The wulver or wullver is a wolf-like humanoid being known in the folk tradition of the Shetland Islands. The folklorist Jessie Saxby, in her 1932 book on Shetland Traditional Lore, provides almost the sole report of it; she described it as:
“a creature like a man with a wolf’s head. He had short brown hair all over him. His home was a cave dug out of the side of a steep knowe, half-way up a hill. He didn’t molest folk if folk didn’t molest him. He was fond of catching and eating fish, and had a small rock in the deep water which is known to this day as the ‘Wulver’s Stane.’ There he would sit fishing sillaks and piltaks [saithe, or coalfish, aged up to twelve months or up to two years] for hour after hour. He was reported to have frequently left a few fish on the window-sill of some poor body.”
In his looks, there are some clear resonances with the wider British tradition of the black dog, or shuck, as well as the greater European concept of the werewolf. At the same time, though, the wulver seems to be quite happy to mind his own business- which is fishing, rather than scaring or menacing humans or, as is occasionally the case with the black dogs, acting as a kind of warning of death or disaster. The wulver has a link with the knolls in which the trow folk typically live, but the nature of this is not explained, as well as indications of some sort of transactional relationship to his human neighbours.
What we can observe. though, is that hybrid faery beasts that have animal bodies and human heads appear to be a feature of the folklore of the Celtic parts of the British Isles. On the Orkney islands, south of the Shetlands, there is the nuckelavee; this is a sea monster that’s part-horse and part-terrifying human. The nuckelavee has been described as having a huge head like a man’s but with a pig’s snout and a very wide maw, from which comes breath like steam. It has only one eye, which is as red as fire; its body is like a horse’s but with fins as well as legs. In the middle of the back there sprouts what seems to be a rider, except that he has no legs but rather grows directly from the horse. To add to all of this, the creature has no skin, just raw flesh with black blood visible flowing in yellow veins. Given the description, it need hardly be said that the nuckelavee is a dangerous and terrifying creature to encounter, in contrast to the relatively benign wulver.
On the Isle of Man, there are two comparable beings. The first is the fynoderee, a rough equivalent of the English hob or boggart that’s known to live on the land of about twelve farms on the island. They don’t tend to enter the farmhouses themselves, nor come near to them unless food is left out. They are rarely seen, because during the daytime they keep to the woods and glens. Manx folklorist Mona Douglas described the fynoderee as having “the body of a goat and the head and shoulders of a man; he may perhaps be called a sort of mythical goat.” At Grenaby on the island, the buggane called Jimmy Squarefoot has a pig’s head and face with two large tusks and has been known to charge at passers-by on the highway and even to carry off people to a cave. Another such ‘pig buggane’ menaces travellers on the highway at Lezayre. Once again, there is something of a split between the more ‘domesticated’ fynoderee and the wild and generally hostile buggane. Terrifying as we might naturally find a creature that’s part human and part beast, outward appearances apparently ought not to guide our judgment too much.
Another recent birthday present, I saw this book and immediately knew that I wanted it, as it seemed to chime so well with my interests in Albion as a faery realm and the concepts of genius lociand the idea of the spirits of the land. I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that the text is written by Mat Osman, better known to me as the bassist in Brit pop stars Suede, but who turns out to have a literary and historical side. Osman’s brief poetic musings on aspects of English culture- stones, folklore, magic- and so on, are matched by some beautiful images selected by Stephen Ellcock.
Osman writes that “All traditions were new once, no family is truly young, England will grind every story beneath the harrow, back into the soil, and let strange wild blooms burst forth.” Over centuries we have absorbed and assimilated concepts and traditions from across the world and recreated them as something uniquely our own.
In his chapter on ‘Enchantment,’ Osman considers our faery-lore and describes the existence of two Englands, those of the mortals and of the ‘magic folk’, the latter being an “upside down England… as cruel and capricious as this world… but home to wild, whirling overthrow and dancing madness.” He writes how- “There are rare places where the two worlds meet… In madness and intoxication. In the shadow of rings of trees… In the heart of fire… But our time in the other world is short, too short, and it’s only in dreams that we ever see our true home.” I have often described these liminal places, where we may enter Faery wittingly or not. Faery rings are, of course, the commonest examples.
