About Hob & Hollow

Every corner of Britain has its stories: a stone that was once a king, a hill a giant dropped, a lane where a black dog walks. Many of them were written down by Victorian collectors who went from village to village asking the old people what they remembered. Hob & Hollow brings those stories back to the places they belong.

How we work

• We start from the old sources. Each tale comes from books that are now out of copyright: the Folk-Lore Society's journals and county volumes, and collectors like Robert Hunt, Charlotte Burne and Sabine Baring-Gould. We name the earliest telling we can find, and later ones where they differ.
• We retell them in our own words. We don't copy anyone's retelling, old or new, and we credit the source on every page: “as recorded by Arthur Evans in 1895”.
• We invent nothing. If a detail isn't in a source, it isn't in the tale. Where we haven't yet checked something, the page says so with a red [TODO] note until we have.
• Legend, not fact. We tell you what people said and believed, and a separate section says what the history and archaeology show.
• Real places. Each legend is pinned to the place it belongs to, with visiting notes we check against the people who look after the site. We leave out private homes, anything involving living people, and recent real crimes.

The plates

The pictures come from public-domain books, engravings and paintings. We show them as they are, only cropped or resized, and every one is credited on the page where it appears.

Sister sites

Hob & Hollow is one of a small family of sites. On a legend's page, “Make a day of it” may point you to Weekday Wanderers for family days out, Haunted Hotels UK for ghostly inns (for grown-ups), Acorn & Ink for printables, or The Name Generators.

Get in touch

Spotted a mistake, or know a legend we've missed? Send us a legend.