Ride the Hedge: What It Is, Where It Comes From, and How I Practice It
There's a name for what I do, and it's also the name of this business. Those two things aren't a coincidence. But before I get into what hedge riding actually is — the history, the practice, the why of it — I want to tell you how the name came to me, because the way it arrived is itself a demonstration of the practice.
How This Business Got Its Name (And Why That Matters)
At a certain point in my life, I'd begun taking my practice seriously in ways that previously hadn't been possible. I was expanding: accessing states of consciousness, planes of existence, an awareness of myself not just as a body but as a universal consciousness that uses a body to experience itself. And once you start doing that, it can be a bit of a mindfuck to just go to the grocery store afterward.
That disorientation was real, and it lasted until I developed not just those skills, but the skill of integrating them, of dialing each side up or down depending on what the moment required. As practitioners, we do a version of this in ritual all the time. We cast a circle to designate the space where non-mundane things happen. We clear the noise of being human in order to be fully present for magic. When we close the circle, we reintegrate the space back into the mundane, and we ground ourselves — touching the earth, drinking water, eating something — to bring ourselves back, too.
What I've arrived at now is an integrated state of equilibrium that feels organic and second nature. I don't want to wall one side off from the other. But I have more control over which side has the driver's wheel. One foot here, one foot there — straddling rather than crossing. Accessing rather than departing.
That was the internal reality I was living when I decided I needed a name for this work. I set a clear intention: the name would come to me without me having to bang my head against a wall, and it would arrive from somewhere outside my ego so I could trust it. Then I let the intention go entirely. I resolved to forget about it and left it open — to my ancestors, to spirits of place, to my guides, to my own higher self. I didn't specify the source. I didn't need to.
The name grew louder and more frequent in my mind until the moment came when I understood: that's what I'm supposed to call this. When I sat with it and reflected on it, it felt right. A modern interpretation of an arcane and sacred tradition. And when I learned more about the historical practice itself, the resonance only deepened.
I still don't know exactly where it came from. I didn't ask.
What Is the Hedge?
In the context of folk and traditional witchcraft, the hedge refers to the boundary between the world we move through every day (the mundane) and the spirit world, the Otherworld, the realm of ancestors and unseen forces. It is the threshold. The liminal line between what is visible and what is not.
The hedge was also, historically, a literal thing. The boundary of a village, marked by hedgerows, was the edge of the known and protected world. Beyond it lay the wild, and with it, the forces that didn't belong to the domestic sphere. For practitioners who worked between those worlds, the hedge was both the landmark and the methodology. You didn't just know about it. You rode it.
Gemma Gary, the Cornish traditional witch and author of Traditional Witchcraft: A Cornish Book of Ways, describes the practice of liminal witchcraft in terms that would be recognizable to any practitioner working in this territory: the hedge, the stile, the break in the tree line — these are places between, seen by the wise as useful intersections between the worlds. The hedge isn't just a metaphor. It's a geography.
The History of Hedge Riding and Witch Flight
A lot of beginner-level content about this work flattens it into a solo journey. A personal shamanic experience. A private trip inward.
That's not what the historical record shows.
The Benandanti and the Night Battles
One of the most important scholarly sources on the history of witch flight comes from Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, whose The Night Battles (1966) documented the benandanti — meaning "good walkers" — a peasant fertility cult in 16th and 17th century Friuli, in northern Italy. These men and women regarded themselves as professional anti-witches who, in dream-like states, fought ritual battles against witches and wizards to protect their villages and harvests. While their bodies slept, their souls flew into the night — not for private spiritual development, but in defense of their communities. The destination mattered. The outcome of the battle determined whether the harvest would flourish or fail. The flight was inherently communal and purposive.
The Inquisitors tried to fit the benandanti into their pre-existing framework of the witches' sabbat. The result of this cultural clash, which lasted over a century, was the slow metamorphosis of the benandanti into their enemies — the witches. What was originally a protective, community-oriented practice was reinterpreted through the lens of diabolism and persecution. The flight remained. The meaning was inverted.
Isobel Gowdie and the Sabbat
Perhaps the most vivid first-person account of witch flight in the historical record comes from Scotland. In 1662, in the village of Auldearn in the Scottish Highlands, a woman named Isobel Gowdie delivered four astonishing confessions — vivid, detailed, and filled with images that read more like folklore than courtroom testimony. Over the course of six weeks she spoke of riding through the night with the Queen of Elfhame, of feasting with fairies, of slipping out of her own body to fly through the air.
