Tag: folklore
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The Mermaids of Staithes
Staithes clings to the North Yorkshire cliffs like a stubborn barnacle, its narrow alleys and huddled cottages whispering tales of smugglers, storms, and shipwrecks. Once a modest “staith” — a landing place for Seaton, a settlement mentioned in the Domesday Book — the village grew around its tiny harbour, its people as resilient as the…
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Dally Castle: Where Legend Outlasted Stone
The ruined Dally Castle in Northumberland sits on its grassy knoll like the ghost of a forgotten age. Only low walls and scattered stones remain, but they hint at a place that once surveyed the countryside with authority. The information board, in its pedantic way, insists that Dally was never a true castle at all.…
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Hobthrush Hall
High above the village of Over Silton, recent felling has exposed cliffs that rear up like the broken ramparts of some forgotten fortress, appropriately named The Scarrs. Here lies a cleft in the rock known as Hobthrush Hall. The locals call it a cave, though it feels more like the scar of something ancient and…
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Michaelmas: When the Devil Trod on the Brambles and the Lord Held Out His Hand
The ling has faded, overtaken by the red leaves of bilberry. A fine day, and fittingly Michaelmas: the day the Devil put his foot on the brambles, ending the season for blackberries. A myth, perhaps, but tidier than admitting people simply tired of picking them. Michaelmas once mattered. It was one of the four quarter…
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Rudolph and the Power of the Fly Agaric
Apparently Reindeer are known to seek out the Fly Agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria), the red and white toadstool once used by Lapp shamans for its hallucinogenic effects. Midwinter rituals involved eating the fungus, falling into a deep sleep, and waking with unnaturally heightened strength and agility. The animals reacted in much the same way, fuelling…
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Panis Porcinus: Bread for Pigs, Medicine for Men
The common names we give to plants often say less about science and more about superstition. Take fleabane. Its title comes from the old belief that dried stems would drive away fleas. Toothwort was thought to cure toothache, not through any chemical virtue, but because its flowers looked rather like teeth. The Autumn-flowering Cyclamen carries…
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Smoke over Whitby — The Sandsend Bogey
The coast lies quiet beneath a sky heavy with cloud. Small waves slide up the beach with the ebbing tide. It is early yet; the crowds have not arrived. But beyond the headland the scene darkens. A wall of orange-stained smoke rises from the moor, its glow outlining Whitby and the Abbey. The fire on…
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The Bottomless, Town-Swallowing, Goose-Plucking Lake Gormire
Yorkshire is a county of myths, one of which insists it possesses only a single lake — Gormire. This is clearly absurd, yet it may simply be Yorkshire’s way of keeping a straight face while mocking outsiders, or perhaps a petty attempt to match the Lake District, which, as every schoolboy is told, also has…
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Kirby Knowle: A Castle with Two Names and One Too Many Stories
Towering above the western edge of the quiet village of Kirby Knowle, this brooding grand house is marked on Ordnance Survey maps as “Newbuilding.” The estate agents, less taken with that name, now refer to it in brochures as plain Kirby Knowle. The asking price is ÂŁ7 million, in case you are tempted. The “New…
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The Weather According to a Dead Bishop: Forty Days of Rain
Climate change deniers blame nature for everything. Heatwaves? Natural. Floods? Just weather being weather. Human emissions? Nothing to see there. Meanwhile, chemtrail believers take a different route entirely. For them, extreme weather is no accident but a masterstroke of global puppet masters, quietly spraying secret cocktails into the sky to bend the climate to their…