This story appears in Mabel Peacock’s Taales Fra’ Linkisheere (1889), and is a retelling in thick dialect of the Grimm Brothers’ 1819 The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear (or maybe their slightly earlier Good Bowling and Card Playing, 1812). It is reset into a local milieu, and is one of the most entertaining things I’ve read in a long time.  It’s rendered quite down-to-earth, despite the fantastic elements: the hero isn’t stupid like in the original; he spends three nights in a haunted mill rather than a castle; his reward is the miller’s daughter, not a princess; the apparitions  and boggards he encounters have a local air about them (a Black Dog and a Tatterfoal-like horse). Most interestingly, the tale is one of the few where Peacock sets the scene with named real places, and starts as follows:

“It was a pedler man as tell’d me this here bit, wonce when I was footin’ it fra Scunthrup to Ketton [Kirton in Lindsey], an’ cum’d up wi’ him wheare roäd runs thrif Sir John woods. He was fra foreign parts, I reckon, an’ a ootlandish waay o’ tungin’ his wo’ds he’d gotten, bud awiver he was good enif to mak’ oot if ye nobbud took noatice.”

This would be Twigmoor Woods, just off the old Kirton road (now the B1398), owned by the Nelthorpe family of Scawby. [Editor’s note: we’ve dropped this pin on a public car park, from which you can take woodland walks.] Several of them were called John. After this introduction, the pedlar’s tale is told about an unspecified other location, but as I say it retains a local feel. 

Words by TIM DAVIES