Yallery Brown is mud-brown, tiny boggart, apparently made of earthy matter, who sports an extremely long beard. One summer’s day, a young and feckless farm labourer, Tom, is walking to the farm, and taking the long way round through fields, when he hears what he thinks is the cry of a baby coming from a wood beside the field. He discovers Yallery Brown, supine and pinned down by a big flat rock. Tom removes the rock, and Yallery offers to do him a favour in return, but demands never to be thanked. The lad opts for help with his work, and disaster ensues.

The tale’s first written retelling was collected by Marie Clothilde Balfour, and published (in Lincolnshire dialect) in the three-part ‘Legends of the Cars’, Folklore (1891). According to Joseph Jacobs, who retold the tale in More English Fairy Tales (1894), Balfour was told the story by a farm labourer who gave his name to the story’s hapless protagonist. More recently, Maureen James, in her 2013 PhD thesis Investigating the Legends of the Carrs, has plausibly traced this original teller, suggesting he was probably a farm labourer called Thomas Laming from Hibaldstow; Balfour lived a couple of miles away in Redbourne while she collected local folk tales. James’s precis of the tale is available here. Her excellent research uncovers that the likely location of the tale’s action is in this area (traversed by a public footpath), though it is not obvious which woodland is being referred to in the tale, assuming there was one and that it still exists. It could conceivably be Stonepit Plantation, south-west of here, which is more likely than the wooded route of the Beck to the south. However, James notes that ‘the estate plan of 1917 shows areas of woodland along this route’ that no longer exist.

Though a fairly simple tale, ‘Yallery Brown’ raises many meaty moral quandaries, and perhaps for that reason it has remained relatively popular among storytellers and writers, especially since the 1960s. Joseph Jacobs brought it to a wider audience (and largely standardised the language) in More English Fairy Tales (1894). More recent written retellings include Alan Garner’s, in Book of Goblins (1969), Katharine M. Briggs’s, in Folk Tales of Britain (1970), Kevin Crossley-Holland’s, in The Old Stories (1997), and Mick Gowar’s Yallery Brown (2004), published as a standalone for primary school children, but with the darkest of all possible endings, as Tom is pinned for eternity under the rock where he found the boggart. Gowar relocates it to Suffolk. Rory Waterman includes a modernised adaptation of the tale in Come Here to This Gate (2024), moving the setting to Chamber’s Farm Wood between Bardney and Wragby, and renaming the protagonist Will, in dubious honour of a man local to that area. Benjamin Peel has also written a modernised rendition, in prose, which is included in the anthology Not of this Wold (2025).

Words by RORY WATERMAN