3 1 2 Hampshire Folklore.
and pulled down every night, until supernatural aid assisted in the building of it on the hilltop ; hence the name. At Nursling the church first stood in a wood, but was removed one night in toto. The place is still known as Mary's Grove, though stubbed up long ago, and is said to be haunted. (Another story connects the ghost with a suicide.-^)
As the modern equivalent of Grim and the Devil we find Oliver Cromwell's name connected with mount, battery, and other earthworks. Memories of the Civil War, as is only to be expected, abound in the county. At Cheriton the guide books will point out, if the yokels do no longer, that the lane by Lamborough Fields ran with blood after the fight. A man at Bramdean told me of cottage doors yet to be seen with holes in them, — made by Cromwell's bullets. Waller's troops undoubtedly left their mark thereabouts. Durley has a legend that Cromwell's sisters, — some say daughters, — lived there; whilst an inn at Farnborough takes its name from unfortunate ' Tumble- down-Dick,' the Hursley Squire. A farmer's wife in the neighbourhood of Alton is responsible for the information that Cromwell was in the fight there and was " killed in the pulpit." This is rather an original variant of the heroic story of Colonel Boles, killed when defending the church against overwhelming odds.
A forester accounted for the tumuli on Beaulieu Heath in this fashion : — " We calls ut Saltpetre Bank. All these here mounds was throwd up by Uliver Crummle when he tuk the Farest ; he and the Danes beat the English the fust time they ever was beat, and he druv the English into Wales." ^*^
But my best Cromwell story comes from Weyhill. Mr. Heanley wrote : —
" Built into the wall of the vestry there now stands the much mutilated remains of the top of a double crucifix. But, up till
2« B. B. W. Woodward, T. C. Wilkes, and C. Lockhart, A General History of Hampshire, vol. i. , p. 378. ^^ Rogers, Guide to the New Forest, p. 62.
