My persistent readers,

I am obliged to begin with an unfortunate admission: Percival remains here.

When I first agreed to take my nephew on for what was described as a brief period of work experience, I imagined he would spend a fortnight learning the rudiments of folklore journalism before departing to inflict himself upon some other unsuspecting editor.

Instead, he has somehow entered his third month and more alarmingly still, readers continue to write in his favour. Several have complimented his articles: one lady described him as “delightful” while another requested that he be taken on as Chief Writer.

I have elected to treat these letters as an anomaly and I should make it perfectly clear that I have not lost control of this publication.

The practical difficulty now lies in finding the young man suitable accommodation; he simply cannot remain in my villa indefinitely.

Quite apart from the alarming rate at which he consumes biscuits, his investigations into ghosts, fairy hills and haunted marshes have resulted in a marked decline in what we refer to as “presentability”.

He returns home smelling faintly of damp churches, extinguished candles and vegetation that has no business attaching itself to respectable trousers.

One evening last week I discovered he had convened a séance in my parlour.

Not because he wished to communicate with the departed, you understand, but because he “wanted to see whether anything happened.”

Something did: I happened and the participants were shown the door with commendable efficiency.

As for myself, I have largely avoided unnecessary exertion during this latest spell of oppressive heat.

Summer remains my least favourite of the seasons, encouraging an entirely unhealthy enthusiasm for sunshine, picnics and optimism.

Even the ghosts appear less industrious, preferring, one suspects, to haunt only after dusk when temperatures become more agreeable.

I have therefore occupied my time in more sensible pursuits, including the colour-coding of my taxidermied insect collection, sheltering behind heavy curtains during the brighter hours and, on several occasions, standing beside lonely lakes wearing black and gazing thoughtfully into the middle distance.

The effect upon passing walkers has been most gratifying. Several have fled and one gentleman appeared quite overcome and required the assistance of his wife.

It is pleasing to know that standards have not entirely slipped.

Fortunately, we have now crossed the midpoint of the year, the evenings are shortening almost imperceptibly and darkness is, once again, advancing upon us with admirable punctuality.

I find this deeply reassuring. Autumn possesses a seriousness of purpose that summer has always lacked, and before long the mist, the fallen leaves and the longer nights will return to restore the world to something approaching good sense.

Until next month, avoid amateur séances, never trust a fairy offering favourable terms and, should you glimpse a solitary lady dressed in black beside a secluded stretch of water, do remember that staring is extraordinarily impolite.

Ever yours,

Ada Nemesis

I am Percival Nemesis, temporary assistant editor, occasional correspondent and now, somewhat alarmingly, three months into what my aunt continues to describe as a temporary internship. I have begun to suspect that the word ‘temporary’ possesses a specialised editorial meaning with which the wider public is unfamiliar. My responsibilities have expanded to include ghosts, spectral hounds, haunted architecture, deadline management, tea-making, parcel carrying, unexplained errands and once, for reasons still unclear, holding a stuffed heron whilst Aunt Ada labelled moths. I remain unpaid, though Aunt assures me I am accumulating experience at a rate that will one day prove invaluable. Regrettably, experience remains unacceptable tender at bakeries, boarding houses and, rather disappointingly, public houses.

Extraordinary crimson-faced apparition repeatedly reported at Rollesby

By Percival Nemesis, Manor House Spectre Correspondent, Temporary Ballad Examiner and Opponent of Domestic Disagreements Involving Carpentry Tools

Residents of Rollesby may once have become accustomed to a rather unusual monthly engagement.

Not with the vicar, nor with the postman but with two ghosts.

The former Rollesby Hall, a handsome house dating from the middle of the 16th century before meeting the altogether less romantic wrecking ball during the 1950s (news imparted to me via my séance), was long reputed to harbour a pair of restless spirits known simply as Old Red Face and his unfortunate wife.

According to local tradition, the pair emerged upon the second Monday of every month at midnight, an arrangement which suggests that even ghosts appreciate a reliable timetable.

Precisely what befell the couple depends entirely upon whom one chooses to believe.

