Black Dog lore of the North York Moors

Guest post: Martyn Hudson, Newcastle University The North York Moors of North East Yorkshire are well known for their witch folklore and for lore around hybrid human and animal beings including the witch-hares of Danby Dale, Westerdale and Farndale, mermen and women...

Wheal Vor – black dogs, gunpowder and goose feathers.

Guest post from Andrew MacDonald of Waveney Archaeology. Andrew lives in in South Norfolk Shuck territory, but is currently occupying his waking hours obsessing over tin mines in Cornwall. He does this in between trying to persuade people to stare at bumps in fields...

Black Dog tales: The Hound of St Austell

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...

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

'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 or Black Shuck loitering within. A variety of locations lay some claim to the hound, not least...

Lost in a Landscape: Wayland Wood

There is a darkness in woodland, hiding in the shade of the green canopy, something that retracts in the sunlight in the corner of your vision, beyond the growing and shrinking of the shadows, the greening, then yellowing, then bareness, with each revolution of the...

Black Dog Tales: Toby Gill

A fresh guest tale from Nicola Miller of The Millers Tale. A curious story woven by ghosts across the Shucklands of Blythburgh. Suffolk is home to many a curious tale, from the mysterious green children of Woolpit to a mansion which disappears and re-appears in the...

Folklore and geo-mythology

Mapping the Grim

Mapping the Grim

This project on Black Shuck was part of the original intent of the Public Archaeology project (for PA2015) and for me, because data is poetry and maps are fine prose. Due to the nature of my working life; the fact that I'm a bit of a butterfly/battering ram when it...

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Tom Starling: Old Shuck – Salthouse into Kelling

Tom Starling: Old Shuck – Salthouse into Kelling

Wonderful piece of Norfolk dialect from a well-spoken North Norfolk chap relating his brief but nervy meeting with Old Shuck just outside Salthouse towards Kelling; one of the various 'two masters' routes that relate to the North Norfolk version of the tale based...

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Passing on Black Shuck

Passing on Black Shuck

Tim Fox-Godden is friend who prints and illustrates, he also originates from the same area of Norfolk as me, he strolls down many of the same psychological byways and holloways as me and occasionally our paths cross. He has produced this rather lovely linocut as a...

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Black Shuck of the Fens

Black Shuck of the Fens

Black Shuck of the Fens Guest post: Matthew Champion I have a confession to make. I was born on the edge of the fens. A child of the bleak, flat and desolate waste that sits on Norfolk's western boundary, between 'the Isle' and the cold North Sea. I'm not a true fen...

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Physical Graffiti – Jess Macdonald

Physical Graffiti – Jess Macdonald

Guest post from Jess Macdonald From a very early age, I’ve always loved ghosts and ghouls, and long-legged-beasties and things that go bump in the night. Folklore, myths, the supernatural. I’ve never believed any of it, but it’s always exerted a hold on me. I’d plead...

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The Mouldwarp King

The Mouldwarp King

Like badgers in channels of hypocausts devoid of fire, The Mouldwarps scatter the cairns of our mothers, And the bogs hold our fathers pinned to wicker.[1] The mole is an ‘earth-thrower’ - a mouldywarp, molywarppe, moudiwarp, mouldwarp, moldwarp. The collision between...

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