Creatures

On the island of Westray in Orkney, there is a tradition that certain families are descended from seals. The story runs in various forms across the Northern Isles — Orkney, Shetland, and the outer edges of the Scottish coast — and it is always told with a particular quality of seriousness that

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

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