Every town has its stories. The pub whose name nobody can explain, the lane where a dog is said to howl before a death, the stone children are warned not to walk round at midnight. These fragments are folklore: beliefs and tales carried by word of mouth and shaped by the place they belong to. They are also researchable. A library card, a notebook and a willingness to ask questions will take you further than you might expect.
Start with what you already know
Before you visit a single archive, write down everything you can already recall: place names, field names, pub names, dialect words, warnings passed down in your own family, the story attached to a particular bend in the road. Pub signs are a decent starting point, since names such as The Green Man or The White Horse often carry associations older than the building itself. Church dedications are worth noting too. A church standing alone on a hill, dedicated to St Michael, is often said to occupy ground that was special long before the first stone was laid.
Keep one notebook, or one spreadsheet, with columns for source, date, place and a short note. Folklore research is mostly the accumulation of small details, and what looks like a dead end in March may explain something you find in September.
Get to know your local archive
Almost every county has a record office, and most sizeable towns have a local studies collection in the reference library. These two rooms will do most of the work. Ring before your first visit and ask what they hold for your parish; staff know their collections and can save you hours.
Ask for tithe maps and apportionments, enclosure awards, estate maps, parish registers, vestry minutes, school log books and poor law records. School log books are underrated — teachers recorded epidemics, storms, local customs and the occasional alarming behaviour of parents. So are antiquarian collections: the papers of a nineteenth-century clergyman or squire who wrote down what his older parishioners told him.
Expect practical rules. Most archives ask for pencil rather than pen, restrict bags and want certain documents ordered in advance. Photography policies vary, so ask rather than assume.
Read the old newspapers properly
Nineteenth-century local papers are the richest single source, partly because they printed the strange and the sentimental in equal measure. The British Newspaper Archive is the largest digitised collection, and many library services offer free access from their own computers. Welsh Newspapers Online is free to search from anywhere.
Keywords matter more than you would think. Regional vocabulary means a search for "ghost" can miss the very story you want. Try:
- ghost, apparition, spectre, phantom, "strange figure"
- boggart, bogey, hobgoblin, sprite — the names shift from county to county
- wise woman, cunning man, charmer, witch
- charm, spell, hag-stone, "nailed horseshoe"
- fairy, pixie, pisky, knocker, "little people"
- superstition, "old custom", "old wives' tale", legend
Two cautions. Victorian reporters moralised, and they also reprinted filler from other papers, so check whether an event is genuinely local. Note the date, too: Christmas, May Day, harvest, wakes and funerals attract seasonal stories that appear in print again and again.
Use maps and place names
Maps show where a story sits in the landscape. First edition Ordnance Survey six-inch and 25-inch maps are searchable online, as are tithe maps for many parishes. Copy the oldest map you can find and mark every name hinting at something older: low, howe and barrow for burial mounds; Puck, Boggart, Gallows, Well and Cross as prefixes; "Dead Man's Field" or "Chapel Croft" in the tithe apportionment.
Then walk the ground. Notice springs, boundaries, old tracks, and whether the church tower is visible from the spot the story names. Local tales often explain a feature — a hollow, a stone, a dip in the road — and those explanatory stories tend to be older than the ones that explain nothing at all. If the land contradicts the story, that is worth writing down too.
Listen well: oral history and living memory
The best material is often in someone's kitchen. Ask open questions — "What were you told about the old mill?" — rather than leading ones. A leading question earns a polite yes, which tells you nothing.
If you record a conversation, ask permission first and explain what you intend to do with it. Note the date, the place, the speaker's name and where they had the story from: a parent, a teacher, a book, the pub. Family stories of the "my grandmother always said" kind are valuable even when the details have drifted, because the drift is part of the history. Be careful with tales that identify living people unkindly. Where a story touches on a family, an illness or an accusation, ask before you publish, or leave it out.
Compare what you have found
One version is an anecdote; three versions are folklore. Read county folklore journals, the transactions of your local history society and the nineteenth-century collections, many of which are now free to read online. The Folklore Society and the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library hold material on customs, songs and beliefs that may put your find in context.
Then weigh it. When was the story first written down, and by whom? Was the teller local? Widespread tales attach themselves to new places with ease — a murderous innkeeper can move from one coaching house to another in a generation — so check whether your story has close relatives elsewhere in Britain. A tale recorded in 1900 about "ancient times" may be far younger than it sounds. That is not a reason to discard it. It is a reason to say so.
Start this weekend
- Write down five local stories, names or customs you already know.
- Search the catalogue of your county record office for your parish.
- Run three keyword searches in a newspaper archive, including one regional word.
- Look at the first edition Ordnance Survey map for your street and note one odd name.
- Ask one older neighbour what they were told as a child, and write it down the same day.
Local folklore rewards patience rather than expertise. Keep your notes dated and sourced, credit the people who told you things, and offer a copy of what you find to the archive, the library or the local history society. Stories survive because somebody wrote them down, and from now on that somebody can be you.
Photo: MasterTux / Pixabay
