Yorkshire Dragons, Giants, and other Folk Tales.

By Andrew Walsh

A collection of twenty folk or fairy tales from across Yorkshire. Including stories of dragons, giants, and other legendary happenings.

Most are traditional stories, but a few are new stories based on scraps of traditional legends of the Huddersfield area.

The stories are:

• Billy Biter and Filey Brigg
• The Build

• Language: English
• Publisher: Innovative Libraries
• Release date: Oct 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781911500063

Andrew Walsh

Andrew Walsh is a Chartered librarian at the University of Huddersfield. He chairs the information skills teaching group at the University of Huddersfield library and regularly gives talks at conferences across the UK, particularly in relation to information literacy and its teaching.

Book preview

Yorkshire Dragons, Giants, and other Folk Tales.

Andrew Walsh

Published by Innovative Libraries.

195 Wakefield Road, Lepton, Huddersfield. HD8 0BL.

[e-mail]

First Published 2017

© Copyright Andrew Walsh, 2017

Andrew Walsh asserts his moral rights to be identified as author of this work.

ISBN: 978-1-911500-05-6

ISBN: 978-1-911500-06-3 (e-book)

Introduction

Billy Biter and Filey Brigg

The Building of the Kirk at Heaton

The Crafty Ploughboy, or Yorkshire Bite

The Donkey, the Table, and the Stick

The Dragon of Loschy Wood

The Dragon of Wantley

The Drummer boy of Richmond

The Farndale Hob

The Giant of Dalton Mill

The Giant of Sessay

The Golden Cradle and Castle Hill

The Legend of Semerwater

The Marsden Cuckoo

The Miserly Judge or ‘He had paid for it’

Potter Thompson

The Serpent of Handale

The Seven Sisters & Their Bad Neighbour

Upsall and its Crocks of Gold

Wadda of Mulgrave, and Bell, his wife.

The Wicked Giant of Penhill

Key sources & notes

Further Reading

Introduction

Welcome to this little book of Yorkshire folk tales. It has an assortment of tales of dragons, giants, and other folk, or fairy, tales based in Yorkshire.

Most of these are unchanged, or with very minor changes, to the versions I’ve found of them in out of copyright books. A few, however, have had slightly more significant changes as the older versions I found were a little brief, and I took a mixture of these and newer versions to retell the story. A couple I’ve told completely from scratch, building on tiny scraps of local legend, where I could not find a proper story associated with them.

I’ve pulled these stories together into one place mainly out of frustration at how hard it is to find them otherwise,

As my children (Jennifer & George, now 13 & 11 at the time of writing) were growing up, I would have loved to be able to tell them local fairy stories. I looked for them, and found only scraps (for example, ‘there is a golden cradle somewhere on Castle Hill’) for my local area, Huddersfield. Even looking across the whole of Yorkshire, it was hard to find stories I could tell them.

There is no shortage of adaptions of the Grimm’s tales, or Hans Christian Anderson’s stories, especially if you want a version heavily flavoured by Disney’s treatment of them. But local tales? Not so much…

So here are an assortment of 20 local Yorkshire folk tales and legends. I hope some readers retell them to their children and help to keep them alive, as a counterpoint to the Disneyfication of such things if nothing else.

There is enough material for a second such collection of Yorkshire folk tales, which I’ll pull together if there seems like enough interest!

Billy Biter and Filey Brigg

A couple of hundred years ago, a huge dragon, nearly a mile long, lived in the waters near Filey. It had a habit of lying in the gulley, a tidal inlet, where it was partly hidden, and making itself a snack of any unsuspecting boats that ventured near.

Ralph Parkin, known as Billy Biter to his friends, for reasons too obscure to go into here, lived in Filey all his life, working as a tailor in the town. One day, he went down to the beach for a breath of fresh air and to eat some of the cake his wife had made him.

The dragon was getting restless, however, and its nostrils flared as the smell of the cake drifted over from Billy’s hand. It was the sticky gingerbread style cake made in Yorkshire from plenty of oatmeal and treacle, and it made the serpent’s stomach growl