Collectanea, 347
There is a " wishing well " at Abberley, near Kidderminster. The mode of " wishing " is to walk three times round the well, dropping a little pebble into its basin at each turn, and at the same time whispering your wish.
A newt is much disliked. It is called a hasgill, and supposed to possess some poisonous property. In Hartlebury, in 1890, a workman positively refused to whitewash a portion of a cellar in which he had discovered some very small newts, saying that he would not do it, as there were hasgills on the floor. When asked what harm they could do him, he exclaimed with horror, — " Why, they'm pison," and nothing would induce him to finish the work.
Dobe's Barn, situated in Dobe's Lane, Chaddesley Corbett, has always had an evil reputation as haunted, many people objecting to pass it after dark.^^
The belief in fairies has not yet died out in Worcestershire. An intelligent working-man, just past middle age, told me in 1897 many anecdotes about them. When a lad he lived with his father, a small farmer, on the edge of the Forest of Wyre, and went out with the horses. His bedroom was over the pantry, and near the stable.. He declared that at night things were thrown about in the pantry, crockery rattled violently, etc., but that in the morning everything was in its proper place. He scorned the suggestion of rats. The horses used to rush wildly about in the stable, and one night, when he went down to look at them, he found them with tails plaited up and "all of a lather" as if they had been ridden at a great pace. The stable door was fastened, and nothing was to be seen but some " short straws " on the floor into which, he •was convinced, the fairies had "turned themselves" on the sound of a mortal footstep.
Very small clay pipes are sometimes found when digging in iields or gardens, and are called " fairy pipes." One was found in a garden at Torton, Hartlebury, in 1900. It was small, and the bowl very thick. An old labourer who saw it called it a " fairy pipe," and said that, when found with the stem complete,
12 Cf. "Dobie" in Henderson's Folk-Lore of the Northern Comities, and "Dobbies" in Allies' Antiquities and Folk-lore of Worcestershire, pp. 414-5 '{which gives Dobies as a place name in Chaddesley Corbett).
