Snapperly

Mrs Snapperly, a woman of no teeth and no family who could have spoken up for her, had the misfortune of being mistaken for a witch at a time when witches were not welcome in the Chalk country. When the Baron's son Roland went missing, people put two and two together and made five and remembered that an old woman who cackled and acted strangely lived in the woods.

Lynch-law ruled, the rough music played., and her cottage was burnt down and her cat stoned to death. She died of cold and starvation after knocking at a lot of closed doors.

Tiffany Aching makes sure people remember. She buried both woman and cat in the ruins of the cottage, and the scene is now a riot of meadowflowers not usually seen on the Chalk. This piece of boffo takes time and money to maintain - some of those packets of seed needed to be ordered specially from Twoshirts and were quite expensive - but the meadow stands as testimony to a dark act perpetrated on the innocent, one of whom lies under rare flowers and one under catnip.

Nobody talked about the old lady these days, did they? But when they walked past the place in the summer, the flowers filled the air with delight and the bees filled it with the colours of honey.

Recently, another innocent who died in violence was buried here, under the love-in-a-hurry: Amber Petty's dead baby.