Horncastle's witches mark birthday with exciting future plans

​Flange & Prong, the town's witchcraft shop located on West Street, has just marked seven years in business with High Priestess Shelley Mayes at the helm, and Tessa Lowe rising from becoming a customer to being her second within the shop’s first six months.

Looking back over their last seven years, Shelley said she was “so proud” of how far their business had come, with her personal highlights gaining her teaching diploma for Past Life Therapies, and now she is even continuing on by becoming a lecturer next year.

"Opening our witchcraft school was a huge launchpad for me,” Shelley said, “And we’ve done spell workshops at the Magna Carta in Lincoln and with Heritage Lincolnshire, and now we’re teaching celebrancy.”Shelley was inspired to open the shop in 2017 to share her passion for witchcraft with the community, and Tessa said that she was incredibly proud of the fundraising and charity work they have done in that time, raising money for local and national charities including Mermaids, ECHO, Wild Things, and the Salvation Army.

"We’re very lucky that we have a big platform and online presence so we can show people that we’re not intimidating at all – just normal people, and we’re very silly in our Tiktoks and that’s what we’re like in real life,” she said.

Not only are Horncastle’s witches having huge success with their witchcraft school, which launched to massive popularity last year with participants from as far afield as Switzerland, Scotland, and Wales, but now Flange & Prong is aiming to achieve accreditation status and offer accredited courses, to become a “trustworthy provider of courses” with their newly-renamed ‘Centre of Magical and Humanist Studies’.

Shelley also runs online talks and courses to show how accessible witchcraft is for anyone who wants to start on the journey.

"Witchcraft has an aura of being fantastical and unattainable, but it’s really not,” Tessa said, “We started from our ancestors, taking it back to its roots and it will grow – it should be as simple as it was then, and accessible for everyone.”

Shop manager Sue Hyland said that for the most part, the shop and its team had been well accepted and welcomed by the Horncastle community:

"We’ve had positive and negative reactions but mostly positives, and we’ve found that if people come in for the first time, they keep coming back,” she said, “It’s about educating people so that if they think we’re these sinister people, they’ll see we’re very approachable.”

Flange & Prong is open Wednesday to Friday from 12noon to 4pm and 12noon to 5pm on Saturday.

Find them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/fpwitchcraft/