Pendle Hill means "hill hill hill." In the 13th century it was called Pennul or Penhul, from the Cumbric pen meaning "hill" and the Old English hyll meaning the same. When pen lost its original meaning to English speakers, they appended a modern "hill" to clarify. The result is a tautology three languages deep. Geologically the hill is younger than its names suggest in some ways and older in others. The sloping plateau summit is formed from Pendle Grit, a coarse Carboniferous sandstone of the Millstone Grit Group - the same gritstone that defines the Pennine fells and gave climbers their best-loved crags. The British stratigraphic substage of the Carboniferous called the Pendleian takes its name from here, with the type locality at Light Clough on the hill's flanks. Neolithic and Bronze Age burials lie at and around the summit; people have buried their dead on this hill for at least 4,000 years.

The accused were almost all poor women, most from two rival families living in the Pendle Forest villages of Newchurch and Roughlee. Elizabeth Southerns, known as Demdike, was in her eighties and blind; she died in Lancaster Castle's dungeon before trial. Her daughter Elizabeth Device, her granddaughter Alizon Device, and her grandson James were among those hanged. The rival matriarch Anne Whittle, called Chattox, was also in her eighties; she and her daughter Anne Redferne died on the gallows too. They earned their living as cunning women - beggars who sold cures and charms in a corner of Lancashire too remote and too poor to have much else. Some of them probably believed they had supernatural powers; some of them certainly cursed their neighbours. None of them, by any standard a modern court would recognise, were witches in the sense the seventeenth century used the word. The chief evidence against them came from a nine-year-old child, Jennet Device, testifying against her own mother, brother, and sister - the youngest girl whose evidence ever sent her family to the gallows in England. The Pendle witch trials produced ten executions and one of the most thoroughly documented witchcraft cases in English history. They were real people. The witches were not.

George Fox was twenty-eight years old in the spring of 1652, a wandering preacher who had broken with every existing Christian denomination because none of them seemed to him true to direct experience of God. He climbed Pendle Hill that May, and at the top he saw, in his own words, "a great people to be gathered." From that vision came the Religious Society of Friends - the Quakers - who would refuse to fight in wars, refuse to take oaths, refuse to remove their hats to social superiors, refuse to recognise priestly authority, and over the next three centuries help abolish slavery, found Pennsylvania, build Cadbury and Rowntree, and become the conscience of English nonconformist Christianity. Pendle Hill remains a pilgrimage site for Quakers. The Pendle Hill Quaker Centre for Study and Contemplation near Philadelphia, founded in 1930, takes its name directly from the hill George Fox climbed.

Walk up from Barley village on the east side. The path climbs steeply through grazing land, then onto the open moor where curlews call in spring and grouse explode from heather in autumn. The summit plateau is broad and exposed; in cloud you can lose your bearings quickly. On clear days the view runs west to the Forest of Bowland, north to the Yorkshire Dales, and east to the South Pennines beyond Burnley. Pendle is technically the most prominent child summit of Kinder Scout, far south in the Peak District, by the strict mathematics of topographic prominence. To mark the 400th anniversary of the witch trials in 2012, a local artist named Philippe Handford unrolled 1,500 metres of horticultural fleece on the hillside to spell out "1612" - visible for miles. The Lancashire Witches Walk runs fifty miles from Pendle to Lancaster, ten waymarkers inscribed with verses by Carol Ann Duffy. The walk is the last journey of the accused, made in reverse, by people who remember them.