When you’re walking through the leafy corridors of Pipers Vale in Suffolk, you may hear the thundering of horses hooves coming from behind you. When you look around, the noise has vanished and there is nothing to be seen.
In the latter half of the 1700s, Margaret Catchpole took this route, fetching help for a gravely unwell individual by riding bareback to Ipswich. Margaret was born in 1762 in the village of Nacton, she spent her life in domestic service, moving from position to position until eventually working for John and Elizabeth Cobbold in 1793. The Cobbolds were a Suffolk brewing family, and Elizabeth was a writer and poet who taught Margaret how to read and write. Margaret worked for the Cobbolds for a number of years until she drifted away, returning only in 1797 to steal John Cobbold’s Strawberry Roan horse.
On his horse she rode to Whitechapel dressed in men’s clothing, her disguise proving successful until the distinctive horse was recognised and she was arrested. She was sentenced to death, but Elizabeth asked for leniency and Margaret’s sentence was reduced to imprisonment. Staying in Ipswich gaol for a number of years, she made her escape over the prison walls. Dressed in a makeshift sailors smock and trousers she had fashioned in prison, she scaled the high walls using a clothesline. Her freedom was again short-lived, and she was recaptured and again sentenced to death. Once more her sentence was reduced, and in 1801 was transported to Australia.
In the vale we hear those brief moments of freedom, we hear them return again and again. Echoing, repeating, returning.
Dorset: In the Shadow of Golden
By Memotone