In her confessions, Gowdie described attending regular witches' meetings — termed sabbaths — at sites including the kirk of Auldearn and the kirkyard of Nairn. The flight wasn't inward. It went somewhere. It convened with others — with a coven, with the fairy court, with the presences that governed the tradition. Scholar Emma Wilby, in her landmark work The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland, suggests that when we compare Gowdie's accounts of flight to the experiences of shamanic practitioners from Siberia, Scandinavia, and the Americas, it is conceivable that Gowdie performed some of her magical rites through the medium of dream or trance — in a manner that can be loosely termed shamanic.
Whether her accounts were literal, visionary, or shaped by interrogation and isolation, what's consistent across the testimony is this: the witch did not fly alone and for no reason. She flew toward community and purpose.
The Wild Hunt and the Communal Flight
This pattern holds across European witchcraft traditions. The Wild Hunt — the spectral nocturnal procession of spirits, ancestors, and deities that tears across the night sky in folklore from the British Isles through Scandinavia and into Central Europe — is not a solitary phenomenon. Coby Michael, writing on the connection between the sabbat, the Wild Hunt, and spirit flight, notes that Hexennacht — one of the Grand Witches' Sabbaths — is known as the night that witches take flight and join the Wild Hunt, led by the Horned God: a wild rade of spirits, ancestors, and deities who travel in procession across the night sky. The witch who flies joins something already in motion. She arrives somewhere. She is received.
This is not the solo journey inward that contemporary content tends to describe. The destination — and who you meet there — is the point.
How Hedge Riding Is Practiced Today
Modern practitioners approach hedge riding in a range of ways, and the tradition is wide enough to hold most of them honestly. What they share is the intention to cross the threshold into the Otherworld in a deliberate, purposive state, and to return with something.
The use of flying ointments (preparations made from herbs with psychoactive properties, traditionally applied to the skin) is one of the most historically documented methods. Coby Michael's The Poison Path Herbal: Baneful Herbs, Medicinal Nightshades, and Ritual Entheogens explores the pharmacological and spiritual dimensions of working with plant spirit allies in this context in considerable depth. But entheogenic assistance is one tradition within a broader practice, not the whole story. Many practitioners use drumming, trance induction, breath work, or other methods to achieve the altered state that allows crossing.
What's consistent historically and practically is that the state is specific and the journey is purposeful. This is not daydreaming. It is not visualization in the common sense. It is closer to what Mat Auryn describes in Psychic Witch as bridging the divide between the seen and unseen worlds — a deliberate, trained engagement with what lies on the other side of the threshold.
Kate Freuler, author of Of Blood and Bones: Working with Shadow Magick and the Dark Moon, frames the liminal in terms that resonate here as well: the dark moon current, the threshold space, the gap between endings and new beginnings. Whether the language is shadow work or hedge riding, what's being described is the same underlying geography — the place where the mundane gives way to something else, and where a practitioner with the right preparation and the right intention can do real work.
How It Lives in My Practice
The relational and communal dimension of hedge riding is, for me, inseparable from the practice itself. It is hollow without it. Regardless of your tradition as a practitioner, there is always some source from which our power flows — and hedge riding or spirit flight often reunites us with that source, with our tradition, with the dead and the living and whatever lies between.
When I work with clients in readings, in mediumship, or in spellcraft, I sometimes step further into the liminal depending on what the task requires. But that's distinct from hedge riding as a practice. Hedge riding is specific. It requires a specific state of consciousness, to travel to a specific place. The closest comparison I can make is astral projection, though that framing doesn't quite hold the full weight of it either.
As for what the hedge looks like for me personally: it has a form, then it is formless, then it takes a form again. I'll invoke the To Keep Silent aspect of Lévi's Powers of the Sphinx here and leave it at that.
What crossing actually requires: I wanted a baseline first. I practiced without entheogenic assistance initially so I'd know what I was working with. But the use of sacred plant allies has been part of this tradition for so long that working entirely without them eventually felt derivative. They are part of the ritual now.
For newer practitioners curious about this practice, the thing most beginner content flattens out is the importance of intention and preparation. There should always be a reason for the ride, even if that reason is simply to develop the ability to do it. But once you decide to go, know why and know what you hope to bring back, because your first successful attempt will almost never be something you can predict. You don't want to arrive with no plan.
Recommended Further Reading
The following works were consulted in the writing of this post or represent essential reading for anyone who wants to go deeper on the history and practice of hedge riding, witch flight, and the folk traditions that surround it. Where possible, links go directly to the author's website or publisher. This is just my personal opinion, but when you purchase books, please make every attempt to buy them from either your local independent bookseller, from the author themselves, or from their publisher. Because fuck Amazon, that’s why.
Scholarly & Historical Sources
Ginzburg, Carlo. The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Translated by John and Anne Tedeschi. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966/2013. The foundational academic text on the benandanti and the communal nature of spirit flight in early modern Italy. Essential reading for anyone serious about the history of witch flight.
