Hutton-le-Hole is one of the best-known villages found anywhere in the North York Moors, and among the cluster of nineteenth-century women remembered locally as witches, Peggy Dvell stands out as genuinely unusual for having actually left behind a physical trace of her real practice: a personal grimoire, a handwritten book of magical or folk-medical knowledge, which survives today in the collection of Ryedale Folk Museum for anyone to actually go and see. She was known to travel regularly to the market town of Malton specifically to offer fortune-telling there, suggesting a working practice that went well beyond purely local, informal consultation and extended into something closer to an actual travelling trade carried between different towns.
The genuine survival of an actual grimoire attributed directly to her sets Dvell clearly apart from most of the other named cunning women and witches recorded across this stretch of Ryedale, whose own reputations mostly survive only through oral tradition and passing mentions rather than through any surviving written material of their own.
What the book itself actually contains is not detailed in any of the sources available for this entry, but its careful preservation within a public museum collection gives this particular case an unusually strong documentary foundation for a local witchcraft tradition of this period, Peggy Dvell's own real, physical grimoire offering something concrete that most comparable figures in this collection simply cannot claim for themselves.
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