwear historian June Swann, recording shoes discovered deliberately hidden within the buildings. They have been found in chimneys and behind fireplaces. Under floorboards and inside walls. Above ceilings and around doors and windows. Sometimes there’s a pair but very often there isn’t, just one worn shoe. Adult shoes, children’s shoes, boots, slippers – footwear that somebody could apparently have thrown away, but chose instead to place somewhere very difficult to retrieve.

The practice is particularly fascinating because we have the physical evidence but very little contemporary explanation from the people who actually did it. Nobody seems to have thought:

“I’d better write down why I’ve Just bricked up Ethel’s left shoe in the chimney in case somebody finds it in 250 years…”

They just did it. And that silence has left researchers with several theories.

Perhaps a worn shoe retained something of the person who had worn it – this would fit very well with the magical logic that we’ve already encountered this week. A shoe gradually takes on the shape of it’s owner. It contains the impression of the foot. It is intensely individual. Perhaps it functioned as a substitute for the person. Perhaps it attracted or trapped something harmful. Perhaps it brought luck or protected the household. Perhaps different people concealed shoes for different reasons – we don’t know. Old Magic is full of wonderfully neat explanations invented long after the people performing the ritual had stopped explaining themselves. But the honest answer is sometimes considerably more interesting:

Somebody thought that this mattered. We just don’t know precisely what they thought it did.

The earliest examples stretch right back into the medieval period, while the practice continued for centuries afterwards. By the time researchers began seriously recording concealed footwear, examples had turned up across Britain and much further afield. One nineteenth century child’s shoe in Northampton’s collection was discovered in a ground floor ceiling beneath a beam. A single little shoe, hidden where nobody was supposed to see it.

The there are the bottles.

The so-called witch bottle is perhaps easier to interpret because some historical accounts actually describe the practice. From around the seventeenth century, bottles and jars could be filled with combinations of urine, pins, nails. thorns, teeth, hair, nail clippings and other materials. Sometimes they were heated, sometimes burned, sometimes buried. Sometimes they were concealed beneath hearths, thresholds or floors.

The logic was counter-magic. If someone believed they had been bewitched, bodily material from the victim could be placed inside the bottle alongside sharp objects. The magical connection between witch and victim could supposedly be exploited in reverse. The witch who had reached into the house magically could be hurt through that connection.

Other bottles appear to have functioned more generally as protective deposits. Again, the location matters. The hearth, chimney and doorways were openings. The threshold marked the precise place where outside became inside. Put protection there and maybe whatever was outside stayed outside.

Sometimes the protection wasn’t hidden at all. Look closely at old buildings and you may find curious marks scratched or carved into the timber or stone. Intersecting circles. Daisy wheel or hexafoil designs. Repeated V’s. Mesh like patterns and burn marks. These are often described as ‘apotropaic marks’ from a word meaning something intended to turn away or avert harm. They occur around fireplaces, doors, windows and other openings with suspicious frequency.

Historic England’s public survey of these so-called witches’ marks generated hundreds of reports and one of Britain’s most spectacular concentrations was discovered somewhere very familiar to Derbyshire readers.

Creswell Crags.

The caves on the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border contain an extraordinary collection of marks interpreted as protective, including numerous designs around holes and crevices. Places something might emerge. Once again: boundary. Opening. Protection.But houses sometimes contain rather larger surprises.

Like horses. Or at least their heads.

Horse skulls have been discovered beneath floors and within walls in Britain and Ireland and their interpretation is complicated.

Some appear to have been deliberately deposited. In Ireland particularly, there is a longstanding explanation that horse skulls placed beneath floors improved the resonance for music and dancing. In other contexts, researchers have suggested ritual or protective meanings. The two explanations need not necessarily apply to every find – that is another useful warning. Finding an unusual object hidden in a building doesn’t automatically make it magical. Context is everything.

Which brings us back to the cats.

Dried or naturally mummified cats have been discovered in old buildings across Britain. Some may simply be unfortunate animals that crawled into cavities while hunting rodents and never escaped. Others are considerably harder to explain that way. Cats have been found in sealed locations. Some appear to have been deliberately positioned. There are even reported examples associated with rats or mice in arrangements suggesting that the animals were already dead when placed there.

Various explanations have been proposed. Perhaps the cat symbolically continued hunting vermin. Perhaps it protected the household. Perhaps it deterred supernatural intruders. Perhaps the animal itself had some apotropaic significance.

Again, nobody left us the instruction manual.