Yard Broom Shuck
The volume is a kind of coffee table book in a way, but with a thought provoking collection of really lovely art works that range from Richard Dadd and Samuel Palmer through to modern invocations of our mystical and magical past. I especially loved John Douglas Piper’s contemporary sculptures of East Anglian shucks or shugs made from rubbish picked up on farms. Also powerful are Dan Hillier’s prints, such as Fount (2021) which is used on the cover of the book.
Cousin of Yard Broom Shuck
The book is published by Watkins and is to be enjoyed again and again.
St Thomas a Becket church, Pucklechurch, Gloucestershire
A new subject for this blog is the way in which the faeries are linked to the names the British have given to places in their landscape. Many of these date back to early medieval times (Anglo-Saxon) and indicate once more the very longstanding faery associations with the land.
Whilst quite a few of these names relate to prominent features like hills, streams and pools, many refer to much smaller, less significant and, even, transitory locations. A large proportion of these are field names- used in the past but highly vulnerable to changes of land-use; the consolidation of fields or their conversion to intensive arable have, over the last century, done away with the need to identify various small pastures, meadows and such like. Valuable place name evidence has therefore been lost.
Subtle landscape features were also labelled in the past by those intimately acquainted with the area they lived in and used, and these highly local names may also be forgotten over the generations: Poflet, in Devon, for example, describes a dip down to a stream which Puck frequented; in late Tudor times there was a Hop Gap at Methley in the West Riding of Yorkshire- a space in a fence where you might meet Hob. Such localised names are very vulnerable to being lost.
Faeries, pixies & elves
I’ll start by looking at the names including the element ‘fairy.’ These are, in fact, quite rare and are mostly of rather recent origin, the majority only apparently dating from Victorian times (making you suspect that the choice of the name could have been more literary or romantic than any reflection of local superstition). As readers may be aware, this late usage is probably to be expected in any event, in that ‘fairy’ is a word derived from French and a relative late comer to the English language. Confirmed fae origins may be found for Fairy Yard, a field at Ashton on Mersey in Cheshire, the Fairy Close and Hill at Wragby in West Yorkshire and Fairy Cross, at Trent in Dorset. As the English Place Name Survey remarks of these, they seem to denote places renowned for being haunted by faeries.
A lot of the apparent ‘fairy’ place-names actually come from other words such as ‘ferry’ or ‘fair.’ Too ready an interpretation without tracing back the name to its origins can often produce misleading results. The writer Jabez Allies, in his Roman and Saxon Antiquities and Folklore of Worcestershire, of 1856, was rather guilty of this. His pride in his home county and its rich traditions encouraged him to find faery names everywhere: he enumerated thirty parishes where there are places named after Puck, for instance, and another twenty-six in which the goblin Hob is commemorated. Sadly, modern scholarship is not so generous in its attributions.
Interestingly, names incorporating the element ‘pixie’ are equally rare. The rectory at Durweston in Dorset is recorded as being named Pexy’s Hole, the hollow haunted or frequented by pixies, in 1584. There are other examples, but these are first recorded at a later date. As with the more recent ‘fairy’ names, these suggest a conscious choice of label rather than a traditional significance.
Names that include the Anglo-Saxon aelf, ‘elf,’ are also surprisingly absent. We find that, in 1285, Eldon Hill in Derbyshire was recorded as Elvedon, the elves’ hill. Alfin Hall at Agbrigg in the West Riding of Yorkshire speaks for itself. The lost Alvehou at Tetney in Lincolnshire and Alveleg at Crich in Derbyshire were the elves’ mound and clearing respectively. The ‘alvysch thornys’- the ‘elves’ thorn trees’ are recorded in 1319 as a field name at Milton Abbas in Dorset. Perhaps the most interesting is Elva Hill, near to Setmurthy in Cumbria. In 1488 the place was called Elf How; it’s the site of a circle of fifteen stones, which were probably the retaining wall for a cairn or burial chamber.
