#englishfolklore — Public Fediverse posts

The Vampire of Berwick – Britain’s Medieval Walking Dead.

Long before Dracula bought property in Whitby, before Carmilla developed an unhealthy interest in young ladies and before the Croglin Vampire started scratching at bedroom windows, Britain already had a problem with people who refused to stay dead. They just weren’t called vampires.

They were corpses – walking ones and, according to the twelfth-century chronicler William of Newburgh, one of them caused absolute havoc in Berwick-upon-Tweed.

William was an Augustinian canon at Newburgh Priory in Yorkshire. Born around 1136, he spent much of his life there and towards the end of the twelfth century wrote his ‘Historia rerum Anglicarum’ – ‘History of English Affairs’ – covering events from the Norman Conquest almost to his own death. Our William is an interesting source because he wasn’t some medieval collector of ghost stories who believed absolutely anything he heard, in fact he was famously rude about Geoffrey of Monmouth for writing what William regarded as nonsense about King Arthur. Then William went on to write about green children and corpses getting out of their graves – but hey… Nobody is perfect.

His four accounts of the walking dead appear in Book V of the ‘Historia’, written during the final years of his life. They are sufficiently peculiar that William himself commented on the apparent novelty of such events and the absence of comparable stories in ancient writings. Modern historians have consequently spent a great deal of time trying to work out exactly what these tales tell us about the collision between medieval theology, popular belief and folklore. ([OUP Academic][1])

One of William’s walking corpses lived – and died – at Berwick. He doesn’t give us the man’s name. He does, however, give us his character and it isn’t flattering. The man was wealthy but thoroughly wicked. After his death he was buried in the usual manner, which really ought to have been the end of his involvement in community affairs. Thankfully it wasn’t or I’d be missing an article this week.

William tells us that the dead man’s body was animated after burial and began leaving its grave. The corpse wandered around at night. Dogs followed it, barking furiously. The people of Berwick became terrified. Nobody wanted to meet the thing in the street, which seems an entirely reasonable position to take when one of your recently deceased neighbours is roaming town after dark accompanied by a pack of hysterical dogs. Soon people were shutting themselves inside their houses at night. The dead man had effectively imposed a medieval curfew and the inhabitants of Berwick began discussing what to do about him.

There was apparently a practical concern beyond simply being frightened half to death. The corpse was decomposing. Some of the townspeople feared that this putrefying body, wandering repeatedly through the air, would contaminate it and cause disease. To medieval minds, this was not necessarily supernatural thinking. Disease was widely associated with corrupted air, foul smells and putrefaction. And so the people of Berwick decided that something had to be done about their troublesome former neighbour.

They hired ten young men renowned for their courage. Their job was simple – Dig him up. Cut him to pieces and burn him. Which does rather put modern neighbourhood disputes about wheelie bins into perspective.

The men opened the grave, removed the corpse, dismembered it and committed the remains to fire. And it worked. The dead man stopped walking. Unfortunately, everybody else started dying.

William reports that a pestilence followed, killing many people in the area. For the medieval audience, the connection was obvious enough to be worth recording: the foul wandering corpse had polluted the atmosphere and disease followed in its wake. The revenant had been destroyed. Its consequences had not. ([OUP Academic][1])

So was this Britain’s first vampire? Not really, at least, not if we are being careful about terminology. William never calls the creature a vampire. The familiar word and the cluster of traditions we now associate with vampires belong to a much later European context. There are no elegant cloaks here, no seductive aristocrats, no tiny puncture wounds and no desperate hunt for a wooden stake. The Berwick corpse doesn’t even drink blood. What William describes is better called a ‘revenant’: a dead person who physically returns from the grave. And medieval Britain had some spectacular examples.

In fact, Berwick wasn’t even William’s only one. At Buckingham, he records a dead man returning to torment his widow. The corpse appeared in her bedroom and nearly crushed her beneath its weight. When relatives began keeping watch with her, it moved on to harass other members of the family and eventually appeared during daylight. This time the solution was ecclesiastical rather than agricultural. The Bishop of Lincoln supplied a written absolution which was placed upon the corpse’s chest. The wandering stopped. Apparently even the undead respect paperwork. ([OUP Academic][1])

Then there was Melrose – and this one is magnificent. William tells of a chaplain attached to a wealthy lady who had lived a distinctly worldly life. He was particularly fond of hunting and acquired the nickname ‘Hundeprest’ – the Dog-Priest. After he died, the Dog-Priest began wandering. He attempted to get into Melrose Abbey but apparently couldn’t penetrate its holy precincts – I can sympathise. We too tried to penetrate Melrose Abbey but it was closed. It was after 10pm though and we did see a massive fox… anyway, I digress – so instead he turned his attention to the house of his former mistress, appearing outside her bedchamber and making sufficiently alarming noises that she sought help from the monks.

