witch's stirrup

English

Noun

witch's stirrup (plural witch's stirrups)

1. (uncommon) A tangle in a horse's mane.
   • 1890, The Baptist Quarterly Review, page 139:

     [He may look with] awe on the witch's stirrup in his colt's mane; but on the whole, the belief in witches has passed utterly away.

   • 1922, Bruce Haymond, Borderland Echoes: A West Virginia Story, page 162:

     [They might find its] mane was a tangled mass of witch's stirrups; or perhaps run across the two skeletons that old Aunt Sukey had seen one dark, dreary night while she was passing a graveyard, rise from their graves and engage in a furious encounter with […]

   • 1927, Elizabeth Fleming, Gammon and Spinach, page 24:

     ... and green / Beneath each swiftly flying shoe; / And she will journey far away, / Enchantment at her bridle-rein, / And fall asleep at break of day / With witch's stirrups in her mane.