Welcome

to the website of the AHRC-funded project

LINCOLNSHIRE FOLK TALES

Origins, Legacies, Connections, Futures

Please look around, and get involved. The project’s funded period was February 2024 to July 2025 inclusive, but we remain keen to increase interest in, and understanding of, Lincolnshire’s rich and still constantly evolving heritage of folk tales!

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a folk tale is any tale that is ‘of, pertaining to, current or existing among, the people; traditional, of the common (local) people’. In A Dictionary of English Folklore, Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud note that ‘the term can be used either broadly or narrowly’, the broad usage including legends and memorates, which purport to be true and/or historical but aren’t (or are they?), or can’t be verified. We prefer, and use, the inclusive definition.

We are principally interested in those tales that remain current, or that have developed or been brought to Lincolnshire in living memory. Our aim is to make records of these folk tales, to encourage them to be remembered and retold, and to inspire the continued artistic development and reinterpretation of folk tales, both orally and in writing.

This will take several forms: public events and workshops throughout Lincolnshire that bring musicians, storytellers and other speakers together, an academic symposium at Nottingham Trent University, an anthology of reinterpreted Lincolnshire folk tales from a selection of the finest authors associated with the county, a future critical book exploring folk tales and the locations that inspired and continue to inspire them, and this website – among other things! Please look around here, and get involved however you see fit. We are very keen to hear from you!

Antique Map of Lincolnshire, Miller W, 1845.

We are grateful to the AHRC for funding this project between February 2024 and july 2025, enabling it to do all of the tremendous things it did, and to Nottingham Trent University for hosting it, and are proud to have had partnerships with the following superb organisations: Adverse Camber, Heritage Lincolnshire, Lincolnshire Life, University of Lincoln Library, and Five Leaves Publications.