Mrs Notley's fragment has a dreamlike quality, in that it has retained the imagery and lost the plot. The "mystery" derives from that, not from any quality inherent in the song. I have no opinion as to whether that is a good or a bad thing; that is a subjective judgement that people will make for themselves. Now, at least, they can make an informed judgement rather than one based on pure speculation.

Harding's sleeve notes don't really add much to "Big J"'s earlier comments, I think; and some of what he says is wrong. He states "The melody was collected by the great folk scholar Cecil Sharp from Mrs.Notley at Moreton in 1906". It wasn't. The collectors were the Hammond brothers. Sharp did comment in the Journal of the Folk Song Society that he had noted a similar variant, but that was from somebody else (Mrs Betsy Pike of Somerton, as it happens) and was not published.