Ask ten people what British folklore is and you will get ten answers: a brownie sweeping a hearth at midnight, a maypole ribbon tangled in the wind, a black dog on a dark Suffolk lane. There is no single tradition here, only a habit of storytelling, and every county keeps its own version of things.
What follows is a beginner's tour — twenty or so creatures, customs and tales, enough to spot the patterns and to know where to look next.
The brownie is the household spirit of Scotland and northern England: a small, shaggy figure who threshes, churns and tidies overnight in exchange for a bowl of cream. Thank him, or leave him a set of clothes, and he leaves for good. The boggart is a darker relative, a nuisance rather than a helper — it hides tools, spoils milk and, awkwardly, tends to follow a family when they move house. In the north the same creature is usually called a hob; Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is the most famous of them all, largely thanks to Shakespeare. Treat the lot as neighbours rather than servants.
Water is where the stories turn dangerous. The selkie of Orkney and Shetland is a seal who steps out of her skin to become a woman; a man who hides the skin keeps her until she finds it again. The kelpie is a loch-dwelling horse that invites a rider onto its back and does not let go. Highland tradition has the each-uisge, which is worse. English rivers carried their own warnings: Jenny Greenteeth beneath the duckweed, Peg Powler in the Tees, Grindylow in Yorkshire ponds. Orkney's nuckelavee — a skinless horse with a human torso — belongs to plague and drought.
The black dog is another recurring visitor. In East Anglia he is Black Shuck, huge and shaggy with saucer eyes, said to have left scorch marks on the church doors at Bungay and Blythburgh. In Lancashire he is the barghest, in Yorkshire the gytrash, in Wales the gwyllgi. Meeting one is usually an omen, though some stories give him the job of guarding churchyards and old roads.
Fairies in British tradition are neither tiny nor sweet. They are the Good Neighbours, the Gentry, the People of Peace — euphemisms used because naming them was thought to invite trouble. They live under hills, in woods and beside water, and they take a lively interest in human beings. A few rules turn up again and again:
Read these tales as literature and as social history, and the etiquette starts to make sense.
These are the traditions you can actually attend. May Day is the big one: poles on the village green, Morris sides dancing at dawn, Padstow's 'Obby 'Oss winding through the streets of Cornwall. In Derbyshire and the Peak District, wells are dressed from May to September — clay boards pressed with petals, leaves and seeds, made fresh each year by local volunteers.
January brings wassailing: cider or ale poured at the roots of the oldest apple tree, toast soaked in cider hung in the branches, and a good deal of noise to wake the orchard for the year ahead. Shetland's Up Helly Aa, at the end of January, answers the dark with torches and a burning galley.
Harvest was the great communal moment. In Cornwall the last sheaf was cut with a shout of "crying the neck"; elsewhere it became a corn dolly, plaited and kept until spring. Then came the harvest home supper, with the farmer feeding everyone who had helped. As the year closed, Halloween's turnip lanterns and guising grew out of older soul-caking customs, and Hogmanay's first-footing — a dark-haired visitor carrying coal, shortbread or whisky — is still going strong in Scotland.
Half the pleasure of folklore is the specific story. These five repay the search:
Begin locally. Folklore is best learned within walking distance of where you live.
One caution worth carrying: plenty of what is billed as ancient tradition is Victorian invention, a revival, or a recent addition. That is not a problem in itself — folklore has always absorbed new material — but be wary of anyone selling certainty.
