Another story is told about this self same dobby A youth aged eighteen, one Christopher Cloudsdale, had to go from Finsthwaite bobbin mill to the smithy at Rusland . His work kept him there till late, and a lot of lads standing about plied him with every tale of horror concerning the " dobby " that they could remember or invent. The consequence was that when he left, instead of taking the Ealinghearth Brow road, his direct route, he avoided it and went on to Greenhows, an unfrequented barren waste of ground dividing Rusland from Windermere. A bitter snowstorm came on, and the unfortunate lad lost his way. When found, he was lying dead on his face, and tracks lay in the snow proved that he had wandered miles, but had never actually gone one hundred yards in the right direction. The snow had balled on his clogs, and in his panic-stricken struggles he had " brayed "them to pieces, and struggled on barefoot until he fell.
Maybe you don’t believe the story about the mysterious presence ? Here is a recent experience of two local people …..……..
“We were driving along the lane from Ealinghearth towards Border Moss and noticed another couple walking north towards the Rusland Beeches. When we turned round and passed them on our way back they flagged us down and asked if they were going in the right direction for Newby Bridge. When we told them they were going in exactly the wrong direction, they looked so tired and fed up, so we offered them a lift back to Newby Bridge, which wasn’t far out of our way. So they got in, and we drove back down the road, and turned up Fearing Brow lane, and just as we did so the woman turned to her companion and said ‘we missed this turning, because this was just the place where your mobile phone GPS stopped working...."
Was this perhaps the Ealinghearth Dobby still interfering with travellers ...??