Wilby, Emma. The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland. Sussex Academic Press, 2010. A monumental examination of Gowdie's 1662 confessions, situating her accounts of flight and sabbat attendance within a framework of shamanic visionary tradition. Wilby also wrote Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, which examines the broader British tradition of magical practitioners and the spirit relationships central to their work.
Wilby, Emma. Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic. Sussex Academic Press, 2005. Wilby's first book, and a companion to The Visions of Isobel Gowdie. Examines how familiar spirits and visionary experience functioned within the everyday magical practice of cunning folk in early modern Britain.
Traditional & Folk Craft Practitioners
Gary, Gemma. Traditional Witchcraft: A Cornish Book of Ways. Troy Books, 2008/2018. A deeply rooted exploration of Cornish folk magic and traditional witchcraft, including the use of liminal places, trance, and the spirit relationships that underpin operative magical practice. Gary's work draws on both historical record and living tradition in a way few contemporary authors manage.
Gary, Gemma. The Black Toad: West Country Witchcraft and Magic. Troy Books. Gary's second book, extending into Devon and the broader West Country tradition. Equally valuable for its treatment of place-based magic and cunning craft.
Michael, Coby. The Poison Path Herbal: Baneful Herbs, Medicinal Nightshades, and Ritual Entheogens. Inner Traditions/Park Street Press, 2021. The most thorough modern treatment of flying ointments, plant spirit allies, and entheogenic approaches to spirit flight and hedge riding available. Michael also writes regularly at The Poisoner's Apothecary and his Patheos blog, where his piece on Hexennacht and the Wild Hunt is particularly relevant to this post.
Auryn, Mat. Psychic Witch: A Metaphysical Guide to Meditation, Magick & Manifestation. Llewellyn, 2020. Auryn's framework for psychic perception as integral to magical practice — including his treatment of bridging the seen and unseen worlds — offers useful language for practitioners approaching hedge riding from a contemporary witchcraft perspective.
Freuler, Kate. Of Blood and Bones: Working with Shadow Magick and the Dark Moon. Llewellyn, 2020. Freuler's thorough treatment of liminal space, dark moon energy, and the threshold work that underlies shadow practice. Resonant reading alongside any study of hedge riding and the Otherworld.
Primary Source
Gowdie, Isobel. Confessions of Isobel Gowdie (1662). The original trial records are held at the National Archives of Scotland. The confessions were first published in print in Robert Pitcairn's Criminal Trials in Scotland (1833). Emma Wilby's The Visions of Isobel Gowdie provides the most thorough modern scholarly edition and analysis.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Hedge riding is a form of spirit flight — a deliberate practice of crossing the boundary between the mundane world and the Otherworld in an altered state of consciousness. The term comes from the hedge as a symbol of the threshold between the known and spirit worlds. It is distinct from visualization or meditation in that it involves purposive travel to a specific place, usually to commune with spirits, ancestors, or other entities.
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Description text goes hereThey're related but not identical. Astral projection as it's commonly discussed focuses on the individual consciousness leaving the body to travel the astral plane. Hedge riding is more specifically rooted in witchcraft tradition and is oriented toward the Otherworld and the beings who inhabit it. The mechanics can overlap; the tradition and purpose differ.
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Not necessarily. Entheogenic plant allies are part of the historical tradition and remain part of some modern practices, but they are one method among many. Trance, drumming, breath work, and other forms of altered-state induction have all been used. What's consistent is the need for a specific, trained state of consciousness — the method of achieving it is secondary.
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Like any practice that involves altered states and engagement with non-physical entities, it warrants respect and preparation. The historical record — and modern practitioners — consistently emphasize the importance of knowing why you're going, what you're seeking, and how to return. Showing up with no plan is not recommended.
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A hedge witch is a practitioner who works at the boundary between the mundane and spirit worlds — solitary, land-based, often working with folk magic, spirits of place, and the natural world. Hedge riding is a specific practice within that broader orientation. Not all hedge witches practice active spirit flight, though the liminal sensibility is shared.
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The Wild Hunt is a spectral procession found in folklore across Northern and Central Europe — a rade of spirits, ancestors, and divine figures moving through the night sky, typically at liminal times of year like Samhain or Walpurgisnacht. In many traditions, witch flight or hedge riding was understood as joining or following the Hunt. It is one of the clearest historical examples of flight as a communal and purposive act rather than a solo journey.
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Honestly? I'm not entirely sure, and that's the most truthful answer I can give. I set the intention for it to arrive without ego and from wherever it needed to come from — ancestors, spirits of place, my own higher self. Then I let it go. It grew louder in my mind until I recognized it. That's the practice, as much as anything else I've described here.