The church & hall, Shuckburgh, Warwickshire
Goblins
There is a sort of goblin now called the ‘shuck’ or ‘shock’ (from the Anglo-Saxon scucca) and its presence is marked in at least sixteen names, denoting woods, streams, hills and marshes, from the east of England up to Cheshire. Outliers include Shobrooke in Devon and Shucklow Warren in Buckinghamshire.
Hob is another good example of the potential pitfalls in ascribing faery origins, as many names are more likely to derive from the personal name Hobbe than from the supernatural being. Nonetheless, at least eighteen genuine ‘Hob’ names can be identified, concentrated in the north of England and often related to natural features, such as hills, fields and- in one case- stones, the Hobb Stones at Tankersley in South Yorkshire. Other names concentrated in the north of England are boggart and boggle, applied to fields and woods in West Yorkshire, Cheshire and Westmoreland. A particular boggart known in the north was ‘Old Skrat,’ and he is named in at least nine places, mainly woods and hills.
Skrat Haigh Wood, Barnsley, South Yorkshire
Puck
The other goblin name with clear Anglo-Saxon roots is ‘Puck,’ from the Old English puca. This name is the most common faery toponym in England, being found in at least fifty-three places, of which a third are in Gloucestershire and over seventy per cent in the South and South West of England. About a quarter of these names are associated with pits or holes, alongside a scatter of hills, streams, pools, moors and woods.
Boggart House, Esholt, near Bradford (from the estate agent’s details…)
What’s especially interesting to me is how certain names are noticeably linked to human structures. Eleven per cent of the ‘hob’ place-names are linked with houses and farms; 22% are lanes. In the case of ‘puck’ place-names, the figures break down as follows: 17% applied to buildings (examples include Puckscroft in Surrey and Puckrup and Puckham, both in Gloucestershire) and 17% to roadways, paths and so on (for instance, Puckstye, Sussex, Puckpath, Gloucestershire, Pockford, Surrey and, in Warwickshire, Powke Lane and Poukelone). Whilst it’s fairly easy to imagine that a certain lane might get its name because it was a lonely, dark place where you might run into a goblin at night, the dwellings, barns and sheds named after him are much less expected.
Although we have relatively few boggle and boggart names, 12% of these apply to roads and 12% too to houses. This is especially interesting, as there is a strong tradition in West Yorkshire of ‘boggart houses,’ buildings that are renowned for being haunted by a spirit. The reasons for so many places like Pit House, in Dorset (Puck House originally), Hob Cote in Keighley and Puck Shipton (Puck’s sheep shed) in Wiltshire seem to be twofold: either they were specifically inhabited by such a spirit or they had been built on a spot that was already very strongly associated with sightings of one of the goblins. Either way, it’s remarkable evidence of people living alongside their Good Neighbours over hundreds and hundreds of years.
Summary
Overall, faery derived names are scattered quite evenly across England. They primarily (but not exclusively) relate to landscape features and give us an impression of a land as widely settled by the Good Folk as by humans. Our Good Neighbours were just that- living in the countryside in close proximity to their mortal kin- and sometimes residing far more familiarly than that, sharing a house or co-habiting in a farm.
This posting is adapted from part of a chapter in my new book, The Spirits of the Land- Faeries and the Soul of Britain (2022)- available as a paperback and e-book through Amazon.
During a recent talk I gave on my latest book, Faery Mysteries, at the Atlantis bookshop in London, one attendee enquired if faeries were ever known to follow individuals around. On the spot, I could think of just one example of this happening, but subsequently a range of other stalking faes occurred to me and it seemed worthwhile sharing these.
My first example concerns a witch’s ‘imp’ or familiar which, as I’ve mentioned previously, appears to be form of faery. A rag and bone man at Horseheath in Cambridgeshire was asked by a local witch where he was going. He told her to mind her own business and went on his way. After travelling about about half a mile, however, he realised that he was being followed by one of her imp-mice, which was running along behind him in the hedgerow. He gave chase, but the faster he ran, the imp would gain speed and stay ahead of him until they got back to the witch’s home.
