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.”