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The black dog of Peterloo

Guest post from Rosie Garland. A Manchester Encounter, or, The Black Dog of Peterloo From an unpublished and anonymous letter now in the collection of the Portico Library, Manchester. Typography dates it to the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Spelling and...

Black dog tales: From folklore to fiction, the landscapes of the Baskervilles

Black Dog Tales

‘There is a rumour that…’ is a phrase that appears a lot in relation to the genesis of the spectral hound Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and the Black dog within. A variety of locations lay some claim to the hound, not least those...

Black Dog tales: The Hound of St Austell

Black Dog Tales, Guest writers

A guest post from Andrew Macdonald of Waveney Archaeology. Samuel Drew (1765-1833) was a self-taught man of letters; his special interest was metaphysics, which is perhaps why he is little known now. He was apprenticed to a shoemaker and gave the following account of...

Vanishing Point: Out of sight

Vanishing Points

Genealogy is an inconsistent science and growing a family tree quickly becomes an obsessive work of semi-fictional detective work. The urge to push further and further backward heading into our peasant laden past, hankering after the occasional sight of a king or...

Lost in a landscape: Ditchingham – an eye for an eye

Lost in a landscape, The Great War

Ditchingham sits just North of the Norfolk Suffolk Border. It is to all intents and purposes a suburb of Bungay albeit in a different county and on the other side of a main road. The town and its satellite village sit on the edge of the gentle yawning line that forms...

Vanishing Point – Langemark

Vanishing Points

Langemark is I feel one of the most desolate corners of the Western front. As I mentioned in another piece on Vladslo there is something so desperately bleak and sad about German cemeteries. They don’t lack in any of the respectfulness of the loss or the death...

Lost in a Landscape: Weeting pathways

Lost in a landscape

We’ve been here before. Scrambling about in the past and the past is somehow where this piece of Breckland always feels like it is frozen. We took our children to run around the ridges around the holes in the landscape and down into the belly of the Brecks deep...

An introduction to Black Dog tales

Black Dog Tales

An introduction to Mapping the grim and black dog tales. I grew up and live in Norfolk and have a family roots in the area going back nearly as far as the eye of history can see on paper and parchment, We have tilled these fields for centuries, certainly as far as the...

Sucking Eggs

Mythogeography

My mum is dead, she died over ten years ago at a ‘ripe old age’ after period of massive emotional instability and virtual madness bought on by a rather large stroke. It was a hinterland for her and us, her children. It lasted 18 months from the...

The Black Dog of Bouley Bay

Black Dog Tales

A guest post. This is actually an extract from Erren Michaels’ new book on Jersey Legends which should be available very soon. It is available to pre-order here on the History Press website. On nights when the black dog roamed the hills of Bouley Bay people...