Cinderloo
(Dawley Riots)

White Cow of Mitchell's Fold

Shropshire Folklore Introduction Contents

Mitchell's Fold: a not very imposing stone circle on the Corndon Hill, but as the Arch-Drood, Julian Cope writes in the indispensable The Modern Antiquarian '...it is not so much the stones as the site that give the circle its sense of cosmic wonder.'

There was famine in Shropshire and the people were fair clemming (starving). There was a cow - The Blameless White Cow - at Mitchell's Fold whose milk would never run dry and would fill any vessel brought to it - pail, pitcher, bath - provided it was one only. Now there lived an evil old woman named Mitchell who went to the cow and - to spite her neighbours - milked the cow into a sieve (in dialect, a riddle). The cow dried and, according to popular account, disappeared into Warwickshire where, rather improbably, became a dun cow and was eventually hunted, and killed by Guy, Earl of Warwick.

The old woman received her comeuppance. - she was turned into one of stones which forms Mitchell's Fold. Alternatively, she was buried in the centre of the circle. Needless to say this legend has an analogue in Yorkshire. It has a variant version of the cow that provides milk for an entire community. Charlotte goes as far as to postulate a proto-myth (an 'original' myth from which others derive) of the all-succouring cow.