The story comes from the Norfolk folklorist William Blythe Gerish, who set it down in his unpublished folklore notes, and from the East Anglian Handbook of 1885. It places a deep pit at Coldblow, later Blow or Bow Hill, in a field separated from the River Yare by a carr, alongside which the old Norwich road ran.
The pit was said to be bottomless. At midnight and again at noon, a coach drawn by four horses rose out of the water. The driver had no head, and the passengers were four women in white who were also headless. The coach would travel round a nearby field in silence and then go back down into the pit.
Tradition explained it as a wedding party. Long ago, the story says, a party travelling along the old Norwich road careered into the pond by accident and was lost. The same tale is told of an unlocated pit in a field near Bury St Edmunds, which suggests a stock motif of the drowned wedding coach rather than a record of a particular event.
A second ghost belongs to the same neighbourhood. Not far away stood the Great Melton Beech at the end of Bow Hill Lane, and a woman was said to sit under it at midnight, in great distress, rocking a child back and forth.
No date, names or witnesses survive for any of this. It is a piece of traditional pond and coach lore, and the pin is set near the village of Great Melton because the precise pit cannot now be pointed to.
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