Fortunately, Norfolk possesses antiquaries.

The indefatigable Walter Rye recorded the legend in The Recreations of a Norfolk Antiquary, having himself borrowed the account from the 18th-century Norfolk historian Antony Norris of Barton Turf, thereby demonstrating that folklore, much like family recipes, is generally passed from one enthusiast to another.

The oldest version identifies Old Red Face as one of the Danish raiders, one of the feared “Red Danes”, who supposedly slew the Saxon lord of the manor during one of the many invasions of the Norfolk coast.

His victim’s wife, overcome with grief, was thereafter condemned to follow him through eternity, wringing her hands as they wandered the hall together.

It is an undeniably melancholy arrangement, although I am given to understand that following one’s husband about whilst quietly expressing disapproval is a pastime not entirely unknown among the living.

The alternative explanation is considerably less Danish and considerably more domestic.

Here, Old Red Face was said to have been a Cavalier whose wife possessed an enthusiasm for purchasing clothing and gewgaws beyond the allowance he had provided.

For readers unfamiliar with the term, a gewgaw is a decorative trifle of little practical use: Aunt Ada possesses rather a great many of them. Indeed, I sometimes suspect the structural integrity of her house depends less upon bricks than upon the mutual support of curiosities leaning against one another.

Walter Rye records, with a degree of practicality one rather admires, that the husband allegedly resolved the disagreement by cutting off his wife’s head with a handsaw, the resulting spray of blood permanently staining his face and earning him the memorable title of Old Red Face.

Rye himself was unconvinced.

While remarking that some might not consider punishment for extravagant shopping entirely disproportionate, he observed that removing a human head with so modest an implement seemed, from a purely engineering perspective, exceedingly unlikely.

One cannot help warming to a man who approached ghost stories with such careful attention to carpentry.

The Hall itself was once occupied by the Ensor family, a name which local tradition cheerfully insisted derived from the word “handsaw”.

This appears to be precisely the sort of explanation communities invent after sufficiently long, dull evenings around the fire. Whether linguists would agree remains doubtful.

The legend inspired a ballad which survived into the early twentieth century:

All round the rooms of Rollesby Hall, Roameth the wraith of a red-faced Dane, While from the blade of his good brown sword, Drippeth the blood of a murdered Thane. Follows him closely the dead man’s wife, Who loved her husband better than life. So will they walk till long years wane, And a brown sword cuts through the charm again.

As though one literary mystery were insufficient, another has attached itself to Rollesby Hall.

In the 1980s, Bernard Davies of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London suggested that the Hall may have inspired Donnithorpe Hall in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Gloria Scott, the very adventure that first awakened Sherlock Holmes’ enthusiasm for detective work.

Davies reconstructed Victorian railway journeys, calculated horse-and-trap travelling times and even examined the direction of the setting sun in pursuit of his theory.

Holmes, however, never investigated Old Red Face. Had he done so, he would probably have concluded that there are only two possibilities.

Either Rollesby was haunted by a blood-soaked Danish invader pursued for eternity by the widow of the man he murdered...or somebody once spent far too long trying to explain why a ghost with a red face kept appearing on the second Monday of every month.

As is so often the case in folklore, both explanations possess their admirers.

Another Report on the Progress of Shuck Eight

By Percival Nemesis, Temporary Assistant Editor, Acting Deadline Observer and Individual Who Appears To Be The Only Person Concerned By Calendars

It has once again been brought to my attention, by a frankly astonishing number of correspondents, that readers would appreciate a further update on the progress of Shuck Eight: Fairies.

I would respectfully observe that I already issued an update. Twice.

One might reasonably suppose that an update would remain current for at least a little while before another became necessary, but apparently this is not the accepted editorial practice.

Readers continue to stop me in the street, send letters and, on one particularly memorable occasion, interrupt my luncheon beside an otherwise excellent tray of sandwiches to enquire whether the forthcoming fairy edition has finally appeared.

It has not.

The good news is that we are now, I am delighted to report yet again, within sight of the finish.

