A lad goes to see a wisewoman to get advice: his folks say he is a fool, and he wants to be wise, so he asks her what he should do. She tells him he will be a fool all his days until he finds a coat of clay, at which point he will know more than she does. Thus emboldened, he sets forth to roll in mud and dust in an attempt to become wise. Funnily enough, it doesn’t work.

The joy in this little tale, which can be regarded as a droll (i.e. a humorous tale), is that we know what she means: he will be a fool until he dies and is buried and reaches the other side; and because he is a fool he is destined not to realise this. The story was collected by Marie Clothilde Balfour, who lived in Redbourne while collecting stories in Lincolnshire, and was first published in Folklore in 1891 – though not as part of her three-part ‘Legends of the Lincolnshire Cars’, which contained the first extant versions of most of the Lincolnshire folk tales associated with her. Katherine Briggs retells it in Folk Tales of Britain (1970)

Words by RORY WATERMAN