Detail map
The United Kingdom
7 entries in 7 subareas: 4 at grade A, 3 at grade B. The points fall where the entry was collected, not where the story is set. Hover a point to see the subarea, click it to open the entry.
The entries, in brief
The folklore of the United Kingdom documented in this atlas: Kelpie, Each-uisge, Cŵn Annwn, Black Shuck, Spring-heeled Jack, Will-o'-the-wisp and Selkie. Every entry is placed on the map at the point where it was collected or attested — not where the story is set — and carries its declared grade of documentation (4 at grade A, 3 at grade B), with the sources it comes from. The 7 subareas are not an administrative division: folklore lives in cultural areas, which rarely coincide with state borders.
Cŵn Annwn A
A pack of spectral hounds, often white with red ears, a colour combination that in Celtic tradition indicates the Otherworld and death. They are led by Arawn, king of Annwn, in the First Branch of the Mabinogi, and in later…
Each-uisge A
Katharine Briggs calls it perhaps the fiercest and most dangerous of all the water horses. It appears as a magnificent horse and, once mounted, at the first sight of water sets off at a gallop towards the loch while its skin…
Kelpie A
A powerful black horse that haunts rivers, burns and deep pools and offers itself as a mount; whoever mounts it stays stuck to its back and is dragged under water and devoured. In some versions its hooves are turned backwards.…
Spring-heeled Jack A
A night assailant who leaps walls and hedges as if he had springs in his heels. On 8 January 1838 a letter signed «a resident of Peckham» reaches the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Cowan; it is read in public session at the…
Black Shuck B
An enormous black dog, often as big as a calf, with eyes burning like coals and in some versions a single eye. He travels country lanes, embankments, churchyards and the coast, running in silence or with a heavy tread, and to…
Will-o'-the-wisp B
The English sources describe a light low over the water, pale or bluish, that shows itself at night above the peat bogs and moves in jerks. Whoever follows it always finds it a little further on, and in the tales he ends in the…
Selkie B
In Orkney and Shetland it is the seal that comes ashore, slips off its skin and becomes a woman or a man. Dennison insisted: not mermaids but selkie folk, and only the large seals were held to have the power of changing. The…
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