Eventually four men kept watch at his grave. When three temporarily left, the corpse rose. The remaining monk struck it with an axe, although why a monk was hanging around a grave with an axe is not recorded. Unsurprisingly, the revenant fled back towards its grave. Whether the axe wielding monk pursued the revenant is also unrecorded, but it presents a sufficiently comedic image to warrant it’s hypothetical inclusion here.

The following morning the monks opened the tomb and reportedly found the body showing the wound it had received. They removed it, carried it away and burned it. No stake. No garlic. No sunlight. Just an axe and a bonfire. Medieval problems required medieval solutions. ([Historic Environment Scotland Blog][2])

On a serious note, there is an important reason these stories matter. They show that the idea of the ‘dangerous physical dead’ was firmly present in Britain centuries before the literary vampire arrived. These aren’t the translucent ghosts familiar from later British folklore. William’s dead have bodies. They leave graves. They enter houses. They physically attack people. They frighten animals. Their corpses can be dug up and destroying or otherwise treating those bodies can stop the haunting. That doesn’t make them vampires but it places them in the same enormous family of European beliefs about the restless dead from which later vampire traditions would emerge.

And there is something else particularly interesting about William. He was a churchman trying to make sense of stories that didn’t fit comfortably into orthodox Christian ideas about death. A soul could return as an apparition – that was understandable. But what exactly was everyone supposed to do with a dead neighbour who still had his corpse and was currently stomping down the road? William’s stories sit right on that uncomfortable boundary.

Modern scholarship has argued that they combine popular beliefs about physically returning corpses with Christian ideas about sin, punishment, absolution and clerical authority. William wasn’t merely recording horror stories; the revenants could serve as examples of what happened to people who had lived badly, while the different methods used to defeat them allowed him to contrast secular force with religious authority. ([OUP Academic][1])

The Berwick case illustrates that beautifully. The dead man was wicked in life and became dangerous after death. Ten brave young men solved the immediate physical problem with shovels, blades and fire but they couldn’t prevent the pestilence that followed. Compare that with Buckingham, where ecclesiastical absolution lays the troublesome corpse without anybody having to chop it into pieces. There may be a little medieval clerical advertising going on here.

Church: 1. Ten blokes with spades: 0.

But underneath William’s theological purpose is something older and considerably stranger. People were apparently telling stories in which bad deaths and bad lives produced bad corpses .Burial did not necessarily render the body harmless. Sometimes the grave itself had to be reopened.

Archaeological evidence suggests such anxieties were not confined to chronicles. Across medieval Europe, archaeologists have found burials involving decapitation, stones placed upon bodies, unusual positioning and other forms of post-mortem treatment. Not every unusual burial represents fear of revenants – there are many possible explanations and interpretation requires considerable caution – but medieval texts make it clear that communities could genuinely fear the possibility of troublesome dead bodies.

William of Newburgh gives those fears a voice and his accounts have another advantage over many famous British supernatural stories. We don’t have to rely on somebody in 1973 claiming that their grandmother knew somebody whose uncle had seen the Berwick corpse. The story is medieval. William’s ‘Historia’ survives through a manuscript tradition reaching back towards his own period; passages including these Book V chapters are known from a manuscript dating to around 1200. ([Antiquaries Collections Online][3])

That doesn’t prove a dead man actually wandered around Berwick but it does prove something arguably more useful to the folklorist: people in medieval Britain told stories about dead people doing exactly that. And William thought those stories important enough to record.

So perhaps Britain wasn’t quite as late to the vampire party as Dracula would have us believe. Our medieval dead simply hadn’t learned the rules yet. They didn’t sleep neatly in coffins. They didn’t require invitations to enter. They weren’t particularly interested in anybody’s neck. They didn’t sparkle. They got buried, got back up, frightened the neighbours, acquired packs of barking dogs and eventually caused ten local lads to turn up with digging equipment.

