Tales that belong to a place

Ask anyone who has spent an evening in a northern village hall and you will hear the same thing: the stories are still there, waiting to be picked up. The last few years have brought a steady trickle of collections gathering the folktales of northern England — boggarts, fairies, barguests, haunted lanes and drowned mill ponds — into volumes that are genuinely usable by community publishers, storytellers, museum volunteers and local historians. This review looks at three strands of that publishing and suggests how your group might put the material to work.

Boggarts, barguests and the domestic uncanny

The strongest of the recent collections deal with household and farm spirits. These are not decorative tales. A boggart in northern tradition is a working presence: helpful while it is fed and left alone, ferociously disruptive once it is slighted, mocked or given a name it does not want. The stories cluster around particular farms and cottages, which is precisely what makes them useful to local groups — the tale is anchored to a building you can still point at.

Expect to meet the Cauld Lad clattering about a kitchen at night, the Picktree Brag taking the shape of a calf or a horse on the road home, and the churchyard barguest with its clanking chain and saucer eyes. The better volumes give the original informant, the date of collection and the parish, which is what separates a usable sourcebook from a retelling. Look for that apparatus before you buy.

• Best for: short spoken performances of eight to ten minutes, one voice, no props.
• Watch for: dialect words for the spirit that vary from dale to dale — keep them in your printed text and gloss them lightly.
• Local hook: a boggart bound in a bottle, a wall or a pond is a story and a place at the same time.

Fairy hills and the northern landscape

A second cluster of books takes on the fairies, and it does so without the Victorian sugar. Northern fairies are dangerous, touchy about boundaries and closely tied to features in the landscape: a hollow in a hillside, a standing stone, a particular stretch of road after dusk. The duergars of the Simonside hills and the fairy roads of the Yorkshire dales appear here as warnings rather than whimsy — instructions about where not to walk, and when.

Several of the newer collections draw on nineteenth-century county writers alongside twentieth-century oral history recordings, and it is the overlap that is interesting. When a tale recorded from a farm worker in the 1960s matches one printed in a county weekly in the 1870s, you have something worth noting in your own booklet. The fairy material also gives you the best opportunities for a guided walk, since the stories are attached to terrain rather than buildings.

Haunted lanes, fords and bridges

The third strand is the ghost story, and it is the easiest to localise. These tales hang on infrastructure — a bridge, a ford, a stile, a bend in a lane where a cart once overturned. Water spirits such as Peg Powler and Jenny Greenteeth were doing practical work: keeping children away from mill races and riverbanks. That functional edge is worth preserving rather than smoothing away.

Recent volumes are good at showing how a single haunting migrates between sites as a village changes. A white lady moves from a ruined hall to a road junction once the hall is demolished. That kind of drift is excellent material for a local history talk, because it lets you tell the story of the place and the story of the ghost together.

Putting the books to work locally

Treat a collection as a quarry, not a script. Read a tale aloud before you commit to it; many read beautifully on the page and collapse in the mouth. Edit for pace, keep the dialect, and cut anything that exists only to explain.

• Map it. Plot every tale on a large-scale map of your parish. Gaps in the map usually mean gaps in the collecting, not an absence of stories.
• Record it. Ask older residents directly about the places named in the books. Half-remembered variants are more valuable to you than a polished text.
• Credit it. Note the printed source, the collector and the original informant in your own publication. This is basic courtesy and it protects you.
• Pair it. Put one tale with one walk, one photograph and one object for a museum case or a village trail.
• Test it. Try the material on a school group and a pub audience. The tales that survive both are the ones to print.

Building a shelf for your community group

If you are starting out, half a dozen volumes will carry you a long way: one general northern collection, one county-specific gathering, a dialect glossary, a place-name dictionary, a volume of regional oral history and a file of your own transcriptions. Buy the editions with notes and bibliographies, even when they cost more, because the notes are where the local detail hides.

One caution. Modern collections sometimes reprint Victorian texts without saying so. Check the footnotes. If an editor cannot tell you who told the story first, you cannot tell your readers either, and the whole point of this material is that it belonged to somebody in a particular place. The best book on your shelf will always be the one your own group makes next — and there is no shortage of tales left to gather.