A lad sees a girl washing herself, and offers to marry her if she follows him. She agrees, but says that if he rescinds his promise she will put a spell on him, and he says that if he lets her down the worms should eat him and their children should develop wings and fly away. They search for a church with a sober vicar, but without success, and eventually come to a cottage, where they find an old man sleeping, so the lad kills him with an axe, then chops off his hands and feet. They lob the body out of the window, and light the fire, but then notice a wisewoman attempting to make off with the corpse. She wants to bury it, she says, but the lad says he’ll do it later, and eventually she goes away. He does indeed bury the corpse, but leaves one arm sticking out of the earth, then throws the hands and feet to the pigs, and goes off to hunt for rabbits, leaving the young woman in the house. She hears the hands and feet somehow calling out to be buried with the body, so she does so. He then returns and asks where their children are, and she says they’ve gone foraging for berries, then that they have gone fishing, then that they have flown away. He kills her and pops her body under the bed, and then the children fly back and ask where their mother is. He confesses, so they kill him. Dead, he asks for thunder, fire, water and an axe to kill him, but nothing happens, until a great worm with the young woman’s head eats him.

How they already have children remains a mystery, and it is possible the original teller of the story jumbled things up. The tale is recounted by Marie Clothilde Balfour in the last instalment of 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 morbid mess of a story. She claimed it was told to her by a man who came from the Lincolnshire Wolds, in an inn some distance from where she lived, though she doesn’t say where. We have placed this pin at the Bull Inn in South Kelsey, an eighteenth-century inn that is approximately halfway between Redbourne and the nearest part of the Wolds, though this is of course a guess, there being no way of knowing where it originated or was told to Balfour.

Alan Garner included a version in Collected Folk Tales (2011), and Neil Philip included a version in The Penguin Book of English Folktales (1992).

N/B: The tale has absolutely nothing to do with Flying Childers, the famous 18th-century thoroughbred racehorse, nor with whatever became of him.

Words by RORY WATERMAN, with additions by ANNA MILON