LORE

David Kaiser goes in quest of the ‘original’ Long Meg. Long Meg and Her Daughters is one of northern England’s most famous prehistoric monuments. It’s an impressive site. About five miles N of Penrith, it is Britain’s sixth largest stone circle. It originally consisted of a ring of about seventy large stones standing in an […]

Once a charm, now a design element; but John Billingsley considers if the crossed W has become a subconscious metaphor of its traditional symbolism?               In NE165 we asked for readers’ impressions of two varieties of the letter W, and this article reports on our feedback as well as suggesting how the image aspect

When Britain’s last deep coal mine closed, I found myself conflicted* between my environmentalist, folklorist and political identities, in all of which coal miners and their industry have played an important role. My overwhelming feeling in the end was one of sadness and loss, focussed on the communities and the values they represented. Folklore, they

Eileen Roche dives into a folklore trope, and recommends ‘suspend disbelief here’   The subject of Treacle Mines has a long and interesting history, which I suspect will be of interest to some NE readers. I first became aware of their existence when some friends took me for a walk one hot summer’s day on

A homespun pharmacopeia was once more than simple folklore, as Mark Greener shows   Folklore often contains kernels of truth. In 1568, for example, gardeners in England began cultivating Goat’s Rue (Galega officinalis). First recorded in the wild in 1640, Goat’s Rue (also called French Lilac or Italian Fitch) is now a common wildflower.1 Healers

Digging through old newspapers can bring some strange rewards, as Kai Roberts found in West Yorkshire Sowood House (Kai Roberts) Situated at the junction of Coley Road with the A644 between Hipperholme and Stone Chair in the dispersed settlement of Coley on the hills above Halifax (W Yorks), Sowood House is a minor but typical

Did those feet in ancient time belong to the Devil – or to giants? Kai Roberts calls the question in relation to a Yorkshire legend   Unlike many regions in the S Pennines, including neighbouring districts such as Longdendale, Saddleworth and the Calder Valley, there is a dearth of landscape legends associated with the upland

Kai Roberts reports on a stone and a borrowed story of boggart behaviour in West Yorkshire              Ellen Royd, Elland, and its ‘boggart chair’ in 2001 (John Billingsley) In June last year, an incongruous gritstone boulder was deposited in the memorial garden of Jepson Lane in Elland. Doubtless many casual