Seileag
Seileag : Freshwater Monster of Scotland. Etymology: From the Gaelic an t-Seileag, a feminine diminutive derived from the name of the loch. Variant name: Shiela.…
Sasa
Sasa : Unknown Bird of Oceania. Etymology: Fijian (Austronesian) word. Physical description: Chicken-sized ground bird. Speckled. Distribution: Viti Levu and Kandavu Islands, Fiji. Present status:…
Dean Prior
In traditional tales of exorcism, the troublesome ghost is usually a member of the local gentry, but at Dean Prior (also called Dean-combe) it is…
Cranmere Pool
Cranmere Pool lies about five miles (8 km) south of Okehampton, in the northernmost of the two great blanket bogs of Dartmoor. It is not…
Coffinswell
It is presumably through a pun on the name of this village that there arose the tale that some unknown lady was buried, for reasons…
Buckland Abbey
Sir Francis Drake, whose home this was, is the hero of many legends recorded by two Victorian folklorists active in the area, Mrs Anna Eliza…
Buckfastleigh
At Brooke Manor in this parish, in the seventeenth century, lived Richard Capel or Cabell (d. 1677). The Devon folklorist Theo Brown wrote in 1982:…
Black Anne Pool
Commemorated in an anonymous Victorian poem entitled ‘A Legend’ is the story of Tom Treneman, a fifteenth-century squire of Sowford House, Ivybridge, who reappeared in…
Wormhill
According to tradition, the neighbourhood of Wormhill was once a forest and crowded with trees. It was then the haunt of wild animals. The antiquary…
Tunstead Farm, near Chapel-en-le-Frith
For several hundred years this farm was home to a broken skull nicknamed Dickie or Dick. The first published account dates from 1807, in A…