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Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca

Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca · Chapter V: Traditional Witchcraft

Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, Boscastle: History and Collection

The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic at Boscastle: Cecil Williamson's collection, its moves from the Isle of Man to Cornwall in 1960, and its place in history.

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The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic at Boscastle, on the north coast of Cornwall, is one of the oldest and largest collections of objects connected with witchcraft, folk magic and ritual magic in the world. It was founded by the collector Cecil Williamson, who opened his first museum on the Isle of Man in 1951 and, after years of moving and local opposition, brought the collection to Boscastle in 1960. Today it holds several thousand objects and an important library and archive, and it is used by historians, folklorists and modern Pagans alike.

Cecil Williamson and the Origins of the Collection§

Cecil Hugh Williamson was born in 1909 in Paignton, Devon. In later life he told how, as a boy in the Devon countryside, he had seen an elderly woman beaten by villagers who believed her to be a witch, and he dated his fascination with witchcraft to that experience. Whatever its details, the story fits a pattern well documented by historians: popular fear of witches persisted in rural England long after the Witchcraft Act of 1735 had removed witchcraft from the criminal courts.

Williamson worked in the British film industry in the 1930s and began collecting magical objects, books and stories as he travelled. He also claimed that during the Second World War he had been employed by British intelligence to gather information about the occult interests of senior Nazis. Biographers and historians treat these claims cautiously: he was a vivid storyteller, and some of his accounts are difficult to verify. What is certain is that by the end of the war he had resolved to open a museum devoted to witchcraft — an unusual ambition at a time when the subject was associated either with criminal history or with sensational journalism.

From the Isle of Man to Boscastle (1951–1960)§

In 1951, the year the Witchcraft Act was repealed, Williamson opened the Folklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft at the Witches' Mill in Castletown on the Isle of Man. Gerald Gardner, who was then preparing to present modern witchcraft to the public, joined the venture and was described in publicity as its resident witch. The partnership was short-lived. The two men disagreed about the nature of witchcraft, and their personalities clashed. Around 1954 Gardner acquired the Castletown building and ran it as his own Museum of Magic and Witchcraft, which became an early centre of the movement described in Wicca and Gerald Gardner.

Williamson took his collection back to England. He tried Windsor and then Bourton-on-the-Water in the Cotswolds, where the museum met hostility from some residents and clergy and is reported to have suffered vandalism and an arson attack. In 1960 he moved again, to Boscastle, a small harbour village in north Cornwall, where the museum has remained ever since. Cornwall's reputation for folklore, its holiday trade and its distance from his critics all suited the venture.

Gardner's own Isle of Man collection had a different fate. After his death in 1964 it passed out of the hands of his initiates and was sold and dispersed, so that Williamson's Boscastle collection became the main surviving museum of its kind in Britain.

What the Museum Collects: Charms, Poppets and Cunning Folk§

Williamson's chief interest was not ceremonial magic or the new Wiccan covens but what he called the wayside witch — the village wise woman or cunning man who sold charms, cured animals, found lost property and lifted curses for neighbours. The collection reflects this. It includes protective charms and amulets, horse brasses and hag stones, witch bottles of the kind buried under hearths and thresholds, curse dolls or poppets pierced with pins, written charms, scrying mirrors and crystal balls, herbal remedies, and the tools of fortune-tellers and cunning folk. Many objects come with Williamson's own handwritten labels, which mix careful observation, local hearsay and dramatic storytelling; the labels have themselves become part of the museum's character and of its history.

The museum's treatment of harmful magic is historical. Displays of curse objects and image magic are framed as evidence of how people understood misfortune and sought redress or protection, a subject treated more fully in Maleficium, Curses and Protective Magic. Alongside folk magic, later curators added material on ritual magic and the Golden Dawn tradition, on Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca, on figures such as Doreen Valiente, and on the persecution of witches in the early modern period.

A library and archive§

Beyond the displays, the museum holds a substantial library of books, manuscripts, photographs and papers, including Williamson's own notes and correspondence. Researchers studying English folk magic, the history of Wicca and the culture of traditional witchcraft use it as a working archive, and some of Williamson's notebooks have been published in edited form.

Graham King, Joan Wytte and the Flood of 2004§

Williamson sold the museum in 1996 to Graham King, who took it over at Samhain that year. King reorganised the displays, gave more space to modern Pagan witchcraft and built close relations with practitioners, many of whom donated objects, ritual tools and personal collections. Williamson died in 1999.

King also confronted one of the museum's most sensitive exhibits. For years the collection had displayed the skeleton of a woman identified as Joan Wytte, remembered in local tradition as a strong-tempered healer and seer from Bodmin who died in prison in the early nineteenth century. King decided that displaying her remains was not respectful, and in 1998 she was buried in woodland near Boscastle. The episode is often cited in discussions of how museums should treat human remains connected with magic and folklore.

On 16 August 2004 a sudden flash flood devastated Boscastle. Water and debris tore through the village and the museum, damaging the building and soaking or carrying away objects and books. Volunteers, conservators and supporters worked to recover and dry what could be saved, and the museum reopened in 2005. The flood became part of its story, a test that showed how widely the collection was valued.

The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic Today§

In 2013 King passed ownership to Simon Costin, founder of the Museum of British Folklore, and the museum was renamed the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. Under its new management it has continued to collect, to digitise its archive and to stage temporary exhibitions on themes such as folk healing, cunning folk and ritual magic. It remains a privately run institution supported by visitors, friends and donors.

The museum occupies an unusual position between scholarship and practice. Historians such as Owen Davies and Ronald Hutton have used its holdings and its records in their work on popular magic and modern Paganism, while many witches and Pagans regard it as a place of heritage and even pilgrimage. Its displays aim to describe beliefs as their holders understood them, without endorsing claims about the effects of magic.

Why the Boscastle Museum Matters§

The museum's significance lies partly in what it preserved. Much of the material culture of English folk magic — charms written on scraps of paper, home-made poppets, bottles concealed in walls — survives only because collectors like Williamson valued objects that others discarded. Combined with written sources studied in Folk Magic, these artefacts show how ordinary people used ritual to deal with illness, loss and fear well into the twentieth century.

It matters, too, as a document of the twentieth-century witchcraft revival itself. The quarrels between Williamson and Gardner, the shift from the wayside witch to the initiatory coven, and the gradual acceptance of modern Paganism are all visible in the museum's history and labels. Its own past, from Castletown in 1951 to Boscastle in 1960 and the flood of 2004, has become part of the story it tells.

Frequently asked questions§

Who founded the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic?§

It was founded by Cecil Williamson, who opened his first witchcraft museum at Castletown on the Isle of Man in 1951 and moved the collection to Boscastle in Cornwall in 1960.

What is the connection between Cecil Williamson and Gerald Gardner?§

Gardner worked with Williamson at the Castletown museum in the early 1950s, but the two fell out. Gardner took over the Isle of Man building and ran his own museum, while Williamson moved his collection to England and eventually to Boscastle.

What kinds of objects are in the museum?§

The collection is strongest in English folk magic: charms, amulets, witch bottles, poppets, divination tools and the equipment of cunning folk. It also includes material on ritual magic, modern Wicca and the history of witch persecution, as well as a library and archive.

Was the museum damaged in the Boscastle flood?§

Yes. The flash flood of 16 August 2004 badly damaged the building and part of the collection. Volunteers and conservators recovered much of the material, and the museum reopened in 2005.

Sources and further reading§