Spaunton Moor lies near Hutton-le-Hole in the North York Moors, an area where belief in cunning folk and witches persisted informally well into the nineteenth century, even as such beliefs had already largely faded away elsewhere across England by that same period. Nan Scaife lived on the moor within living memory of the local historian George Calvert, who recorded her in the early 1800s as possessing remarkable powers of foretelling future events, a reputation that placed her firmly among the small cluster of named wise women and witches still remembered across Ryedale from this particular period.
Among the details preserved about her actual practice is one striking and genuinely grim recipe: she was said to prepare small magical cubes using ingredients that included powdered human skull, taken directly from a gibbet, the public display structure once used to exhibit the bodies of executed criminals as a warning to others, mixed together with animal blood.
Whatever the literal truth behind this recipe, it reflects the genuinely dark materials sometimes associated with cunning-folk practice during this period, a form of folk magic that drew directly and deliberately on the visible apparatus of judicial punishment still standing openly in the landscape around her, transforming the physical remains of executed criminals into ingredients for her own working magic.
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