SummaryA 56‐year‐old woman with lifelong symptoms of irregular bowel habits and symptoms of obstruction of the large intestine was found to have a sigmoid volvulus caused by lack of normal peritoneal attachments and a long mesentery to the splenic flexure. It is possible that the patient had had episodes of volvulus of the splenic flexure, corrected by autodetorsion, before the reported incident and that the diagnosis had been missed in earlier examinations.