In anticipation of the Lincolnshire Folk Tales Reimagined anthology, to be published with Five Leaves Publishing in early 2025, in which a plethora of exceptional Lincolnshire authors give the county’s folk tales a fresh spin, we’re asking these authors to reflect on the project. This week, Alison Brackenbury shares her perspective on the county.

1.  Please introduce yourself and your connection to Lincolnshire.

I’m Alison Brackenbury. I call myself, when I’m being grand, ‘poet and broadcaster (born in 1953)’. But, for my first twenty years, I was a Lincolnshire villager. I now spend many of my waking hours being one again, as I am writing a non-fiction prose book called Village, about my childhood home. This includes the landowner who surveyed us all from his horse and the pioneering woman archaeologist who lived in a tall house filled with treasures, down Long Lane. This was Ethel Rudkin – whose friends called her ‘Peter’. Village will tell you why.

My villagers have proved surprisingly keen on social media – do look for us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter/X! They have also ‘flitted’ – that good Lincolnshire word! – to my website, at

https://alisonbrackenbury.wordpress.com/

 2. How would you describe your writing style?

As plain as possible. But lanes do twist. And all the best Lincolnshire stories begin with ‘your grandfeyther’. (Or grandmother!)

3. Could you talk a little about the folk tale you worked with for the anthology: why did you choose it and how did you adapt it?

Mrs Rudkin first scented it, of course. C. W. Phillips, whom she called simply ‘Phillips’ was excavating in Lincolnshire and heard of this story… but did not bother to send her all the details. (Did this man deserve to dig up Sutton Hoo?) She, of course, found out more, from a ‘waggoner’s wife’. I was desperate to learn of this legend, because it is based near Kirmington, a heartland of my ‘grandfeyther’s’ family. The Brackenburys had not passed it on to me – but a very kind Kirmington villager did so, via Facebook!

I realised, sadly, that there would be no room in Village for this compelling story from the far North of my county. So I immediately chose it for ‘Lincolnshire Folk Tales’.

I changed nothing in the story. The soldier’s ghost is still with us. But I felt I must set it within the life of its village, and to remember the Brackenburys of Kirmington, heroic survivors, who chose to forget…

 4. If you could ask any author, living or dead, to adapt any piece of Lincolnshire folklore, as you have done with the Gibbery Gap (or if you’d like to see a biography or fictionalised treatment of the life of Ethel Rudkin), whose adaptation would you most like to read and why?

Dickens would have seized with delight upon the story of Mrs Rudkin’s father. The man whose birth was celebrated by the building of a Hall, who spent his life expecting an inheritance which shrank to a few pieces of furniture…. But the great author might have to be dissuaded from one of his favourite plot devices – the complete collapse of what a friend called ‘the famous abode of Peter’. Mrs Rudkin’s house was also the home to her lovingly restored medieval jugs and her precious records of all she had been told by Lincolnshire villagers. 

5. Haslet is one of Lincolnshire’s delicacies, a kind of meatloaf with herbs, often made out of pork. Despite the similarity in names, it is far more obscure than its cousin, the Haggis. If the Haslet was a mythical creature, like the Wild Haggis, what kind of creature would it be?

My poor father could tell you. He loved food, especially Lincolnshire delicacies. And he was not fussy. He had endured cold fat bacon for childhood breakfasts, ‘reasty’ by winter’s end. But after the Second World War, all his village landlady could find to fill his sandwiches was ‘haslet’. The ‘bought’ 1940s version was a kind of brown cardboard, of very suspect origin. Every ‘dinner’ time my father, ploughboy turned farm lorry driver, carefully peeled back his bread, then hurled the hated confection into the nearest field. An obscure but lively sub-species! The Hedge-Hopping Haslet…