Byard's Leap

Four pairs of horseshoes nailed to a post on the old Roman road of Ermine Street, near Cranwell in Lincolnshire, mark the spot where the legendary horse Bayard made his famous leap. The tradition is simple and extremely local: a man tasked with killing a dangerous witch found her in a pool and spurred his horse to flee. Bayard sprang an impossible distance — variously given as sixty feet or more — and landed so hard that his hoofprints were cut into the stone.

The witch, thrown from behind the rider by the force of the jump, was killed in the fall. Her three eyes — she had a third in the back of her head, the traditional sign of a witch with the evil eye — were said to have been cast aside and become three stones still visible in the field. The horseshoes were renewed over the centuries as the originals wore out, keeping the tradition alive on the same site.

The leap is one of the more vivid examples of landscape-attached folklore in Lincolnshire, where the flat, ancient road-crossed countryside has generated an unusually rich tradition of local legends tied to specific named spots. The post and shoes still stand.