Tiddy Mun (i.e. ‘small man’ who was, according to the tale, ‘wi’out a name’) was said to be a white-bearded boggart the size of a toddler, who lived in the marshy Carrs of the Ancholme Valley, and would come out at night dressed in grey and laugh like a peewit. When the waters rose close to villages, people would call on him for help until they heard the peewit’s cry, at which point the water would start to recede, so he certainly wasn’t wholly malevolent.

When the Fens and Carrs were drained on a mass scale, beginning in the seventeenth century with the work of Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden and a Dutch workforce, there was significant local opposition – even though the wetlands were a source of malaria (which many people treated by taking opium) and were widely believed to be the haunt of witches, boggarts and sprites. The tale tells of how the draining brought immediate bad omens – to livestock, people’s health, homes (which collapsed), and the Dutchmen who would occasionally disappear – all of which was fed by Tiddy Mun’s anger. (The proliferation of anti-Dutch insults around this time, such as ‘double-Dutch’ and ‘Dutch courage’, which are still in use, and others which are not – e.g. ‘Dutch concert’, a terrible noise – might infer how some of the workers vanished.) Keen to restore order, the locals called again on Tiddy Mun for help at the next new moon, and poured water in the dykes to apologise for the damage done to his home. It worked, resulting in everything ‘thrivin’ I’ tha cars’, and therefore the ritual continued for a long time.

Recounted by Marie Clothilde Balfour for her three-part ‘Legends of the Cars’, published in Folklore (1891). Balfour lived in Redbourne while collecting the tales, though it is not clear precisely where she was when she heard this. It was allegedly told to her by an old woman who said she used to undertake the ritual, and had once seen Tiddy Mun. Maureen James provides a full version of the tale in Lincolnshire Folk Tales (2013), and a précis here. Margaret Read MacDonald includes the original, in standardised English, in Earth Care: World Folktales to Talk About (2005). Recent literary adaptations are plentiful, and include Polly Howat’s, in Ghosts and Legends of Lincolnshire and the Fen Country (1992), Kevin Crossley-Holland’s, in The Old Stories (1997), and Adrian Gray’s, in Tales of Old Lincolnshire (1990).

Throughout the then-wetlands of the fens and carrs, tales abounded of ‘tiddy people’ who would perform useful tasks such as pinching buds to make them open, and to whom farmers would leave gifts to ensure the safety of crops. Belief in them, and in the ‘Tiddy Mun’ of the tale, indicates a strong sense in the people that they had a duty, beyond human need, to look after the land. Darwin Horn, in ‘Tiddy Mun’s Curse and the Ecological Consequences of Land Reclamation’ (Folklore, 1987) makes a convincing case that land reclamation likely did lead to a short period marked by the tribulations discussed in the tale, for scientific reasons, and that this would indeed have been followed by relative prosperity in terms of health and production. Andrew Borlik, in ‘Caliban and the Fen Demons of Lincolnshire’, published in Shakespeare: Journal of the British Shakespeare Association 9.1 (2013), argues that Tiddy Mun was a potential influence for Shakespeare on the creation of Caliban in The Tempest.

In 2022, a competition to name a newly-widened road bridge in Guyhirn, Cambridgeshire, resulted in Tiddy Mun Bridge being named by thirteen-year-old Ava McCulloch, and perhaps that is a location from which twenty-first-century people might survey the land and tarmac and send profuse apologies into the ether. However, the tale as recounted by Balfour names ‘Cross-Dyke’, possibly an old name for the Old River Ancholme which snakes alongside the canalised present route of the Ancholme, so we have placed this pin on a public footpath where it crosses the old river.

Words by RORY WATERMAN