Where can you find the ‘Devil’s footprints’? What happened at the ‘hangman’s stone’? Did Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, ever really exist? Where was King Arthur laid to rest? Bringing together tales of hauntings, highwaymen, family curses and lovers’ leaps, this magnificent guide will take you on a magical journey through England’s legendary past.

‘A fascinating county-by county guidebook to the headless horsemen, bottomless pools, immured adulteresses and talking animals that make up the hidden landscape of the country.’ London Review of Books

‘Evokes an England terrified by screaming skulls, tantalized by hidden treasure, spooked by the unearthly clanging of bells, bewitched by fairies and hobgoblins’  Country Life

‘Wonderful… Contains almost every myth, legend and ghost story ever told in England’ Simon Hoggart, Guardian

The Lore of the Land:
The Editor’s Story

The deal on family holidays when I was a child was that half the day would be spent on the beach, and half traipsing around some ruined castle or stately home. And so it was, one afternoon, following a sand-sprinkled picnic lunch, that I found myself on a guided tour of a rather gloomy medieval manor house. In due course, we made our way upstairs, and the guide invited each of us in turn to peep through a gap in the wooden panelling that ran along one of the passages. Behind the panelling, I could just discern the dim outline of a sealed-up room. The guide informed us that it had been blocked up and forgotten about for centuries. However, she went on, the room had been rediscovered in Victorian times and had been found to contain the skeleton of a woman.  That woman’s ghost still haunted the house.

I was gripped; and while it would be something of an exaggeration to say that at that precise moment I vowed, ‘When I grow up I’m going to work for Penguin and commission a lavishly illustrated book of stories like this with a page size of '246x189mm', it’s certainly true that my fascination with English folklore started then. Now, many years later, I’m publishing The Lore of the Land – an ambitious county-by-county survey of English legends, painstakingly researched and superbly written by the leading folklorists, Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson. The book not only retells hundreds of stories about haunted houses, hidden treasure, witches, bogey beasts and other supernatural phenomena, but also seeks to establish how these stories arose in the first place and what they reveal about the beliefs and attitudes of the people who first told them. It reaches into every corner of England. Wherever you’re from, wherever you live now, you’ll find a story in the book about a place you know – Liverpool, perhaps, with its Liver Birds; Totnes, with its Brutus Stone; Bungay, with its Black Dog; Nottingham, once home of the miraculous St Anne’s Well.

In the course of the book, the authors point out that many of the claims made in local history books and tourist guides are – perhaps not surprisingly – often wildly wrong. There is no evidence at all, for example, that Sweeney Todd, ‘the Demon Barber of Fleet Street’, ever existed – apart from anything else, his story is suspiciously similar to an earlier Parisian account of an evil barber at work in the Rue de la Harpe. Other stories, though, do sometimes turn out to have a tantalising basis in fact. Dick Turpin may not have ridden from London to York in a single day, but an earlier highwayman, John Nevison, did – in order to establish an alibi for a robbery he had carried out at Gad’s Hill in Kent. Bodrugan’s Leap in Cornwall takes its name from a real person and a real event that occurred during the Wars of the Roses. And it does seem to be the case that on the one occasion when the Tichborne family in Hampshire broke a centuries-old tradition of giving bread to the poor each year – the ‘Tichborne Dole’ – a whole series of disasters ensued, and the Dole had to be revived. It is still given out once a year.

While the text has been going through its editorial paces, we’ve been tracking down some wonderful pictures for the book – an illustration from a 1678 pamphlet entitled The Mowing Devil, which shows a supernatural entity creating what we would now call a crop circle; the title page of The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster; a photograph of trees growing from the grave of Lady Anne Grimstone in the churchyard at Tewin, Hertfordshire (local belief asserted that her last words were to the effect that ‘if God existed, seven elm trees would grow out of her tombstone’). Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is a photograph of what I first took to be a batch of overcooked sausages, but that actually turned out to be a Hand of Glory – the dried hand of a gibbeted criminal, used as a magic charm by robbers. This one is preserved in Whitby Museum. For some reason, it reminds me of my childhood holiday picnics.