And that is why I’m cautious about my first cat. I saw it. I know it came from an old outbuilding. But without knowing enough about the precise building, its date and the exact context in which the cat was found, I can’t tell you that somebody deliberately put it there. It might have been Old Magic. It might have just been an unlucky cat.

The Buxton cat is more intriguing.

The building in The Quadrant dates from the nineteenth century, and the cat was found in a ceiling cavity during restoration. Newspapers dating from the 1890s were reportedly found in the same general space, although that does not prove that the cat was deposited at the same time. It is now catalogued among documented British examples of dried cats discovered within buildings.

And here’s the part I particularly love. These traditions didn’t necessarily end when we stopped believing in them.

Because sometimes modern people find these objects. And put them back.

During renovations begun in 2012 at a historic building in Gatehouse of Fleet in Scotland, three individual children’s shoes were discovered hidden in separate walls. The owners researched them. They learned about the tradition of concealed shoes. They registered their finds with the Concealed Shoe Index. Then the building was converted into three houses. And they put one shoe back into each house. They hoped the shoes would continue to bring luck.

Think about what has just happened there.

A ritual is performed. Its original meaning is forgotten. Centuries pass. The building is opened.

Modern people discover the objects. They research the lost ritual. And then they perform it again.

The tradition has effectively resurrected itself.

Research into concealed footwear has found this reaction repeatedly. People discover an old shoe and feel strangely uncomfortable about simply throwing it away.

Some give it to a museum.

Some display it.

Some keep it near the place where it was found.

And some put it straight back into the wall.

Research on concealed deposits records June Swann’s observation that English finders often instinctively returned shoes to their original locations. Some reportedly became genuinely uneasy at the thought of the shoe leaving the building, as though removing it might also remove whatever protection it had provided. And I completely understand them.

Imagine it.

You’re renovating your house. You remove some plaster and behind it is a tiny, worn child’s shoe. Nobody has seen it for perhaps two hundred years. You discover that people once hid shoes inside houses, possibly for protection or luck. You are a rational twenty-first-century human being. You do not believe that witches enter through chimneys. You do not believe malevolent spirits lurk behind the skirting board. You do not believe a battered old shoe has spent two centuries standing supernatural guard over the spare bedroom. Obviously.

So you throw it away.

Do you?

Because the moment somebody tells you that the shoe may have been protecting the house for two hundred years, another tiny voice appears.

“It’s not hurting anything. It belongs there. Why risk it?”

And suddenly the plasterboard is going back up with the shoe behind it. That may be the most beautiful example of Old Magic we’ve found yet. Not because an eighteenth-century family believed in magical protection, we expect people in the past to have beliefs different from ours. What fascinates me is the modern hand putting the object back. The person who knows the history, knows the archaeology, knows there is no demonstrable mechanism by which an old shoe can protect a building from supernatural attack. And still thinks:

“Leave it where it was.”

Maybe that isn’t belief exactly.

Maybe it’s respect. An unwillingness to break a chain. Maybe old objects acquire authority simply by surviving. Maybe knowing that another human being deliberately placed something there centuries ago makes removing it feel intrusive.

Or maybe, beneath all our electric lights, central heating, video doorbells and home insurance policies, the old magical map of the house still makes a peculiar kind of emotional sense.

There is inside. There is outside. There are openings between them and we want the things we love to be safe. So we lock the door. Check the windows. Leave a light on.

Hang something beside the entrance. Keep particular objects because they make the house feel right.

And if we discover that somebody long dead left something inside the wall to protect the place?

Well.

Maybe it can stay.

I’ve encountered two dried cats from old buildings in my lifetime. One remains a mystery. The other fell out of a Buxton ceiling in 2017 and ended up in the museum where I was volunteering. Neither proves that every dried cat in every roof was deliberately concealed. Neither gives us a neat explanation for why people placed animals, shoes, bottles and other objects inside buildings. But together with thousands of other discoveries, they remind us that our ancestors sometimes constructed houses with more than timber, stone and plaster.

They built beliefs into them. Protection beneath the floor, luck inside the wall, warnings beside the door and something watching the chimney. Most of it was never meant to be seen again.

Until somebody renovates the kitchen.

So if you live in an old house and one day the builder calls you over with a peculiar expression and something dusty in his hand, take a photograph. Record exactly where it came from. Don’t immediately assume it’s witchcraft, find out what you’ve actually got. And whatever you do, treat it with respect. Then decide what happens next.

Museum? Display case? Back inside the wall?

I know what plenty of perfectly sensible people have chosen.

They put it back.

And between you and me?

I probably would too.