Freeborough Hill
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Freeborough Hill
Freeborough Hill
is a conical mound, 250 metres high, on the edge of the moors, a kilometre
south of Moorsholm. It has been described at the
Silbury of the north, but it is a geological feature.
There are many
legends associated with the hill, including a story that King Arthur and his
knights live inside it. Another suggests a link with the Norse goddess of love
and war, Freya. A story was told in 1661 to a traveller that it had been cast
up by the Devil at the bidding of an old witch so that she could find her lost
cow on the moors. ‘People under the hill stories’ are a common tradition across
Europe.
John
Farndale wrote in 1864 to the south rises majestic Freebro’,
500 feet high, of a beautiful pyramid shape. A few years ago, near to this
hill, one of the most tragic scenes ever enacted took place. A young mother,
shocking to relate, deliberately took the life of her own son, only three years
of age. She murdered the poor innocent in broad daylight, and afterwards
quartered him in the most barbarous manner, for which she was tried and
deservedly transported for life. From this noted hill you have in view an area
of ten square miles, and as you gaze on the woodlands and varied fields below,
the whole appears like a beautiful picture of patchwork, on which the eye may
dwell with the most pleasant sensations.
“Art hath charms
most attractive; but Nature displays
The wonderful
woods of the Ancient of Days;
Those hills from
the world’s foundation have stood,
Midst the tempest
of storm and the deluging flood;
And there shall
they stand unapproach’d by decay
When the proud
works of art shall have faded away:
Till the last
glorious sun shall illumine the sky,
And beneath their
huge piles in oblivion shall lie.
Yes! those hills
we now view shall relapse at the sound
When the
Archangel’s trump through the earth shall rebound;
Then bow their
high heels, shiver, crumble, and fall,
Midst Creation’s
greatest consummation of all.”