We Are Not Witches, Just Women Swimming

Casual sexism | What witches were not | Cool sea, cold river

There are people here but not many, and the water shelves quickly from clear to turquoise to indigo. We change by the slipway and a pile of high tide seaweed, dry now, caked and clumped, the pungent scent rising with every waft of air. We go into the water together. Cool silver clutching our ankles, sliding up, but clear, so clear I can see my toes on the grey pebbles below the surface. We walk out and push off once we reach our waists. The bay is in the cleft of the cliff, tall trees with umbrella canopies at one edge, bursting purple rhododendrons on the other. Below the surface, the light filters down in shafts, and the sand is pressed into ripples by an earlier tide. Seaweed clumps yellow and purple and ochre at the edges, tall and shifting with the motion of the soft swell. When I put my face in, the cold gathers in my cheekbones, my sinuses, the gap between my eyebrows. We swim till the cold forces us out again.

Changing back on the beach, a man and a woman walk by. ‘Mad’ the man says, the woman shakes her head apologetically. We tell him it was lovely. He turns and says, somewhat angrily, ‘300 years ago they’d have burned you as witches’. Neither of us really say anything, partly because we are tangled in towel tunnels, and partly because of the surprise of it. It stays with us as we change, as we sit and watch the water, as we walk through woods strewn with red campion and cow parsley. Before long we laugh about it, but what a strange - and quite aggressive - thing to say to two women in the process of getting dressed who are in no way affecting you. What a very violent and misogynistic period of history to evoke. I have a novel on the back burner that is set in the period of the witch trials, and I was called to the subject precisely because of the unjust and undeniably misogynistic slaughter of many, many women, and how that sadly echoes through to our own times. Let’s unpick it a little.

Firstly, no, actually, 300 years ago they wouldn’t have burnt us as witches. They didn’t burn women for swimming in the sea or for being close to nature in the way of contemporary practitioners of green witchcraft. They didn’t execute people for being ‘mad’ in a simply eccentric way, but for a whole host of complex reasons, including but not limited to poverty, property disputes, vagrancy, begging, unexplained sickness, family or neighbourhood quarrels or just plain bad luck. People were genuinely afraid of what they couldn’t explain; coincidences, such as someone falling ill after quarreling with someone else, or bad luck, like your neighbour’s crop being much better than yours. They were looking for reasons, for someone to blame, for a way to fight the unknown, It was a time when people had little, when the Christian church had recently introduced the idea of personal sin and punishment and the devil was a real figure to be feared. Some men were called witches too, albeit a much smaller number (only 10% in Orkney, where I was researching, as much as 30% in parts of England). Those who were killed as witches were NOT witches, they weren’t part of some strong and secret coven (see this piece by Eleanor Janega for more on why you’re NOT the granddaughter of the witches they couldn’t burn.) They were mostly vulnerable, unprotected people without the means to protect themselves from accusations that, once they started to build, could not possibly be countered. In the UK, generally those executed for witchcraft were not burnt at the stake - they were hung, and in some places, such as Scotland, their bodies were then burnt to prevent the devil reanimating their bodies. Fear of - and persecution for - witchcraft spanned a huge period, from the mid 1400s to the early 1700s. Many, many innocent people lost their lives. It is not a thing to make into a quick joke.

The grumpy man on the beach probably meant little by it. Who knows? But does meaning little harm exonerate you? I think not. I think it is so that often the little, seemingly inconsequential things that do damage. The jokes built on dodgy foundations, the assumptions born of ignorance, the casual, almost too small to challenge things that skew the world ever so slightly. These things do damage; not only are they symptomatic of wider problems, but they, as tiny building blocks, contribute to them. If left unchecked the tiny casual assumptions and off-colour jokes will sprout and grow and strangle us. I think, too, that if you’re going to refer to something you should at least choose something you are entirely ignorant about.

The next day we follow a river upstream and find a swing, a secluded bay down an overgrown desire path. The water is rushing but clear, cold and green, and the tree we change under deposits floating white specks of fluff through the air, over the river. The dappled light of the trees paints patterns on the sandy riverbed. The sun is shining and there is no one here; we are hidden, we are in the rushing bowels of the river, and we are alive and we feel powerful. I think that this is where the twinning of nature and power and witchery comes from; this moment of immersion, the natural world tight around us, the exhilaration of the silence, the power of the place. It would be easy to equate this with magic, with secret knowledge, with witchcraft, yet still; we are not witches, we are just women, swimming, sated, cold and strong. Just let us be.