Issue 14: Lincolnshire Folk Tales – Edited by Anna Milon and Rory Waterman

Lincolnshire’s peatlands include the saltmarsh of The Wash, southern fenlands, heathlands, and raised bogs in the Isle of Axholme. These are landscapes rich in folklore which also hold, often well-preserved, archaeological material including bog bodies, artefacts, and structures like wooden trackways. Archaeology and folklore both speak to the time-depth of our relationships with these, often liminal landscapes. As simultaneously part of the heritage of these landscapes and a way of expressing the meaning this holds, archaeological and folkloric narratives can be a source of connection with place across time. In this article we explore connections between folklore and the archaeological and environmental histories of Lincolnshire’s peatlands. Focusing on two stories from Marie Clothilde Balfour’s three-part ‘Legends of the Cars’ (‘Tiddy Mun’ and ‘The Dead Hand’), we share an archaeological reading of these texts and creative responses in the form of poetry.

When a little figurine was found inside the inglenook fireplace of a 17th-century cottage in Dorset, it was first interpreted as a horned devil. It was later identified more specifically as a Ruston Hornsby Lincoln Imp car mascot. This presentation uses this enigmatic discovery as a springboard into explorations into the development of the Lincoln Imp as a folkloric motif, the symbol of a city, and the mascot of a car company. The themes of folklore as communal identity and as commercialised product will be delved into, along with the question of why a car mascot might have been hidden inside a fireplace to begin with.

This article focuses on a collection of ten folk stories, that were written down (in dialect), and published in the journal Folk-Lore in 1891, as the Legends of the Carrs. Since their publication, many of the stories have migrated from where they were collected, in the area of the Ancholme Carrs (just south of the Humber), to the Great Fens area of Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and South Lincolnshire (around the Wash), where they became the focus of a number of successful arts and museum collaborations and also popular source material for the modern revival of storytelling. Alongside this migration, within the world of Folklore and Folk-Tale scholarship, the provenance of the Legends was also questioned, and the suggestion made that the collector composed the tales herself. The article demonstrates that the tales are authentic folklore using research into dialect, tale structure, and individual tellers of the tales.

When Ethel Rudkin released her seminal article on the Black Dog in Lincolnshire in 1938, she asserted her position that the Black Dog in her home county was a ‘kindly beast’, friendlier and less foreboding than the same apparition found elsewhere. This paper analyses Rudkin’s claim against the folkloric encounters she charts and pursues a deeper understanding of the Lincolnshire Black Dog through practice-based research. The compelling image of the spectre that Rudkin paints is explored through printmaking, and through lenses of the eerie, the sensory and the enchanted.

This article, illustrated with the author’s photographs and archive materials, considers the folklore and photographic representation of the Haxey Hood, a calendar custom with a history that may date back to 1359, which takes place on the 6th January in the area of North Lincolnshire known as the Isle of Axholme. Each year, participants act out a folkloric narrative specific to the history and landscape of this former marshland area, involving communal singing, procession and performance, a chase and mock burning, and finally ‘the sway’, a mass game in which as many as two hundred participants attempt to guide the ‘hood’, a tightly bound roll of leather, towards a pub in either Haxey or the neighbouring village of Westwoodside.

Please see PDF version to view illustrations.

This article, illustrated with the author’s photographs and archive materials, considers the folklore and photographic representation of the Haxey Hood, a calendar custom with a history that may date back to 1359, which takes place on the 6th January in the area of North Lincolnshire known as the Isle of Axholme. Each year, participants act out a folkloric narrative specific to the history and landscape of this former marshland area, involving communal singing, procession and performance, a chase and mock burning, and finally ‘the sway’, a mass game in which as many as two hundred participants attempt to guide the ‘hood’, a tightly bound roll of leather, towards a pub in either Haxey or the neighbouring village of Westwoodside.

As with other similar customs, the ritual and performative aspects of the event provide numerous photographic opportunities, moments when key characters and action can be more easily captured, which have come to represent the event. As a result, photographers, like folklorists, can find themselves following in the footsteps of those who preceded them, partaking in a ritual of re-photography, a remaking of all those photographs that came before. Whilst visually simplifying the complexities of the custom, this also provides a fascinating opportunity to slice through history, tracing similar moments across time, marking both similarities and differences.