Approximate Location
OS Grid Reference: SJ 8590 7730
Latitude: 53.29.27N Longitude: 2.21.09W
The location of the meeting point of the farmer and the wizard in The Legend of Alderley. The wizard initially appears at Thieves Hole and offers to buy the farmer’s milk-white horse on the latter’s journey from Mobberley to Macclesfield. Then, after a luckless day at market, the wizard once again makes an offer on the farmer’s return journey – again appearing at Thieves Hole before conducting the journey to the Iron Gates.
The area known as Thieves Hole lies to the south of the track which leads from the Wizard, via Seven Firs, to Goldenstone. It is a small area of woodland which has grown up within a shallow mineral extraction site.
In an article entitled By Sevenfirs and Goldenstone: An Account of the Legend of Alderley, Alan Garner has noted that the place-name Thieves Hole may have grown up from from Anglo-Saxon “hola” meaning “holloway” or a track worn and sunken into the earth. Furthermore, he has noted a reference in a mediaeval charter for Rolleston (Staffordshire) dated 1008, which describes a section of a manorial boundary on Alderley Edge: ‘to the thorn where the thieves lie’. He has then interpreted this as a place of execution at a possible crossroads of the lane between the Wizard and Goldenstone in one direction and a farm track leading towards the Beacon in the other. As such Thieves Hole may have been a liminal zone where the boundaries with the supernatural world were historically considered to be at their thinnest – just the sort of place for a farmer to meet a wizard!