Frankly, I prefer them.

The Vampire of Berwick wasn’t really a vampire. He was something older. A walking corpse. A wicked man whose death had failed to make him harmless. A reminder that, for some medieval communities, the boundary between living and dead wasn’t necessarily crossed only once.

And if William of Newburgh is to be believed, sometime in the late twelfth century the people of Berwick discovered an important rule of British folklore:

when the dead don’t rest, somebody eventually fetches a spade.

William’s Berwick story is Book V, chapter 23 in the standard numbering; the surviving text describes Berwick at the mouth of the Tweed and the dismemberment and burning of the corpse, while recent historical scholarship analyses it alongside William’s other three revenant narratives. ([Ruth J. Salter][4])

Sources:

[1]: https://academic.oup.com/histres/article/96/273/283/7146770 “Religious masculinities in William of Newburgh’s Historia rerum Anglicarum* | Historical Research | Oxford Academic”

[2]: https://blog.historicenvironment.scot/2024/10/the-melrose-vampire/ “The Melrose Vampire – Historic Environment Scotland Blog”

[3]: https://collections.sal.org.uk/mss.0010 “Society of Antiquaries Collections Online | MSS/0010”

[4]: https://ruthjsalter.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/william-of-newburgh-historia-rerum-anglicarum-5-xxii-xxiv1.pdf “William of Newburgh, Historia rerum anglicarum 5.xxii-xxiv1”

The Three Lions

There are few symbols in England more instantly recognisable than three golden lions marching proudly across a field of red.

Today they adorn football shirts, cricket caps and rugby jerseys. They are painted on pub signs, stamped on passports, embroidered onto military uniforms and waved from terraces whenever England dares to dream.

Millions sing Three Lions without ever stopping to ask a simple question.

Why three?

Why lions?

And why has this particular emblem survived almost nine centuries while kings, dynasties, empires and governments have all faded into history?

Like so many ancient symbols, the answer lies somewhere between history and mythology.

The lion itself had never roamed Britain. Wolves, bears and wild boar once stalked these islands, but lions existed only in stories carried home by pilgrims, crusaders and Roman writers. To medieval Europe, the lion represented everything a king was expected to be: courageous, just, noble, watchful and fierce.

Long before heraldry became an organised system, lions appeared throughout Christian art. Medieval bestiaries claimed that lion cubs were born dead before being brought to life by the breath of their father three days later. Whether believed literally or symbolically, the tale became an obvious parallel with the Resurrection of Christ. Lions were therefore not merely dangerous beasts; they were creatures associated with kingship, divine authority and eternal life.

It is hardly surprising that Europe’s rulers eagerly adopted them.

England’s relationship with lions began with the Norman kings. William the Conqueror himself probably bore no official coat of arms because heraldry had not yet fully developed, but by the twelfth century shields and banners had become increasingly important on crowded battlefields. Knights hidden beneath mail and helmets required instantly recognisable devices.

The first English royal lions seem to appear during the reign of Henry I. Henry married Matilda of Scotland, linking Norman and Anglo-Saxon royal bloodlines. Some historians believe one lion may have entered the royal family’s symbolism through this marriage, while another emerged through subsequent dynastic alliances.

Heraldry during this period was fluid, with symbols evolving rather than appearing fully formed. The decisive moment arrived with Henry’s son, Richard I.

Richard Plantagenet.

Richard the Lionheart.

Few English monarchs have acquired such legendary status. Ironically, Richard spent remarkably little time in England. He spoke French, regarded his continental possessions as more important than his English kingdom, and devoted much of his reign to warfare and the Crusades. Yet he became the king most closely associated with English courage.

Richard originally used seals depicting two lions passant guardant – walking with one forepaw raised while turning their faces towards the viewer. During his reign a third lion appeared, creating the royal arms that remain instantly recognisable today.

Whether Richard consciously chose three lions or inherited an evolving design remains debated by historians, but by the end of the twelfth century England possessed one of Europe’s most distinctive coats of arms. Three gold lions with blue claws and blue tongues, marching one above another upon a crimson shield.

In heraldic language the animals are not technically “lions” at all. They are described as lions passant guardant. Passant refers to the walking pose. Guardant means the head faces directly towards the observer. To medieval eyes this posture conveyed confidence rather than aggression. A rampant lion, rearing upon its hind legs, symbolised battle. A passant lion suggested calm authority – a ruler who possessed strength but had no need to prove it.

