The Witch of Goudhurst, Kent.

The true story behind Cunning Woman, by Sinead Spearing

I once stepped into my village church seeking peace — community, healing, belonging. But something shifted when I began to write.

Not sermons. Not heresy. Just the quiet truths of the women who came before: the healers, the herb-keepers, the prayer-whisperers. Women with roots in soil and soul. Women who were once honoured — until they were named witches.

The air grew cold. The gossip came like frost. And then, the ground cracked beneath me.

Some called the deliverance ministry. Others asked for public acts of penance, one or two suggested I burn my books — as if fire could undo what I’d remembered.

They said I had invited darkness, danced with the devil, because of my research. That I was dangerous. Not because I had done anything… but because I had spoken. Because I had dared to remember the women they had worked so hard to forget. I was shunned. Demonised. Spiritually exiled.

For years, I avoided the village. I walked with my head down, ashamed, as if the word they whispered had been branded into my skin.

Witch!

And then, one winter's evening, I stood at my door and looked out across the fields towards the church, snow soft beneath my boots, and thought: If this were the seventeenth century… would they be coming for me with pitchforks?

What I didn’t know then — what I would only discover much later — is that they already had. Right here in this very village.

🕯️ Goudhurst, 1657

Her name was Mary Allen. She lived in Goudhurst with her mother. Both women were tried for witchcraft in 1657 — and both were hanged.

Mary, unmarried and described as a spinster, was accused of harbouring a spirit in the shape of a black dog. The official charge named her “a common witch and inchantrix,” saying she had employed the aid of a wicked spirit “with intent... that certain devillish arts, inchantments, charms, and sorceries might be used.”

Her crime, essentially, was being a woman alone with her mother. An odd pair. Women thought strange. Women not shaped to fit.

I didn’t know all this when I moved here. I didn’t know it when I stood in the church that had turned on me.

✨ When fiction remembers history....

Cunning Woman began as a way to alchemise what had happened to me. I had written nonfiction books — Old English Medical Remedies and A History of Women in Medicine — and had spent years researching the early English women who blended healing with spirituality, herbs with care, community with intuition. The more I studied them, the more I saw how they were not fringe figures but foundational ones — and how they had been rewritten as witches to erase their power.

But after the church turned on me, I couldn’t write like that anymore — clean, researched, distanced. I needed to write through it.

So I wrote of Eden. A woman caught between belief and fear. An academic like myself, haunted by ancestral grief. Someone who finds herself in Goudhurst, face-to-face with a history she doesn’t yet understand. In the novel, Eden discovers she’s linked by blood to the very woman accused of witchcraft at the time.

I thought I was writing fiction. But, after Cunning Woman was published, I looked deeper into my own family history. And found it: My ancestors lived in Goudhurst in the sixteenth century — older than the witch trial itself. My family grave still stands behind the church, obelisk-like, looking over the village that turned its back on me.

The same village. The same church. The same story — just turned in time.

🌾 The bramble path home...

I walk the same paths as Mary Allen. I write in the shadow of the same steeple. And where once I was named a witch by whispers, now I stand by name and by bone, part of the oldest family line in this place.

Some witch trials end in hanging. Some end in exile. And some… in return.

Cunning Woman is a novel. But it is also a remembering. A spell of reclamation — for the ones they tried to burn, and for the ones still burning in quieter ways.

This is my offering. My healing. And my homecoming.

🌙 If this stirred something in you...

You can read the first chapters of Cunning Woman here →

Or find the full book on Amazon here →