Over the years, English Heritage and Historic England have claimed to have identified large numbers of “witches’ marks” or “ritual protection symbols” on the walls of historic buildings, including medieval churches and houses. Now a leading architectural historian has said there is “absolutely no evidence” that these marks have anything to do with witches or any “mystical meanings.” Markings in Tithe Barn, Bradford-on-Avon, in an image released by Historic England in 2016 (English Heritage) Daisy wheels, or hexafoils, are among symbols that are no more than the marks of stonemasons who worked on those buildings, according to Jennifer Alexander, a professor of architectural history at Warwick University and author of a new study. She told the Guardian: “Do you remember at school when you were first given a pair of compasses and you made a daisy wheel? It’s that. There are hundreds of such marks and they tend to be [of] varying degrees of skill. It’s much more the sort of thing you would use to train apprentices with, giving them skills in using tools on intractable surfaces like stone.” She said such marks were “practical geometry” being taught and tried out. “The daisy wheels are practices for drawing on stone and learning how to use compasses with straight edges to do geometry.” Ridiculing their identification as “witches’ marks,” Alexander said: “Anything on a stone building that looks like a design gets picked up as these things now. There’s absolutely no evidence they were ever used like that.” Alexander said: “There’s no evidence that these are witches’ marks. What they’re telling us is that when that barn wasn’t needed for farm produce, it was either a schoolroom or a mason’s training shop. “There are a huge number of designs on the walls there and they vary enormously in skill. If you are drawing a circle with a pair of compasses, you get three-quarters the way round and it’s very difficult to make a nice clean line because your wrist is upside down. When you’re doing it on paper, it’s bad enough. When you’re doing it on stone, it’s even harder. So people have to be trained.” She added: “There are things to ward off the evil eye, but they are a more generic thing ... These are parts of the mechanisms by which buildings are constructed ... Marks that look like a capital W or an M are mason ciphers. They can help put things together in the right order if you are building something. Or they can identify whose work it was.”