There may also have been another layer of symbolism. Throughout medieval Europe, the number three carried profound meaning. Three represented the Holy Trinity. Birth, life and death. Past, present and future. Faith, hope and charity. The symbolism would have been immediately understood by contemporary audiences. Whether Richard deliberately chose three lions because of religious symbolism remains uncertain, but medieval rulers rarely ignored such powerful associations.

Once adopted, the badge spread rapidly.Royal seals, coinage, castles, government documents,military banners. It became the visual signature of the English Crown.

As English armies marched across France during the Hundred Years’ War, three golden lions marched with them. The emblem flew above the armies of Edward III, the Black Prince and Henry V. It fluttered above muddy battlefields at Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, becoming associated not simply with monarchy but with English identity itself. Ironically, the badge survived periods when the monarchy itself seemed close to collapse.

During the Wars of the Roses, rival claimants fought beneath variations of royal heraldry. Under the Tudors, dragons, roses and portcullises joined the royal display, yet the three lions remained.

When James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne in 1603, the royal arms expanded dramatically. Scotland’s rampant lion and Ireland’s golden harp joined the shield, yet England’s three lions retained their place.

Empires rose. Empires fell. The lions remained.

One reason for their remarkable survival maybe lies in what they came to represent. Originally they belonged solely to the king. Gradually they became the property of the nation.The shift happened slowly over centuries. The English Civil War challenged royal authority. The Industrial Revolution transformed society. The British Empire reshaped Britain’s place in the world. Yet somehow the ancient lions adapted, and by the nineteenth century they had become less a symbol of monarchy than of England itself.

Then came football.

In 1863, when the Football Association sought an emblem, it turned naturally towards the ancient royal arms. The modern FA crest retained the three lions while adding Tudor roses between them. Few sporting badges possess such extraordinary ancestry. Every England football shirt carries a design whose origins stretch back to the Crusades. Every chant echoes nearly nine hundred years of history. Every major tournament briefly reconnects modern England with a medieval kingdom.

Of course, symbolism rarely remains fixed. To Victorian imperialists the lions represented national destiny. During the World Wars they became symbols of resilience. For football supporters they came to embody hope, frustration and stubborn optimism in equal measure.

The song Three Lions, first released during the European Championships in 1996, captured something far older than football itself. “It’s coming home” resonated not simply because the game originated in England, but because the badge itself already felt timeless. The lions seemed to belong to history rather than any particular generation.

Yet there is another, older way of looking at them.

Folklore often blurs the line between animal and guardian. Across Britain, churches possess spectral black dogs, castles harbour ghostly ravens and forests boast white stags. England’s lions occupy a similar symbolic space. Not literal creatures. Guardians. Sentinels. Beasts that exist not in the countryside but in the collective imagination of a nation.They have watched Norman knights become Tudor courtiers, Georgian soldiers become Victorian industrialists, and factory workers become football fans. They have witnessed plague, civil war, empire, Blitz, victory and defeat. Kings have died beneath them. Queens have ruled beneath them. Governments have come and gone. The lions simply continue their silent march.

Unlike flags, or borders, which shift. Unlike politicians, who disappear into history. The three lions remain reassuringly constant. Almost nine hundred years after Richard the Lionheart’s reign, children still draw them in school exercise books. Soldiers still wear them into battle. Sportsmen still carry them onto the world’s biggest stages.

Most never think about where they came from.But perhaps they should because hidden inside those three ancient beasts lies the story of England itself. And it’s a story of crusaders and kings, of heralds and holy symbolism, of battlefields and belief, of history transformed into legend.

And that is one of the greatest mysteries of all.

Not that three lions came to symbolise England.

But that, after nearly nine centuries, England still instinctively recognises them as its own.

My childhood brushes with ghost lore

Despite writing about supernatural folklore, I rarely think about my childhood brushes with ghostly stories. I thought I might rectify that here—by reflecting on two examples of ghost lore I was exposed to in my youth.

Before I begin, I should point out that children’s folklore is just as vital and dynamic a phenomenon as its adult equivalent. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1999) is one example of a text that documents the folkloric creativity of children (as opposed to their passive receptivity). The book shows that wherever children come together, they form what folklorists call “folk groups.” The only criteria for the existence of such a group is that “two or more people. . . share something in common—language, occupation, religion, residence”; that they “share ‘traditions'”; and that they have the opportunity to meet face to face.

