The Witch of Goudhurst, Kent.

The true story behind Cunning Woman, by Sinéad Spearing

I once stepped into my village church seeking peace — community, belonging, maybe even sanctuary.

But something changed when I began to write. Not sermons. Not heresy. Just quiet truths — about the women who came before: the healers, the plant-workers, the ones who prayed with their hands and remembered things the world was told to forget.

The air shifted. The gossip arrived like frost. And the ground cracked beneath me.

Deliverance ministries were called. There were mutterings of penance. One or two even suggested I burn my books — as if fire could undo the truth.

They said I had invited darkness. That I was dangerous. Not because of what I did — but because I remembered.

For years, I avoided the village. I kept my head down. I walked quietly. As if the word they had spoken over me had stuck to the soles of my feet.

"Witch!"

And then, one winter's evening, I stood at my door, snow beneath my boots, and looked toward the church. I remember thinking: If this were the seventeenth century, would they come for me with pitchforks?

What I didn’t know then was that they already had.Right here, in this village.

Goudhurst, Kent, UK, 1657

Her name was Mary Allen. She lived in Goudhurst with her mother. Both were accused of witchcraft — and both were hanged.

Mary’s crime? Living quietly.Being unmarried.Being strange. Being seen.

She was charged with harbouring a spirit in the shape of a black dog, and described as “a common witch and inchantrix.” Her life ended under suspicion of being different — of not fitting into the shape the world had made for her.

I didn’t know any of this when I moved here 25 years ago. I didn’t know it when I stood in the church that later turned its back on me.

When fiction remembers what history buried…

Cunning Woman began as a reckoning. After writing Old English Medical Remedies and A History of Women in Medicine, I thought I was done telling the story of England’s forgotten women. But after what happened here — after the whispers, the spiritual exile — I knew I had to write differently.

I created Eden — a woman of faith and scholarship, haunted by grief and drawn to Goudhurst. In the novel, Eden discovers she is descended from the very woman accused of witchcraft.

I thought it was fiction. Until I looked into my own family history — and found that my ancestors lived here in Goudhurst in the sixteenth century. Older than the trial. Older than the accusations. One of their graves still stands behind the church, upright, unmoving, looking out over the village that once tried to shame me into silence.

Same village.Same church.Same story. Turned once more.

The bramble path home…

I walk the same paths Mary Allen once did. I write in the shadow of the same steeple. And where I was once named by whispers, I now stand by name and by bone.

This is my ancestral home. And I no longer walk with my head down.

Some witch trials end in hanging. Some end in exile. And some — eventually — end in return.

Cunning Woman is a novel. But it is also a remembering. A reclamation — of land, lineage, and light.

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 →