The same area of Eastern England is especially well known for its ‘black dogs’- apparitions of faery beasts. It is very common for these creatures to appear at night and to pursue lonely travellers- typically following them along a limited stretch of roadway before vanishing. At Geldeston, in Norfolk, a black dog was known to prowl which was sometimes as large as a horse, with fiery eyes and foaming jaws. It would follow travellers along the highway leading towards Bungay, growling fiercely if you tried to turn back and occasionally dragging a victim along by their clothes. The ‘shuck’ of Methwold on the eastern edge of the Fens is another good example of the behaviour I’m describing here. It would never emerge fully from the shadows of the road side, so that a lonely late-night traveller would only ever be aware of a shape whose red luminous eyes glowed in the dark. The shuck would walk softly when the pedestrian walked, and would stop if she or he stopped. This unpleasant sense of being tracked slowly overwhelmed the victim until they were trembling and almost paralysed. Then they would make a precipitous flight- with the shuck loping steadily along behind.
A hound as a big as a cow, with yellow eyes and lolling tongue, is reported to haunt Godley Green in Cheshire. It pads along beside walkers, howling and emitting a sound of chains, but it is quite insubstantial. If you try to touch or strike it, your blow will pass right through it, unimpeded.
In Wales, the spectral hound is called the gwyllgi, also known as the ‘dog of darkness’ or the ‘hound of twilight’ and it typically haunts lonely highways, appearing to those walking alone late at night. Either the mastiff will appear in a road, blocking the way, baring its teeth and barking fearsomely, or it may walk beside a traveller for a distance. The gwyllgi can paralyse travellers with the gaze of its blazing eyes; quite often these dogs will then turn into large bodies of fire.
Generally, the only apparent purpose of these creatures is to terrify pedestrians, but some have a prophetic or warning function. In the 1970s a woman living at Buxton in Norfolk was walking past the church when the clock struck four. A large black dog appeared beside her, which she tried to pat, but it almost immediately vanished again. A few days later, she learned that her brother had died at exactly that moment. It should be added too that the beasts aren’t always awful companions. During the Second World War a young airman met the large black dog that was often seen at Swanton Morley in Norfolk, and reported a great sense of friendliness as it ran beside him as he cycled along, quite at odds with most witnesses’ reports.
Finally, we turn to more conventionally humanoid faeries, the faery lovers called lhiannan shee on the Isle of Man and leannan sith in Scotland. These females can become attached to an individual and almost impossible to shake off. Here are a few examples.
A man lived in Surby, on the Isle of Man, with his wife, who one evening was away from home. He went out to meet her at the time he expected her to be returning across the fields. Instead, he met a faery woman whom he thought it was his wife, and spoke to her. This contact created a link which meant that she followed him for long time afterwards. In another Manx case, a man called Mickleby met a faery woman at a dance. When the dancing was over, she followed Mickleby home and haunted him ever after. He went abroad, hoping to leave her behind, but she followed him wherever he went- over sea and land. It was widely supposed he must have kissed her, and it was that contact that gave her the power to haunt him, and to go across the ocean with him.
We should note the fact here that crossing water in these cases doesn’t seem to be a problem for the faery lover. A man from Barra called Lachlann had a fairy lover who used to visit him nightly, to the point that he was becoming exhausted by her and was beginning to fear her affection. He decided to flee to Canada to escape her, but she quickly found out, and could be heard lamenting by women milking the cattle at evening on the meadows. Nonetheless, when Lachlann reached Nova Scotia, he found the fairy had followed him there (Evans Wentz, Fairy Faith, 112).
Although we generally reserve the word ‘haunt’ for ghosts and suchlike spirits, it will be clear that for some faeries and faery beings the verb is entirely appropriate- along with the sensations of fear and alarm that go with that.
British Fairies 