The Grey Lady

I’ll start with my childhood experience of belonging to a large “folk group” at my prep school, Tockington Manor, in South Gloucestershire. Every child in the school belonged to this folk group, because everyone, at some point, learned about the Grey Lady who haunted the manor’s halls. The boarders at the school were terrified of this lady: they said she wandered the manor at night—the spirit of a nurse who’d fallen from a skylight when the building served as a hospital during the First World War. I don’t remember much about this nighttime revenant, but she’s clearly a variant of a folkloric figure found at boarding schools everywhere: the Grey, White, Black, or Brown Lady.

In my school, older students, already initiated into the ghostly mystery, passed on stories about the drab-colored lady to the younger children, who did the same for the incoming class. I can only assume that telling stories about the Grey Lady allowed us to share anxieties in a fixed, personified form, which helped us adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. It also mythologized the building’s space, especially for boarders—those who couldn’t leave. Separated from their family homes, they created bonds and associations through the emotions that ghost stories evoke.

The story of the Grey Lady may have been one of the most memorable aspects of our folk group. But one story doesn’t create a culture. We also played games like marbles and conkers and had a shared language (words like cave—Latin for “beware”—were used to signal that a teacher was coming). Sometimes we sneaked out of school to gather in an old stone quarry, a place now dense with ivy-covered trees. The aura of this place—which we called simply “Quarry”—will forever remind me of the childhood capacity to create mythological worlds in spaces dominated by adults.

The Yellow Lady

The second example of supernatural storytelling from my childhood occurred during a trip to a Catholic boys’ camp in the summer of 1991. There too the sharing of ghostly legends created belonging among the boys. Despite sharing a tent with my brother, a cousin, and members of my cousin’s family, I felt unsettled in my new surroundings, and I remember how powerfully the nighttime telling of ghost stories allowed us to bond through fear. 

The only story I remember clearly (because it terrified me) was inspired by a local landmark. Visible from the camp was a house that glowed an eerie yellow at night. The sight of this building alone would be enough to inspire a haunted house tale. But in our case, the color became detached from the building, and we gave it to a supernatural figure who roamed the grounds at night. Apparently, a mysterious revenant called the Yellow Lady haunted that house, and she visited the meadow where we slept. Pricking up her disturbingly large ears to listen for wakeful boys, the Yellow Lady prowled the rows of tents, determined to steal a child. 

Although I remember thinking at the time that the Yellow Lady must have been a ghost, she differs in one important way from the Grey Lady mentioned earlier. While the latter was merely a scary presence that never interacted with students, the Yellow Lady was relational, embodying the discipline of the adult world (“no talking after lights out”). Her eerie color and super-sensory abilities—a result of her inhumanly large ears—suggest that she was a kind of supernatural bogeywoman, perhaps even close to a fairy.

The extreme effectiveness of this Yellow Lady legend meant that all of us had trouble sleeping that night. The next day we rushed to mass, hoping to find protection in proximity to a sacred ritual. The impulse was in keeping with much ghost lore, where holy symbols ward off supernatural threats.

Interestingly, while researching “Yellow Lady” stories (to see how commonplace they are), I came across a blog post in which the writer talks about a Yellow Lady story he learned at a camp run by monks. He then turns the tale into a literary short story—an embellishment, perhaps, of a fragmentary tale like mine. It seems to me that the writer’s camp may even have been the one I attended. Either that or the Yellow Lady haunts a number of such camps.

Haunted houses and witch houses

Besides my encounters with the Grey and Yellow Ladies, the only other ghost lore I can remember from my childhood are stories about haunted houses. These were always abandoned homes in the neighborhood, their shattered windows revealing darkness inside, the absence of family life. Repeating things we’d heard or inventing stories on the spot, we called these houses “haunted” or the former resort of “witches”—words that described the rupture in our sense of what a home should look like. One of these houses sat at the corner of Charborough Road and Dunkeld Avenue in Filton, Bristol (I can still picture its dilapidated state). Another was on a road branching off from Charborough Road: they said that if you looked into its broken, upstairs window, you might see a witch looking back. (The latter is a vague memory that may even have been my own thought.)

