Iburndale Beck runs near the village of Sleights in the Esk valley close to Whitby, and it was here in 1719 that a woman named Meg Collett was drowned during a ducking, a traditional folk method of testing an accused witch by forcibly submerging her in water, carried out well after England's own formal witch trials had already wound down but clearly still reflecting exactly the same underlying suspicion that had driven those earlier, more formal prosecutions.
Most of the North York Moors witches recorded in local tradition, women such as Nan Scaife or Molly Harbutt elsewhere in this collection, lived out their own lives as figures of ordinary suspicion and occasional harassment rather than ever facing genuinely lethal violence, which is precisely what makes Collett's own case so unusual and worth taking seriously as documented local history rather than as folklore alone.
Accounts of the incident describe it as the area's one clearly recorded murder arising directly from a witchcraft accusation, genuinely distinct from both the earlier, formal witch trials of the seventeenth century and from the informal, non-lethal suspicion that surrounded most of the region's later cunning folk. The specific circumstances that actually led to Collett being targeted in the first place are not detailed anywhere in the sources currently available, but the date and location are both given with enough precision to treat this confidently as a genuine, if genuinely grim, piece of local history rather than invented legend.
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