PERHAPS the strangest story told in the Cotswolds concerns `The Campden Wonder', writes Mathew Martin.

Set in the turbulent aftermath of Cromwell's puritan regime, it combines such fantastical elements as witchcraft, piracy, espionage, slavery and murder. However, the tale of the Campden Wonder is not a cider house yarn, but an actual historical enigma.

The story relates the strange disappearance and return of William Harrison, a faithful retainer of the dowager Lady Campden.

Mr Harrison was a man of some 70 years who was respected and liked throughout the community despite his role as the estate's rent collector. It was with this routine task in mind that he set off on the afternoon of Thursday, August 16, 1660, for the two-mile walk to Charingworth.

When by dusk he had failed to return, his wife sent their servant John Perry to look for him. He too did not come back. The next morning Harrison's son Edward joined the search. He met Perry returning from Charingworth and together they called at Ebrington. Here they discovered Harrison's comb and collar, mangled and bloody, lying in the road.

The immediate conclusion was that Harrison had been murdered for the money he was carrying and John Perry was called before magistrates.

Perry convinced everybody of his guilt. He constantly changed his story and his explanations became ever more fantastical. Eventually he implicated his mother and brother in the alleged crime and they too were arrested. After more than a year in jail all three were executed - accusing one another and professing their personal innocence to the end. It seemed that the town had rid itself of a thoroughly unpleasant and murderous family. Furthermore, the mother Joan Perry had long been suspected of witchcraft.

Campden life returned to quiet normality until two years later, on August 6, 1662, a remarkable event occurred. William Harrison walked back into town. With him he brought a remarkable story that he related to Sir Thomas Overbury, a local magistrate.

Harrison told how he was overpowered by three men who bundled him up and carried him off into the night. They took him to the town of Deal where they negotiated with a mysterious stranger.

Here, Harrison reported, he was sold to slave traders and eventually became the property of an ancient physician in the Turkish town of Smyrna. When the doctor died, Harrison escaped and, stowing away on a ship bound to Lisbon, worked his way back to the Cotswolds.

Many solutions have been put forward to explain the Campden Wonder. Harrison would have had little value as a slave so it is impossible to understand why he would have been abducted and carried so far. The contradictory confessions of the Perry family are also something of a conundrum.

Many possible explanations have been put forward in a wealth of plays, pamphlets, poems and novels.

Some speculate that Harrison was the restoration's answer to James Bond off on some foreign mission or escaping old enemies. Others suggest that he believed himself bewitched by Mrs Perry and so went to elaborate lengths to rid himself of her curse.

Given the importance of the unknown realm of the supernatural, and the unseen world of political intrigue at this time, both of these explanations are possible. Perhaps the most straightforward theory rests on the fact that Harrison's son Edward was known to be bullying, ambitious and ruthless. He could have arranged his father's disappearance to get his hands on his inheritance.

Whatever the truth of the Campden Wonder, it remains one of the most fascinating of all historical enigmas.