British folklore is unusually rooted in specific places. A story is rarely about a generic forest; it is about that hill, that well, that stretch of road, and people will point at it.
The two national legends
King Arthur
The great British legend, and almost certainly not historical. The earliest references are Welsh, from the ninth century, describing a war leader fighting Saxon invaders. Geoffrey of Monmouth turned him into a king in the 1130s, and French romances added Lancelot, the Grail and the round table.
Arthur is claimed by an enormous number of places: Tintagel in Cornwall for his conception, Glastonbury for his grave — announced by the abbey in 1191, at a convenient moment for fundraising — and Cadbury Castle, Winchester and Caerleon for Camelot. Wales, Cornwall and Brittany all claim him, and the sleeping-king-who-will-return motif attaches to caves across Britain.
Robin Hood
The outlaw of Sherwood Forest, robbing the rich to feed the poor. The earliest ballads are from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and are considerably rougher than the modern version — the Robin of the medieval texts is violent, kills with little compunction, and shows no particular interest in redistributing wealth.
Maid Marian and Friar Tuck are later additions, and the transformation into a dispossessed nobleman fighting for the rightful king is a sixteenth-century refinement. Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire both claim him, and there is no convincing evidence he existed.
The black dogs
The most widespread British apparition. Enormous spectral hounds with glowing eyes appear in folklore across almost the entire country under local names:
- Black Shuck — East Anglia. A 1577 pamphlet describes one bursting into Bungay church during a storm and killing two of the congregation; scorch marks on the door are still shown.
- The Barguest — Yorkshire.
- The Gytrash — Lancashire, and the creature Jane Eyre thinks she has met on the road in Charlotte Brontë’s novel.
- The Padfoot, the Trash, the Church Grim — a dozen other regional names.
Meeting one is generally an omen of death. Conan Doyle drew directly on Dartmoor versions for The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Giants and the landscape
A great many British landforms are explained by giants. The Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland was built by Finn McCool; Wade and Bell threw stones across Yorkshire; the Wrekin in Shropshire was dropped by a giant with a grudge against Shrewsbury.
Hill figures cut into chalk — the Uffington White Horse, the Cerne Abbas Giant, the Long Man of Wilmington — carry their own legends, and the Uffington horse is genuinely prehistoric, around 3,000 years old, and has been maintained by continuous scouring ever since.
Fairies
British fairies were never the small winged creatures of Victorian children’s books. In older tradition they are dangerous, capricious and to be placated rather than befriended — the Good Folk, referred to obliquely because naming them attracts attention. Changelings, abduction to fairyland and time passing strangely are the standard motifs.
Still being collected
Folklore in Britain is a living field rather than a closed archive. The Folklore Society has been recording since 1878, and new material accumulates continuously — motorway ghost stories, urban legends, and the accounts people still give of the black dog on the lane.