Vixana of Vixen Tor

The popular version goes like this: a woman called Vixana (or sometimes a witch, sometimes a wise woman) lived at or near Vixen Tor, and her name stuck to the place. The story tends to fold into broader Dartmoor witch folklore, with various accounts adding their own details about curses, supernatural encounters, or her dealings with locals. It is the sort of tale you find half-told on hiking blogs and in the usual folklore roundups.

The trouble is, I cannot find where this actually comes from. Legendary Dartmoor (the modern in-copyright source on Dartmoor folklore) does not seem to carry a detailed version, and the written trail back from the internet gets very thin very quickly. No old manuscript, no dated record, no clear attribution to a named source. It may be a genuine local memory that never made it into print; it may be a modern invention; it may be older than the written sources we have. I honestly do not know, and neither does anyone I can find who has looked into it properly.

What we do know for certain is that Vixen Tor is real, it is on private land, and public access has been banned since 2003. The legend, though? That one is still waiting for someone to trace it back to its actual roots.