Lioness attacking a mail-coach? A true tale in ‘Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium’

In ‘The Devil’s Coachman‘, the first of the inventor’s two tales, there is an account of how a lioness attacked the Salisbury mail coach at what was then called the Winterslow Hut (until recently The Pheasant).

This is a true story, which occurred in October 1816. A travelling menagerie had pulled in for the night at the inn. A lioness escaped its travelling cage and attacked Pomegranate, the leading horse of the mail coach. All the passengers fled to the safety of the inn. One poor fellow was too slow, however, and found the door shut in his face. When the lioness was at last secured, he was let into the inn. He recovered sufficiently to write an account of his ordeal for the local paper, but later went mad and was incarcerated at the lunatic asylum at Laverstock, where he died twenty-seven years later.

Later in the same story the coach drives into the middle of the stones at Stonehenge. I’m not sure that this was ever possible, though there were nineteenth century illustrations of coaches drawn up close to the stones. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the road (now the A303, soon to be buried in a tunnel) is said to have been half a mile wide as it passed Stonehenge, the coachmen trying to by-pass each others’ wheel ruts during the winter months.