Gabbygamies
Location: Ashmore
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The Terrors of Ashmore
There was once a fairy barrow at a place called Folly Hanging Gate at Washers Pit in Ashmore, which was believed inhabited by strange fairy-like spirits called 'Gabbygamies' or otherwise 'Gappergennies.'
It was said anybody who visited the barrow and put their ear to the top would hear the hypnotic sounds of the fairies within.
However, in 1840 the barrow was levelled to make way for a new road. Some human bones were found in the heart of the mound and these were later buried in the churchyard. With the barrow gone, the uncanny sounds of its inhabitants were never heard again.
Edward William Watson, in his 1859 publication "Ashmore, Co. Dorset: a history of the parish with index tothe registers, 1651 to 1820" writes an account of the Gabbergennies and the gost of a Woman in White.
"There are, as in all the down parishes, several barrows in Ashmore. There is one at Gore, one at Mudoak copse, and two large ones on what was Broadridge Common. When the common was broken up, the plough was taken over these, and a number of brass buttons, or what passed for such, were found under the surface of one of them. Concerning another barrow, which has now disappeared, there appears this entry in the parish register : — " Part of a human skeleton — whether that of a man or of a woman is uncertain — shaving been found on Broadridge Common in this parish, was buried according to the rites of the Church of England, 14th Nov., 1864. William Darby, Curate." There was another barrow, over which the road to Fontmel now runs, by Folly Hanging Gate, near Washer's Pit. In this lonely place, till within living memory, strange sounds were made by creatures in the air called Gappergennies, or however else the name may be spelt.(Otherwise called Gabbygammles. The late Mr Stephen Hall, of the Manor Farm, who had often heard the sounds, thought they were made by badgers.)
Of the nature of these sounds I have not been able to learn anything, except that they could be successfully imitated by human lips. When, perhaps fifty years ago,a metalled road was made to Fontmel instead of the old cart-track, this barrow, which lay close to the old road and on the line of the new one, was dug up, and the bones it contained buried in the churchyard. As there is no entry of the fact in the register, this was no doubt done without the burial service. On the down, by the roadside, a cross had always been kept cut, opposite the barrow. This has been neglected since the reinterment; and since then, also, the strange sounds have not been heard. The low mound and the cross on the turf are well remembered. On the common below Sandpits Field is a line of small barrows, which seem to have been opened at some remote date. No exploration of any of these Ashmore remains has in recent times been attempted; and I cannot be sure that the list here given is complete, even of those which an inexperienced observer would notice.
But if the occupants of the barrows did not live on the site of the present village, and there is no evidence that they did, population must early have been drawn there by the one advantage which the place possesses. The great pond, from which the village takes its name, (for Ashmore is a corruption of Ashmere, little more than three hundred years old ; Ashmeer occurs in a will of 1698) sixteen feet deep opposite the Rectory, has nothing to equal it among the chalk downs of the neighbourhood, nor indeed in all the down country of Wiltshire and Dorsetshire. In all probability, however it may have been enlarged, its beginnings are natural ; it must be a swallow-hole, like those in the Yorkshire limestone. It rarely fails, though it is only fed by rain water. Perhaps, on an average, it is dry once in twenty years; and then the villagers, by ancient custom, hold a feast. Cakes are baked, and eaten round the margin and in the bed of the pond ; and the farmers haul out the hundreds of cart-loads of mud which have accumulated on the bottom, and lay them on their land. By a curious coincidence, the pond happened to dry, and the feast was held, in 1887, the Jubilee Year."
The Woman in White
"Though Robert Barber, the High Sheriff of 1670, made his home at Tollard, his son returned to Ashmore, which the family regarded as their chief seat. In Ashmore Church, in a vault under the chancel, almost all of them are buried. Soon after the place was purchased, the manor house must have been built. About half of it is now standing. Formerly a wing ran at right angles to the main building on the north-west side, and the south-east end was flanked by two octagonal towers, though there seems some doubt whether both of these were ever completed. There was another octagonal tower, or large stone summer-house, in the comer of the gardens nearest to the church ; and on the down, now ploughed, overhanging Washer's Pit, a building of the same kind called Barber's Folly, from which the field and down are still named.
With the hollow below the Folly, where the road to Fontmel crosses the bottom, a legend is connected, well known in Ashmore, into which the name of the Barbers has been introduced, though the story must be far older than their time. It runs that a Squire Barber, or perhaps his daughter, for the tale is variously told, was warned in a dream on three successive nights, or else three times on the same night, that some one was in distress at Washer's Pit. The person warned woke the household, and asked for a volunteer to go down to the place. No one would venture, except the cook. Her master gave her his best hunter for the ride, and she went forth to find a lady in white hanging by her hair from an ash tree over the well/now closed, at Washer's Pit. She released the victim, and carried her back on the horse to Ashmore.(One version relates that she was pnrsaed, bat blew her hom and leaped the horse) For her courage she was rewarded with the little holding called Mullens', after her name. But the Mullens family had been settled in Ashmore long before the Barbers ; and another version tells that the daughter of the house, and not the cook, went on the quest. What became of the rescued lady, who she and her assailants were, is not recorded. And it is only fair to state that Dr. Chisholm, the younger, was in the habit of telling the story as of one of the servants at the manor farm being nearly murdered at this spot, and a fellow-servant being warned in a dream to help her. Perhaps Dr. Chisholm had rationalised the story; he told it as of his own or his father's time.
Connected with the same ground as this legend and that about the barrow at Folly Hanging Gate, is another of a woman in white, who has been seen and felt brushing by them, within the last fifty years, by travellers between Spinney's Pond and Washer's Pit. I have heard it
connected with the barrow, but the true form of that story is the Gappergennies ; and the affair at Washer's Pit ended too happily to generate a ghost. This must be some third and independent legend. It is curious that in a parish full, as Ashmore is, of dark and lonely
places, no other neighbourhood than these few yards on the road to
Fontmel should have its story."