There remain only a handful of pages to design before Shuck Eight can finally flutter into the world like one of the very creatures it celebrates.

As I value both my internship and my continued occupation of my Aunt’s spare bedroom, I will simply remark that certain editors possess an admirably relaxed relationship with deadlines.

When I miss one, I receive a lecture while if Aunt Ada misses one, she announces that time itself is an artificial construct and continues drinking tea.

This has proven difficult to challenge.

Nevertheless, I remain optimistic: the pages are being assembled, the final details are falling into place, the editorial sighing has become noticeably less frequent.

I therefore feel quietly confident that readers shall soon have Shuck Eight in their hands.

Should that prediction prove inaccurate, I shall naturally issue another progress report as I understand they have become rather popular.

Peculiar ecclesiastical bell-ringing reported from the vanished village of Egmere

By Percival Nemesis, Pilgrimage Correspondent, Temporary Campanologist and Firm Believer That Invisible Travellers Should Still Observe Reasonable Hours

There are many unsettling sounds one might reasonably expect to encounter in the Norfolk countryside after dark.

Owls. Foxes. The occasional hedgehog conducting what sounds remarkably like an argument – or a love affair - with a biscuit packet.

Church bells, however, generally require a church and this is where the tale that regards Egmere, near Walsingham, becomes unnecessarily complicated.

Just a few miles from Little Walsingham stand the lonely remains of St Edmund’s Church, all that survives of a medieval village almost entirely erased by plague, changing fortunes and an enthusiastic preference for sheep over people.

The houses have vanished, the villagers have vanished, even much of the church has vanished – and yet, bells, according to local tradition, continue to ring.

Not great peals from the tower, but the soft chiming of dozens of little handbells drifting through the darkness.

Witnesses speak of hearing an invisible procession approaching the shrine at Walsingham, the pilgrims themselves nowhere to be seen, only the gentle music of their journey carrying across the fields.

The explanation, naturally, depends upon which legend one prefers.

Some say the bells belong to medieval pilgrims making their final approach to England’s greatest shrine dedicated to Our Lady.

Egmere stood upon one of the principal routes into Walsingham and would have formed one of the final stopping places before travellers reached the Holy House itself.

For medieval pilgrims, bells were far more than cheerful accessories.

Some were purchased as treasured souvenirs to prove a pilgrimage had been completed or worn to drive away evil spirits, witches and whatever else might be lurking beside lonely roads after sunset.

Entire groups reportedly rang bells, blew horns and sang as they travelled, partly for celebration and partly so nobody became separated along the journey.

One suspects it also made locating the slower members of the party considerably easier.

Others tell a sadder story: they say the invisible bells belong not to healthy pilgrims but to sufferers of leprosy.

Church law required those afflicted with the disease to carry bells or wooden clappers to warn others of their approach.

The sound that drifts across Egmere, therefore, may not be one of joyful expectation at all, but of lonely souls making one final desperate journey in search of miraculous healing.

It is difficult to imagine a more melancholy procession.

The Black Death devastated Egmere during 14th century, reducing a thriving village to little more than a memory.

As the years passed, sheep replaced people, cottages disappeared, the church became a barn and eventually even that fell into ruin.

Today only the tower stands watch over empty fields where hundreds of footsteps once passed each year on their way to Walsingham.

Perhaps places remember and after enough centuries, perhaps roads grow accustomed to pilgrims and fields become reluctant to surrender the sounds they once heard every day.

Or perhaps, on quiet evenings when the wind is carrying just enough moisture from the coast and the light begins to fade, imagination simply becomes unusually sensitive to distant noises.

This correspondent has no firm opinion.

Although I will confess that should I ever hear the faint ringing of unseen handbells approaching through the mist, I shall almost certainly step politely to one side of the path.

Shucks of (near) Norfolk (actually Suffolk, AGAIN): The Galleytrot

By Percival Nemesis, Black Dog Correspondent, Temporary Suffolk Apologist and Firm Believer That Spectral Hounds Ought to Settle Upon One Appearance

Readers have once again caught me venturing across the Norfolk border: I can only apologise.