Considering all this lore, it seems to me that ghosts fill the gaps where social meaning decays, whether through separation from home, abandonment of a home, or maladjustment in a place that’s not yet fully home. When I consider these crucial functions, I understand why empirical approaches to ghostly “phenomena” bore me: they arguably fail to understand ghosts at all.

Read about more ghost lore here.

#HappyGoodFriday !🐰🥚✝️
On Good Friday in old England: bake hot cross buns—they never mould & protect your home from fire & ills.

Skip with long ropes for luck & harvests. 🥐

No digging iron tools in the earth! ⛏️

Hang the bread for protection. 🥐✝️
#EnglishFolklore

Boggarts are mischievous and malevolent creatures from British and Northern European folklore, often linked to domestic disruptions. #boggarts #englishfolklore https://connectparanormal.net/2026/03/01/boggarts-in-folklore-facts-and-fearsome-legends/

Often portrayed as a giant or monster who haunts lonely roads and shadowy paths, Jack-in-Irons is a figure of English folklore. #Giants #englishfolklore https://connectparanormal.link/post/776008644844273664/jack-in-irons

At the behest of the devil, his imps were once sent to England to cause trouble. While one of these imps was wreaking havoc inside Lincoln Cathedral, an angel put an end to his mischief by turning him to stone. The petrified imp can still be seen in the cathedral. #WyrdWednesday

#Folklore #Folktale #LincolnImp #LincolnCathedral #Imp #Devil #England #EnglishFolklore

After purchasing all the meat from a butcher who was passing through Sherwood Forest, Robin Hood went to Nottingham in the butcher's place where, disguised as another butcher, he proceeded to sell the meat the poor of the city at a deep discount. #FolkyFriday

🎨: Howard Pyle

#Folklore #Folktale #RobinHood #England #EnglishFolklore #HowardPyle

According to the Northumbrian fairy tale of 'The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh,' England's Bamburgh Castle was once home to a princess who was transformed into a dragon by her jealous wicked stepmother. #FairyTaleTuesday

🎨: John Varley

#Folklore #FairyTale #BamburghCastle #TheLaidlyWormOfSpindlestonHeugh #Princess #Dragon #Castle #Northumbria #England #EnglishFolklore

In the English ballad of 'The Noble Fisherman,' a bored Robin Hood leaves the forest behind to become a fisherman in Scarborough. Although he proves to be a poor sailor, his skill with a bow ends up coming in handy when his ship is attacked by French pirates. #FolkloreThursday

📷: Jacek Ulinski

#Folklore #Folktale #RobinHood #Scarborough #Fisherman #England #EnglishFolklore

When a frustrated Hampshire farmer decided to forgo sleep to catch whoever had been making a mess in his barn every night in the act, he saw thousands of tiny elves coming and going through the keyhole in order to carry away all his straw one piece at a time. #LegendaryWednesday

📷: Mats Hagwall

#Folklore #Folktale #Elves #Fairies #Barn #Hampshire #England #EnglishFolklore

Like Robin Hood, Jack O'Legs is an English folk hero that was known for robbing from the rich to give to the poor. One notable difference: Jack was a giant. According to legend, he stood at least 14 feet tall and lived in a cave in the woods outside Baldock. #FairyTaleTuesday

🎨: Louis Le Breton

#Folklore #Folktale #FairyTale #JackOLegs #Giant #England #EnglishFolklore

According to English folklore, you should always wear at least one new article of clothing on Easter Sunday. One superstition even claims that not only is a lack of new clothes unlucky but that birds will purposely soil your disrespectful outfit. #LegendaryWednesday

📷: Pavan Kumar Nagendla

#Folklore #Easter #Birds #Superstition #EasterFolklore #EnglishFolklore

Although the various supernatural black dogs of English folklore were generally seen as being either dangerous or bad omens, the benevolent Gurt Dog of Somerset was said to protect the children of the area and safely guide lost travelers back home. #FolkloreSunday

📷: Florian Roost

#Folklore #BlackDog #GurtDog #Somerset #England #EnglishFolklore

According to legend, a Knucker dragon once terrorized the West Sussex village of Lyminster. In order to stop this beast, a young man named Jim Pulk came up with a unique solution: he baked an enormous pie, which he poisoned and then fed to the dragon. #WyrdWednesday

#Folklore #Folktale #Dragon #Knucker #Pie #Sussex #WestSussex #England #EnglishFolklore

