Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project

A project exploring the origins, legacies, connections and futures of folk tales in Lincolnshire, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2/2024-7/2025) and hosted at Nottingham Trent University.



Our books:
Rory Waterman, Devils in the Details: On Location with Folk Tales in England’s Forgotten County (Five Leaves, 2026), exploring folk tales across Lincolnshire, and the places associated with them.
Anna Milon and Rory Waterman (eds), Lincolnshire Folk Tales Reimagined (Five Leaves, 2025), featuring fourteen of Lincolnshire’s finest writers reimagining local folk tales.

news
  • Dr Anna Milon Anna was the Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project throughout its AHRC-funded duration, from February 2024 until July 2025. She is now a Postdoctoral Research Associate on Project StoryMachine, so this is a ‘guest post’, but also not quite a guest post! The hamlet…

Latest Articles
  • The Metheringham Lass

    The Metheringham Lass

    A variant of the ‘phantom hitchhiker’ contemporary legend, common in twentieth-century and contemporary folklore concerning ghosts. The ghost of a young woman is said to…

  • The Centurion & the Witch

    The Centurion & the Witch

    According to this tale, a Centurion was marching his men along the Roman Ermine Street, towards what we call Newport Arch, the north gate of…

  • Tom Thumb

    Tom Thumb

    Tom Thumb is the famous hero of a comical fairytale, common in England since at least the early seventeenth century. It begins with a woman’s…

  • Tattercoats

    Tattercoats

    A rich, old lord, who lived in a palace by the sea, had no living wife or children, but he did have a granddaughter. However,…

About the project

‘Lincolnshire Folk Tales: Origins, Legacies, Connections, Futures’ is a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/Y003225/1), and is led by Dr Rory Waterman and the Research Fellow Dr Anna Milon in the School of Arts and Humanities at Nottingham Trent University. The project explores the origins, legacies, intertextual and social connections and futures of Lincolnshire folk tales (LFTs), and is intended to facilitate wider engagement with this heritage from writers, the general public, and scholars.