The Witch Files: Going to Sea in an Eggshell
Make sure you crush up your eggshells after eating an egg, otherwise witches will use them as boats and cause great harm!
Hunting for Unicorns
Scotland is one of the few nations to have chosen a mythological creature rather than a real one as her national animal, and probably the only nation to have chosen an animal that no one believed actually lived there…
Piskies, Knockers and Tommyknockers – Cornwall’s Misunderstood Folklore
The Folklore of Cornwall: The Oral Tradition of a Celtic Nation addresses everything from piskies – south west Britain’s fairies – to mermaids, harvest festivals, a corpse visiting his betrothed, and the giants long noted for making the Cornish peninsula their home. And amid all this are the spirits of the mines – knockers together with the tommyknockers, their New World descendants.
The Fairy Trees: Blackthorn, Hawthorn and Rowan
White blossom on the trees is one of the delights of springtime, but it masks a deeper magic in three of the most charismatic of British trees: blackthorn, hawthorn and rowan. Storyteller and ecologist Lisa Schneidau has some practical tips on navigating plant folklore, bringing you face to face with the fairy realms and the ways of the Other Folk…..
The Boggart: A Study in Shadows
I became fascinated by boggarts about a decade ago. If I turned to the fairy and folklore dictionaries, I learnt that a boggart was a type of house goblin or perhaps, at a stretch, a poltergeist.