Due to a misunderstanding, a wealthy man banished his youngest daughter from his home, so the resourceful girl assembled a hooded cloak out of rushes to hide her fine clothes and took a job cleaning pots for another great house, where she became known as Cap o' Rushes. #FairyTaleTuesday

🎨 : John D. Batten

#FairyTale #FairyTales #CapORushes #Folklore #EnglishFolklore #England

According to English folklore, asrai are timid mermaid-like creatures that only emerge from their watery home once a century to bathe in moonlight. However, they must return to the underwater realm before dawn because exposure to sunlight is fatal to them. #WyrdWednesday

📷 : Janosch Lino

#Folklore #FairyTale #Asrai #Mermaid #EnglishFolklore

The initial site planned for Jersey's St. Brelade's Church turned out to be a favorite of the local fairies, who began moving all the construction tools to a beach miles away each night in protest. Eventually, the workmen gave up and built the church at that location instead. #WyrdWednesday

🎨 : P.J. Ouless

#Folklore #Folktale #Fairies #Church #Jersey #England #EnglishFolklore

Off-season coastal towns rule. In Sidmouth, Devon, someone’s turned these old phoneboxes into Cabinets of Curiosity. These two are stuffed with exhibits of local folk charms & witchcraft, & include a mummified cat found in the wall of one cottage, & spells sealed up in others. 💀 #folklore #witchcraft #devon #mummification #spells #witches #witch #halloween #folkhorror #folkhorrorrevival #magick #spells #britishfolklore #englishfolklore #magic #spells #mythology #sidmouth #publicart #PhoneBox

Cormoran was a giant that lived in St Michael's Mount and would roam the countryside devouring people and livestock. He is the first giant to be slain by Jack the Giant Killer in Joseph Jacobs' version of the tale. #FairyTaleTuesday

🎨: Arthur Rackham

#FairyTale #Folklroe #Giant #JackTheGiantKiller #Cormoran #EnglishFolklore

In the English fairy tale of “The Imp Tree,” Queen Heurodis falls asleep beneath a tree and dreams about the Faërie King, who makes her promise to return to the same tree the next day under penalty of death. When she does as he asked, the fairies kidnap her, despite the fact she was being guarded by her husband, King Orfeo, and 1,000 of his knights.

#FairyTaleTuesday #FairyTale #Folklore #EnglishFolklore #Fairy #Fairies #TheImpTree #England

📷: Jeremy Bishop

🍺⛏️ If you walk near the Henbury gorge today you will see the Giant’s Footprint where Goram stamped his foot in rage when he woke up from his snooze. And if you look out to the Severn Sea from Weston you will see two islands - Steep Holm and Flat Holm - which are the head and shoulders of the poor drowned giant.

#folklore #riversevern #somerset #britishfolklore #englishfolklore #westcountry #storytelling @folklore @bristol #giants #goram #riveravon #bristol

🍺⛏️ Goram turned up just in time to see Avona gleefully meandering through Ghyston’s gorge. Well, he was beside himself, and in the heat of the moment he threw himself into the Severn Sea where he quickly drowned. Unfortunately stories involving giants often end in sadness.

#folklore #riversevern #somerset #britishfolklore #englishfolklore #westcountry #storytelling @folklore @bristol #giants #goram #riveravon #bristol

🍺⛏️ So Goram begins his gorge at a place now known as Henbury. And Ghyston starts digging at what is now Clifton. To be fair, it was a really hot day, but Goram drank quite a lot of cider whilst he was working, and eventually he fell asleep in the sun. When he woke up, he discovered that Ghyston had already finished his gorge.

#folklore #riversevern #somerset #britishfolklore #englishfolklore #westcountry #storytelling @folklore @bristol #giants #goram #riveravon #bristol

🍺⛏️ Well, I’ve never met a giant but I understand they are argumentative things. Goram and Ghyston couldn’t agree on the best route to dig their channel, so they decided to each dig a separate one. They said that whoever finished first would impress Avona most and win her love. Not that Avona agreed to this.

#folklore #riversevern #somerset #britishfolklore #englishfolklore #westcountry #storytelling @folklore @bristol #giants #goram #riveravon #bristol

🍺⛏️ People who know these things say that Avona was never interested in Goram or Ghyston, but that didn’t stop them thinking they could win her love. One day they came up with an idea to dig a channel through the hills so that the lady of the lake would be free to flow out to the sea if she wanted. That might impress her.

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