I am fully aware that a column entitled Shucks of Norfolk is expected to concern itself primarily with Norfolk. Yet Suffolk persists in producing giant ghostly dogs with an enthusiasm that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

This month we encounter perhaps the most perplexing member of East Anglia’s ever-expanding family of supernatural hounds.

The Galleytrot. Quite what a Galleytrot actually is depends entirely upon whom one asks: some describe an enormous white dog, others insist it is black, some say it lives beneath hollow hills alongside the fairies, others report it stalking churchyards, lonely lanes and marshes in pursuit of the unwary.

As methods of identification go, this leaves something to be desired.

Nevertheless, there seems little doubt that for generations the people of Suffolk have been entirely convinced that something large, canine and deeply unpleasant has been wandering about after dark.

The creature is particularly associated with Walberswick and the melancholy remains of old Dunwich, where stories of phantom dogs appear almost as frequently as new branch openings of Joules, FatFace or Seasalt Cornwall.

Indeed, Walberswick Common seems to have accumulated Black Dog reports with the same enthusiasm that some villages collect parish notices.

One local lady confessed she encountered the beast only once: “quite enough,” she concluded, and this correspondent feels little improvement can be made upon that assessment.

Another witness described seeing a phantom dog “the size of a calf”, while others reported the creature pacing silently behind hedges, keeping perfect step with travellers before disappearing without so much as disturbing a leaf.

One coastguard even fired his revolver at the beast as it crossed the road before dawn (the Galleytrot, displaying what one must admire as complete professional indifference, carried on regardless).

Perhaps the most remarkable encounter occurred during the Second World War. An American airman and his wife had rented a modest hut beside Walberswick Marsh while he served at a nearby airfield, accommodation which today would almost certainly be marketed as a “rustic coastal retreat” at a price roughly equivalent to a fortnight in the Maldives.

One stormy evening an urgent pounding shook the door: naturally, they assumed some unfortunate soul had become caught in the weather and the airman peered through the window to see.

There was an enormous black dog throwing itself bodily against the hut.

The terrified couple barricaded the door with what little furniture they possessed while the creature hurled itself against the walls and then onto the roof.

The assault continued for several hours while the occupants waited in understandable terror for daylight. At dawn the pounding ceased.

Expecting splintered timber, broken windows and pawprints surrounding the hut, they cautiously stepped outside: there was nothing. No damage, no footprints, not even a claw mark in the soft earth.

The locals listened patiently before explaining that the couple had merely encountered the Galleytrot. One imagines this was intended to be reassuring.

The beast also appears to favour Leiston Churchyard, where Lady Walsingham and Lady Rendlesham once undertook what can only be described as an unusually adventurous evening’s entertainment.

Rather than attending dinner parties or musicales, the ladies chose to sit among the gravestones at midnight in the hope of seeing a ghostly dog.

Remarkably, they succeeded.

James Wentworth Day records that the great black animal came silently along the road, leapt effortlessly over the churchyard wall and disappeared among the graves.

In another account, he describes it rather beautifully as a “slinking sable shadow” that slipped away “like an evil whisper.”

Readers should note that very few ordinary dogs are described in such language. Since discovering the works of James Wentworth Day, however, I have become convinced that absolutely everything ought to be described in such language.

(Editor’s note: “Please stop this nonsense. This morning I heard you describe the milkman as “a pale emissary of the morning mist.’” This MUST end)

The Galleytrot’s habits are no more encouraging than its appearance.

According to legend it sometimes waits outside houses where somebody is gravely ill, remaining there until death finally claims the occupant, elsewhere it lurks beside lonely roads before hunting unfortunate travellers who have made the regrettable decision to walk home after dark.

This seems rather severe punishment for preferring fresh air to a horse and trap.

Meanwhile, in 2014, archaeologists excavating Leiston Abbey uncovered the skeleton of an enormous dog nearly seven feet in length.

For a glorious few days, speculation flourished that Shuck himself had at last been discovered, but alas, careful examination suggested something altogether more touching.

