Rowan Red (She’s a Friend of Mine): A Song for the Women Who Walked Before Us

By Rebecca Denniff – Bonfire Hill

Somewhere on the uncanny slopes of Bonfire Hill, there grows a tree.
She is old, she is wise, and she has seen too much. She leans with the wind, listens to the stones, and remembers what most have tried to forget.

Our new single, “Rowan Red (She’s a Friend of Mine)”, is a song carved from those memories – from fragments of history, scraps of paper, and names nearly lost to time. It is a song for the women who were persecuted as witches on the moors I call home. Women who walked the old ways before us, and who left something behind: a whisper, a warning, a trace.

The lyrics were born out of a moment that stopped me in my tracks. In 2024, I visited the “Believe It or Not” exhibition at Ryedale Folk Museum in Hutton-le-Hole. Among the artefacts was a list. It was drawn from the Calvert Manuscript, a 19th-century record of women accused of witchcraft across villages in the North York Moors. We read and re-read these names, recognising local last names among them. But these weren’t just names, they were real lives, stories, legends. We wove some of them into the fabric of the song, so their memory could live on, in our otherworld of shadows and stones.

Another theme came from Canon Atkinson’s Forty Years in a Moorland Parish. He tells a strange, compelling story about a woman who was seen walking far from her home, alone, across the moor. When asked where she was going, she said she was looking for a rowan tree she had never seen before. According to the old ways, if you want to cut a protective bough – one to hang above your door to keep evil away – it must come from a tree unknown to you, cut with your own knife, and brought home by a different path. It’s a quiet story, but one with truth within. There’s power in it. It stayed with me.

Musically, the song owes something to Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Starwalker” – that sense of honouring those who have gone before, and knowing what they did for us. We stand on their shoulders. We must tread softly. We layered field recordings and folk textures to create something like a sonic ritual.

This isn’t a lament. It’s a resistance.

I think about those women a lot. I think about how they were punished for simply existing in ways that unsettled the people around them. For healing, or knowing, or being poor, or being loud, or just being alone. And I think about how lucky we are – and how much we owe them. There’s still so much

Rowan Red is for them. For us. She walks beside us still.

You can listen to the track now at bonfirehill.bandcamp.com.