Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/363

Rh near "Woeful Danes' Bottom," suggests another vanished menhir.

Tumuli and Buried Treasure.—On the opposite side of the road to the Longstone, in what was also once part of the Common field, is Gatcombe Tump, a long barrow, of which the following story is told. I got it from a middle-aged woman who keeps a small shop; her mother, from whom she heard it, knew the heroine of the story, "There was an old woman in Minchinhampton who used to charm ailments; she was called Molly Dreamer, because her dreams came true. She dreamed that she would find a pot of gold in Gatcombe Tump, and she and her husband dug there many times. Once she actually had her hand on the pot, and was saying,—"Come up! Labour in vain!" when a spirit rose up and frightened her. At another time a spirit appeared to her husband there, and asked him to name five parish churches, [apparently as a condition of getting the gold], but he could remember only four." One old inhabitant, who lived as a child at a farm quite near, lays the scene of Molly's search at the Longstone itself, and adds that, just as she was lifting a stone that hid the treasure, there came a flash of lightning on to it, and Molly was never the same again. Some say, however, that she did find the gold. It is a fact that there have been finds in the near vicinity of the Longstone and the barrow,—of ornaments, flint chips, and arrow-heads.

In Bisley parish ("Bisley, God help us!") there is, or was recently, a barrow called "Money Tump." There is also a legend of hidden treasure in Pan's Wood, Slad, near Stroud. People have tried to look for it, but have always been hindered by something happening,—accident or death,—or else the searchers have been scared away by mysterious noises. Cottagers at the foot of Bredon Hill, near Tewkesbury, assured me in 1906 that there is treasure hidden near or under the Bambury Stone, which goes down to the Avon to drink when it hears the clock strike twelve.

Until three or four years ago, there was an ancient lime-tree, called "The Round Tree," standing on a knoll at Hyde, in Minchinhampton parish. The trunk seemed to have forced its way