Mollsgrave Coppice near Ettington carries the name of Scratching Moll, a witch figure said to have attacked anyone who came too close to her patch of woodland by scratching them, a fairly literal and almost folk-etymological explanation for both her unusual name and the legend that grew up around it.
Stories of this particular kind, an unpleasant or feared woman living alone in or near woodland who becomes fixed permanently in local place-names as a witch, are common across rural England, part of a much wider pattern in which isolated or unconventional women, often simply elderly or living without family support, became the focus of local suspicion that later hardened into folklore long after any real circumstances behind it were forgotten.
Mollsgrave's naming itself is the strongest piece of evidence that some version of the Scratching Moll story has genuinely circulated locally for a very long time, since a place-name of this kind does not simply appear without an underlying story to explain it, whatever the actual truth of any historical woman who may or may not have lived and been feared in that particular stretch of woodland.
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