Breathing Life into Lost Things
How Lincolnshire’s folk heritage has influenced my writing.
Not so long ago, I would have found my love of folklore a bit embarrassing to talk about. Folklore is fairies and goblins and heavy-handed cautionary tales to keep kids alert to strangers, particularly if they are ‘wizened.’ Love-worn tales probably first told to you while being tucked in, but implausible, quaint.
That changed for me in 2020. It was then, midway through the first lockdown, that I learned of my dad’s death. The before and after of this event has become my life’s dividing line. The stomach-knotted disorientation will be familiar to anyone who has known bereavement by suicide, but also in the mix were ripples that might be described as useful, even positive. First, the almost total loss of self-consciousness about my desire to try and write professionally, and second, an overnight lesson in the importance of story.
I grew up in a storied land. Cleethorpes, North East Lincolnshire, lies on the curve of shoreline where the Humber estuary feeds into the North Sea and, like lots of somewhat remote coastal places, has many regional beliefs and traditions. My dad lived his whole life there, a ‘Meggie’ through and through (named perhaps for a former ‘Meg’s Island’ separated by a coastal moat, or just to differentiate us from the ‘Skeggies’ of Skegness). One of my earliest memories is going with Dad to see the Grimsby Morris side. I found them mesmerising, especially the slightly sinister hobby figure, towering and black-cloaked and with the head of a boar. Back home, Mum had to make me my own Morris costume from old bits of tablecloth.
I now live in London, but I still try to catch the Morris when I’m visiting, during the Folk and Cider Festival or on their annual Boxing Day performances. It is in the small towns of this country where folk culture clings on, increasingly with white knuckles. The fact is that Lincolnshire is just sort of flat and forgotten about, somewhere you might drive through on the way to somewhere else. But you only have to glance at these pages to know that England’s second largest county has an extraordinarily rich folk history. Cleethorpes alone claims a ‘bottomless’ pond that is said to be haunted by the lives it has claimed, and a sea monster widely sighted and reported to be lurking in the Humber estuary. Both shores of the Humber are good places to find hagstones, the naturally-formed amulets of witches.
That first lockdown was the longest I have gone without visiting, and it was then I began to look closer at the tales and traditions that I had loved as a kid. First as a kind of scrap book just for me, but then to share with others, a project which became my social pages Folk Horror Magpie. Out of the community I built, there came a hazy plan to pitch a book based around the customs of the English folk calendar. Then dad died, and the direction of my research became naturally steered by the way I felt and the home I missed.
The book that eventually came out of that period was The Bleeding Tree : A Pathway Through Grief Guided by Forests, Folktales and the Ritual Year, and it is all about folklore and folk rituals around death and bereavement. My family’s deep roots in Lincolnshire feature heavily, as do the many premature and violent ends to be found in our family tree. Irish immigrants drawn to the industry of the sea: smugglers, merchant trawlermen, recruits to wartime minesweeping operations. Working class men, like my dad — and their stories helped me to understand his. Theirs was dangerous work undertaken because there were few viable alternatives, coastal north Lincolnshire epitomising the cut-off and overlooked. My family’s heavy inheritance is a feature of the county’s very landscape.
From the people and stories of Lincolnshire, I turned to wider folk beliefs from across the world to help me comprehend the complexity of suicidal behaviour, but also to appreciate the human life behind each statistic. Folk tales are how people of past times metabolised the raw data of their lives, taking their pain and narrativising it. In this small action they sought to make it comprehensible. The passing down of stories also gives voice to the majority underclass of history, tales shaped like a hagstone by an unknown number of unknown authors. These stories may tell us how ordinary people interpreted grief and loss but, more than this, their persistence offers consolation during the very worst of times. Stories are proof that people endured to tell the tale.
Repeating stories told to me while collecting seashells at low tide, or tucked up at bedtime, or even transmitted through traditional dance while wearing a homemade costume of ribbons and bells, is as much a statement of perseverance and love as talking about my dad whenever I have the opportunity. When we participate in and celebrate our shared folk culture we are breathing life into lost things. In my writing, I am lucky to be able to do this. I’m currently working on an anthology of folklore-themed short fiction which will be out in 2025. My own contribution is, of course, set in Lincolnshire.
This article first appeared as a guest post on the Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project website. Visit the archive here to explore the origins, legacies, connections and futures of Lincolnshire folk tales.
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