The moon comes down to the Carrs to investigate the evil spirits that inhabit the place on moonless nights, but slips and is trapped, managing only to shine a path for a man who is lost before she falls down in exhaustion. Bogles and will-o-the-wykes (will-o-the-wisps) hide and guard her, in some versions burying her beneath a coffin-shaped stone, so she fails to appear at next new moon, at which point the spirits of the Carrs, under cover of darkness, stray from the bogs and terrorise the locals. The moon remains absent from the sky, of course, and the darkness offers cover to the bogles and other terrors. The people talk about this in the local inn, and eventually go to a wise-woman who gives them instructions to help them find and release the moon. (Some versions leave her out, and instead the information about the moon’s probable whereabouts are relayed by a man in the pub.) They do as advised, and find and release the moon, who thereafter shines brightest of all over the Carrs.

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. It was allegedly told to her by a nine-year-old ‘crippled’ girl called Fanny, though Balfour said she had first heard a version of it in a nursery rhyme. Maureen James provides a full version of the tale in Lincolnshire Folk Tales (2013), and a précis here. Joseph Jacobs shortened it, and called his version ’The Buried Moon’, in More English Fairy Tales (1894). Later versions of the story include Katharine M. Briggs’s, in Folk Tales of Britain (1970), and Polly Howat’s, in Ghosts and Legends of Lincolnshire and the Fen Country (1992). A rendition called ‘The Imprisoned Moon’ is included by Adrian Gray in Tales of Old Lincolnshire (1990). Episode 9 of the Tales of Britain and Ireland podcast (2018), hosted and written by Graeme Cooke, includes a fun quasi-modernised rendition of ‘The Buried Moon’, and a discussion of its folkloric context here. Kevin Crossley-Holland includes a version in The Old Stories (1997). The Fenland Stories Project produced an animated rendition in 2010, which you can watch here. Nottingham-based storyteller Tim Ralphs’ rendition from 2021, performed for our project partners Adverse Camber, is here.

We have dropped this pin on a lane in the Carrs, east of Redbourne; if you go here, you must imagine the landscape before it was drained.

There are no ‘original’ sources for this tale beyond Balfour, though the personification of the moon is anything but original, and the attribution of the moon to female deities is common in western and other cultures, and also has an ancient and pagan legacy. This is so widespread that it is the result of a blend of polygenesis (i.e. they developed independently) and diffusionism (subsequent adaptation from one source). For example, there were female moon deities for the Greeks (Selene, Artemis, and Hekate) and Romans (Luna, Diana, and Hecate), as well as for the Aztecs (Coyolxauhqui), Incas (Mama Quilla), and the Fon people who practiced the Dahomean religion in what is now Benin (Gleti), which has inspired many African diasporic religions. Like many folk tales, this tale, or rather the notion that underpins it, seems to have pre-Christian origins. In Lincolnshire Folk Tales, James notes that The Clouds (423-417 BCE) by Aristophanes mentions the ‘hiring of a Thessalian witch to bring down the moon and shut her up in a box’, and points out that the tale Balfour collected bears a similarity to ‘Well in the Well’, a story from Yorkshire.

Words by RORY WATERMAN