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J.C. Aldred

J.C. Aldred

J.C. Aldred writes about the folklore, mythology and dark history of the British Isles. Creatures, ballads, witches and buried landscapes. Published every Tuesday and Friday at The Chalk & Thorn.

Dartmoor: Myth and Legend on England's Wildest Moor

Dartmoor does not look like the rest of England. It sits in the middle of Devon like a different country — 368 square miles of upland blanket bog, granite outcrops, and ancient weather, rising to over 2,000 feet at its highest points and generating its own climate with apparent indifference

The Wicker Man and the Archaeology of Folk Horror

In the final scene of Robin Hardy's 1973 film, a police sergeant from the Scottish mainland stands inside a giant wicker construction on a clifftop on a fictional Hebridean island, watching it burn around him. The island's inhabitants sing and dance in a circle outside. He

Herne the Hunter: Forest God or Tudor Invention?

He appears in Windsor Great Park, according to local tradition, at times of national crisis. He rides a black horse. He carries a great hunting horn. Antlers grow from his head, or he wears a stag's skull as a helmet, or he leads a pack of spectral hounds

Jenny Greenteeth and the Danger of Still Water

The pond at the end of a Lancashire field. The village duck pond gone stagnant in summer, its surface covered in a thick mat of algae and duckweed. The still water beneath a mill race where the current drops away. These are Jenny Greenteeth's places — shallow, neglected, apparently

The Fens: England's Drowned Uncanny

There is a quality of light in the Fens that does not exist anywhere else in England. It comes off the water — the drains, the rivers, the flooded fields in winter — and it flattens everything it touches. Horizons become ambiguous. The sky takes up more of the view than feels

The Pendle Witches: What the Trial Records Actually Say

In August 1612, twenty people stood trial at Lancaster Assizes on charges of witchcraft. Twelve of them came from the area around Pendle Hill in Lancashire — a bleak stretch of moorland rising to just over 1,800 feet, visible for miles across the surrounding farmland. Ten of the Pendle accused

What Are the Child Ballads? A Beginner's Guide

The Child Ballads are 305 traditional British folk songs collected by Francis Child. A guide to the collection, its history, and why it still matters.

Black Shuck: The Devil Dog of East Anglia

The legend of Black Shuck — East Anglia's phantom black dog. From the 1577 Blythburgh church attack to modern sightings on the Suffolk coast.