A Ghost Story from Silverstone...

Before there was the racing track, before the airfield, and even before the monastery, the grounds of Silverstone circuit were part of the Royal Forest of Whittlewood.

Patches of this woodland are still visible around the circuit. The Royal Forests were large areas of the British Countryside that belonged solely to the King, and established by William the Conqueror, in the 11^th Century.

These areas were covered by special laws aimed at protecting ‘the venison and the vert’. The Norman Kings loved to hunt, and these laws protected not only the game (deer, wild boar, rabbit, hare, pheasant and partridge), but also the habitats they need to thrive so the King and Lords would never be disappointed.

However, these laws did not bode well for the ordinary man. There were severe penalties for those that broke them, which included death, or mutilation.

And so began the cat and mouse games between poachers and gamekeepers - and the rise of ghost stories in the woodlands.

It goes without saying, that the story today has not come from the archive – no one exactly knows who started them. But either way, would you have ventured into the Royal Forest after hearing, that on the darkest and quietest of nights, some have reported hearing the distant sound of horses hooves and hounds as they careen along the gloomy avenues of Whittlewood?

For those that have seen these ghostly apparitions, they claim to have witnessed the headless horseman and his hell hounds. Some have even believed it was the Goblin King himself, riding between the trees of Whittlewood.  

Other ghostly sightings have referred to the legend of a young woman, who was the daughter of a local, noble ranger of the Royal Forest. She was famed for her beauty. A local knight pursued this young lady with romantic advances and proposals of marriage. Alas she grew tired of the knight’s advance and rejected his proposal.

The knight descended into madness. No longer able to bear the heartbreak, he drew his sword and plunged it into his broken heart. In his dying breath he cursed the young lady: 

“That she, whom I so long pursued in vain,

Should suffer at my hands a lingering pain:

Renewed to life that she may daily die;

I daily doomed to follow, she to fly;

No more a lover, but a mortal foe.”

Not long after, the young lady suddenly died. Was it the curse, or just bad luck with the normal downfalls of becoming ill in the Middle Ages? This remains unknown.

But not long after this, reports came back of ghostly sightings of a young woman running through the forest of Whittlewood, chased by a knight on horseback, with this now her fate, and doomed for an eternity.