The Dark Secret of Hawthorn Tree Corner

A Lincolnshire legend rooted in law, fear, and the restless dead

There is a crossroads near Fishtoft, on the outskirts of modern Boston, where three roads once met in open country: Tower Lane (now Rochford Tower Lane), the road to Fishtoft Church (Church Green Road), and the Low Road to Freiston (Priory Road). For centuries, this junction was marked by a large and picturesque hawthorn tree — “picturesque,” as the antiquarian Pishey Thompson described it in his History and Antiquities of Boston. It appeared on Brazier’s Map of 1724, was noted in the Fishtoft Acre Books as early as 1662, and endured long enough to lend its name to a place still known today as Hawthorn Tree Corner.

The Hawthorn Tree at Hawthorn Tree Corner

However, Thompson also noted something else about the tree—an ancient piece of local memory passed down for over fifty years before he wrote. It was said that the hawthorn was not planted in the typical manner. Instead, tradition claimed it grew from a wooden stake—one that was driven into the grave of a woman who had died by suicide, and who was buried, following old customs, at the crossroads.[1]

Thompson knew the woman’s name but chose not to record it, noting only that “many traditional particulars respecting her” had been related to him, and that she was said to have been “ignominiously interred” at this spot. The hawthorn, rooted in that grim act, grew large enough to become a landmark. And the landmark outlasted almost everything else.

Suicide as a Crime: The Law of Felo de Se

To modern readers, the idea of punishing the dead seems almost incomprehensible. Yet for centuries, English law treated suicide as a felony — a crime against oneself — under the Latin designation felo de se. A coroner’s jury was required to determine whether a death was wilful self-destruction or the act of a person not of sound mind. The distinction carried enormous consequences.

A verdict of felo de se — deliberate self-killing — stripped the deceased of almost everything. Their property could be confiscated by the Crown. They were denied Christian burial in consecrated ground. And they were interred instead at a crossroads, with a stake driven through the body.

Consequences of a felo de se verdict

No Christian burial in the parish churchyard.

Confiscation of the deceased’s property by the Crown.

Burial at a crossroads, outside consecrated ground.

A wooden stake driven through the body.

This was not fringe practice. It was enshrined in law and endorsed by the Church. Suicide was understood to violate both divine and natural order — a rejection of God’s gift of life, and an act that threatened the social fabric. The punishment, even in death, was designed to express that rejection publicly and permanently.

The Stake: Containing the Restless Dead

But the stake was not merely punitive. It carried a deeper purpose rooted in English folklore: containment.

In the popular imagination, those who died violently, suddenly, or outside the natural order were thought to be at risk of returning. Suicides, in particular, were considered restless — spirits unable to find peace, hovering between the worlds of the living and the dead, and potentially dangerous. Driving a stake through the body was believed to pin the spirit to the earth, to anchor the dead where they lay, and to mark that death — unambiguously — as standing outside the community’s moral and spiritual boundaries.

This was not vampirism, though it draws from the same deep reservoir of fear. It was an attempt, solemn and earnest, to manage the anxiety that attaches to certain kinds of death — deaths that feel unresolved, transgressive, wrong. The stake said: you stay here.

The Crossroads: A Place Between Places

Crossroads have always occupied a peculiar place in the folklore of these islands. They are liminal by nature — boundaries between routes, between parishes, between jurisdictions. The ordinary rules of place blur at a crossroads. They were sites of executions and gibbets, of deals struck at midnight, of the kind of transaction that cannot happen in the middle of the village.

Burying suicides at crossroads served several interlocking purposes. The spirit, emerging confused and disoriented, might be bewildered by the multiplying paths and unable to find its way home. The burial lay outside the sacred geography of the churchyard. It was, crucially, visible — a crossroads burial was meant to be seen, to function as a kind of public statement about the nature of the death and the community’s response to it.

At Fishtoft, the junction of Tower Lane, the Church Road, and the Low Road to Freiston was exactly such a place: not a remote wilderness, but a local landmark, known and named, lying just outside the village’s sacred heart. The woman buried there — whoever she was — was placed where the community could witness the fact of her burial without ever having to bring her within the church’s embrace.

How Long Did This Last?

The practice has roots stretching back to Anglo-Saxon England, yet it persisted with remarkable tenacity into the modern era. As late as 1813, a woman named Mary Turrell was buried with a stake at a Norfolk crossroads. The last known English crossroads burial of this kind took place in 1823.

That same year, Parliament abolished the practice. Attitudes toward mental illness were slowly shifting; the idea that a person who took their own life might have been suffering — rather than simply sinful — was gaining ground. The law began to distinguish between moral failing and mental anguish, and the crude theatre of the crossroads burial came to seem not just cruel but archaic.

It is worth noting that this was largely an English custom. In Scotland, those who died by suicide were also denied Christian burial rites, but the staking of bodies was not part of the tradition — a distinction that reflects the different legal and religious histories of the two nations.

What the Hawthorn Tells Us

The hawthorn tree at Fishtoft — if the tradition is to be believed — is a particularly vivid emblem of this history. A stake driven into a grave, rooting itself, growing tall, becoming a landmark: it is an almost literary image of the way that forgotten suffering persists in the landscape, marked not by a stone or a name but by something living and indelible.

Thompson noted that the woman’s name was known locally in his time, that those who remembered her had “many traditional particulars” to share. But he declined to record them. She remains nameless in the written record — buried ignominiously, her story preserved only as the explanation for a tree.

Crossroads burials were not simply superstition. They were a community’s way of drawing moral maps on the landscape — defining who belonged within the bounds of sacred space, and who did not. They expressed fear, certainly, but also judgment, and a social anxiety about death and disorder that required a physical, visible response.

Today, the Hawthorn Tree Corner in Fishtoft is an ordinary place. The tree is long gone. The roads have been resurfaced and rerouted. The junction that once marked an act of ignominy is now simply a place you pass through.

But the name remains. And with it — quietly, stubbornly — the memory of what once happened here, at the place where three roads meet.

Sources: Pishey Thompson, History and Antiquities of Boston (1856); Brazier’s Map of Fishtoft (1724); Fishtoft Acre Books (1662, 1709, 1733).

[1]The three documentary sources cited by Thompson are characteristic of how early modern land use and boundaries were recorded in fenland parishes. The Fishtoft Acre Books (1662, 1709, 1733) were local surveys recording the ownership and layout of individual strips and fields within the parish — a form of record common in areas undergoing gradual enclosure of common land. Brazier's Map of 1724 almost certainly relates to the enclosure of Fishtoft's common lands, which took place that same year. Enclosure maps were drawn up by local surveyors as legal documents accompanying an enclosure award, recording roads, field boundaries, drains, and notable landmarks in detail. "Brazier" is likely the surname of the surveyor commissioned for the work rather than a published cartographer. The original map, if it survives, is most likely held at Lincolnshire Archives in Lincoln, which holds the county's enclosure awards and estate maps. Their catalogue can be searched at discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk.