A mischievous but likeable young lad called Tom Pattison refuses to take precautions against the evil spirits and boggarts lurking in the Carrs. Ignoring the advice of everyone he meets, he sets off across the Carrs on the darkest night of the year with only a lantern and not even the protection of the safe-keep his mother has given him. Other lads follow, at a distance, to see what happens. The wind blows out Tom’s lantern by a willow snag, and the lads can just make out the silhouette of him fighting against evil things that have come out of the bog, so they begin to pray. They then witness a disembodied hand pull Tom down. The ‘things’ then close in around the lads, but luckily their safe-keeps and prayers protect them.

A week later, Tom is found at the spot where he vanished, white-haired and shaking, his feet submerged, with one missing hand, and (terminally, as it turns out) unable to speak. A year later, both mother and son are found dead, in an embrace, her with a smile on her face and him with a look of horror. Thereafter, they haunt the area.

This seems to be a cautionary tale warning against the foolhardy predilections of youth. It might also be read as a caution against deviations from beliefs in old superstitions and concomitant failures to take precautions against them, in an age of increasing scientific rationality. It is 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, nor the extent to which she embellished what she heard. Redbourne is to the west of the Carrs, which is why we have placed the pin to the east of the village on Carr Lane. you have to imagine a very differently wild landscape to the tamed, plotted and pieced one you’ll see today. When Balfour collected this tale, the Carrs had fully been drained only within living memory, though the process had largely been undertaken in the preceding two centuries.

Maureen James provides a full version of the tale in Lincolnshire Folk Tales (2013), and a précis here. Polly Howat also tells the tale, in Ghosts and Legends of Lincolnshire and the Fen Country (1992). Kevin Crossley-Holland includes a rendition in Long Tom and the Dead Hand: More Tales from East Anglia and the Fen Country (1992).
Episode 36 of the Tales of Britain and Ireland podcast (2022), hosted and written by Graeme Cooke, includes a fun quasi-modernised rendition of the tale and a discussion of its folkloric context here.

Words by RORY WATERMAN