By John Macklin

“OLD MOTHER Webb is a witch,” chanted the village children, scuttling past the decrepit cottage in fearful glee. Then they ran home in case the old woman came out and turned them into frogs or bats.

But during the winter of 1901 the door of woman who had become a legend in the windswept hamlet on the edge of the Lake District was firmly closed and the children lost interest in chanting outside her cottage.

Approaching 80 and suffering from painful rheumatism, Maria Webb spent most of her days and nights sitting in an armchair in front of the living-room fire. Once a day her nephew, a farmer named John Barton, would bring her food, replenish her stocks of coal and wood and run any errands she needed.

At weekends his wife would clean the cottage, tidy up, and do Maria’s washing. No one else visited the house overhung with ivy and ragged windblown bushes.

THE REST of the village contented itself with speculating on the size of Mrs Webb’s undoubted fortune and whether or not she had the supernatural powers she was supposed to have exercised in the past.

She had never been a populist woman and since the death of her husband some 20 years earlier, had become almost a recluse. Only John and Helen Barton showed any concern for her wellbeing.

But that didn’t stop villagers talking about her. On winter evenings when green logs hissed and spat on the wide hearth of the village inn, customers would occasionally talk about the woman generally known as Old Mother Webb.

“It isn’t that she’s tight-fisted,” the landlord was heard to declare. “It’s just that she’s the meanest person between here and Carlisle!” Whatever the truth it was certain that the old woman had one obsession: she hated owing money to anyone and throughout her life had paid off any debts as quickly as possible.

MRS WEBB spent Christmas of 1901 alone apart from a fleeting visit from relatives. She was now too frail to leave her home, and in any event, had refused all offers to move into the Barton’s comfortable farmhouse.

She died along in February 1902, and only the Bartons and a few parishioners attended the funeral. She was buried alongside her husband in a windswept plot overlooking a bleak valley and the officiating priest said he hoped she had found contentment at last after years of solitude and loneliness.

After Mrs Webb’s death, the cottage in which she had lived for nearly half a century lay empty and John Barton arranged to have the furniture taken out.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own