Malkin Tower was the home of Elizabeth Southerns, known as Demdike, and her family, standing on the western side of Pendle Hill in ground that would become, through one single gathering, central to one of the most notorious witch trials in English history. On Good Friday, 10 April 1612, Elizabeth Device organised a gathering there of family and associates, a meeting for which her son James Device stole and slaughtered a neighbour's sheep specifically to provide food for everyone attending. When the magistrate Roger Nowell learned of the meeting, he treated it not as the ordinary family occasion it more plausibly actually was, but as a witches' sabbath, convened, according to the eventual prosecution case, specifically to plot the murder of the gaoler holding Demdike and Chattox and the blowing-up of Lancaster Castle itself. The gathering, more than any other single piece of evidence gathered during the whole investigation, was what turned a local family dispute into a full mass trial, drawing in everyone said to have simply attended.
Malkin Tower itself was demolished not long after the trials concluded, and its precise physical location has never actually been settled with any real confidence in the centuries since. Thomas Potts's own 1613 account of the trial places it somewhere within the Forest of Pendle without pinning down its exact site any further, and local tradition combined with later archaeological survey has proposed at least three separate candidate sites over the years, including present-day Malkin Tower Farm near Blacko, where a place called Malkyn is genuinely recorded from as early as the sixteenth century, an area near Newchurch in Pendle, and a field called Mancknowles Ing near Barley, none of which has ever produced conclusive evidence of an actual seventeenth-century building matching the details of the story.
The name persists today on the modern farm at Blacko, which remains the site most usually pointed to by visitors and historians alike, but it should genuinely be treated as an educated best guess rather than any kind of confirmed location, Malkin Tower's real, physical foundations remaining as lost to history as the ordinary family gathering that took place there has been transformed, through centuries of retelling, into the stuff of witch-trial legend.
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