Pontesford Hill Stories

“The Golden Arrow”, is one of the novels written by Shropshire authoress Mary Webb during the early part of the twentieth century. The story is linked to an ancient tradition which took place each year on Palm Sunday, a week before Easter Day. For days the village would have been busy with baking and other picnic preparations in readiness for the big event.

When Sunday morning came local folk gathered at the foot of Pontesford Hill to race and gather a ‘palm’ or sprig from the ancient yew on the summit and this was believed to bless the winner with good luck for the rest of the year. When the race was over the rest of the day was spent in feasting, games and merriment, and in the search for a Golden Arrow. Exactly who had lost this Golden Arrow no-one seemed to know. Some said it was dropped by a King, others maintained that when it was found a great estate, possibly Condover, would be regained by its rightful owner, and others thought its recovery would undo an ancient curse.

The Revd Harteshorne in his book “Salopia Antiqua” written in 1841 said that the hunt for the Golden Arrow commemorated a great battle fought on the hill in AD 641. If there is confusion over the loss of the arrow there is even more over the likelihood of its ever being rediscovered because the various conditions that governed its finding made it virtually impossible for that to ever happen.

For instance, many thought that the Golden Arrow could only be found by a maiden under twenty years of age and who was the seventh daughter of a seventh son . If that were not difficulty enough, a further condition was that it could only be discovered at the very stroke of midnight on Palm Sunday. For many years this unusual ‘wake’ was very popular, but by the 1880s it was said to have become too rowdy an affair for respectable young girls to take part in. The custom seems to have continued in a lesser form until the 1950s before finally dying out altogether.