The animal appeared to have been buried with considerable care, perhaps a much-loved companion rather than East Anglia’s most notorious phantom.

There is something rather comforting about the idea that even 16th-century monks occasionally became fond of exceptionally large dogs.

As for the Galleytrot, however...I remain unconvinced that we have heard the last of him.

A creature capable of being white, black, fairy, phantom, churchyard guardian and roadside man-eater, sometimes all at once, strikes me as far too adaptable to have disappeared entirely.

If you should find yourself walking across Walberswick Common after sunset and become aware of large silent footsteps behind you, it may be prudent not to look back immediately.

On the other hand, running away from the supernatural has rarely made matters worse.

My increasingly unreasonable readers,

Last month, in a moment of weakness, I permitted my nephew Percival to contribute to this publication.

The intention was that he should gain experience, but the outcome appears to have been popularity.

Readers have written in support of him, some have requested further reports. One or two seem positively pleased by his presence.

I find this mildly irritating.

Still, it has afforded me a little respite during the hottest weeks of the year, a season I have always regarded with suspicion. Summer encourages entirely too much sunlight, activity and optimism. Even the ghosts seem less committed.

While Percival has been investigating haunted houses, buried treasure, devil-proof architecture and a creature in Suffolk that appears unable to decide whether it is a dog, a monkey or a gargoyle, I have been occupied with fairies.

As for Shuck Eight, progress continues. Certain individuals have suggested I have been saying this for some time.

To them I would point out that the seasons are also progressing and nobody stands in a field shouting at autumn to hurry up.

Fortunately, Midsummer has now passed and the days have already begun their slow journey back towards darkness, which I consider one of the year’s more encouraging developments.

Until next month, avoid bargains with fairies, be wary of large unexplained animals and remember that darkness, unlike deadlines, always arrives precisely when expected.

Ever yours,

Ada Nemesis

I am Percival Nemesis, temporary assistant editor, occasional correspondent and, somewhat alarmingly, now a recurring feature of this publication. I originally joined as a work experience student under the supervision of my aunt. Several months later, I remain here. Whether this reflects satisfaction with my work or simply a reluctance to complete the necessary paperwork remains unclear. My duties include investigating ghosts, black dogs, mysterious creatures and other matters of public importance. I perform these duties entirely without payment, a circumstance my aunt insists is “good experience” and I increasingly suspect is “free labour.”

I hope you enjoy my work. It is currently my only form of compensation.

Singular agricultural treasure reported beneath Belton Common

By Percival Nemesis, Rural Antiquities Correspondent, Temporary Barrow Inspector and Advocate for Responsible Treasure Burial

Residents of Belton may be interested to learn that a curious report once attached itself to Mill Hill, a mound upon Belton Common, concerning the alleged burial of an object of considerable value beneath the earth.

Not a crown, not a chest of gold, not even the remains of a long-forgotten monarch: a plough. A golden plough.

The tradition, though fragmentary, maintains that this remarkable agricultural implement lay concealed within the hill, awaiting discovery by persons sufficiently fortunate, determined or optimistic to locate it.

No reliable account survives of who buried the plough, when it was interred, or indeed why anyone should choose to hide an item whose primary purpose is to drag through mud.

Nevertheless, local belief insisted it was there.

Mill Hill itself presents an air of mystery: some authorities have suggested the mound may be of considerable antiquity, perhaps even prehistoric in origin, while others believe it later served as the site of a windmill.

Either way, it has occupied its position upon the landscape for centuries, quietly encouraging speculation.

Ancient mounds have long attracted treasure stories.

Throughout Britain, barrows are said to conceal kings, giants, warriors, silver, gold, enchanted objects and, on one memorable occasion, an entire army awaiting the proper moment to awaken.

Yet the Belton treasure remains unusual.

Most communities dream of royal riches but Belton, it would appear, dreamt of farm equipment. This may tell us something important.

A crown speaks of power, a sword speaks of war but a plough speaks of prosperity.

For generations, the wealth of Norfolk was measured not in jewels but in harvests, because a successful plough could feed a family while a failed one could ruin them.

So to agricultural communities, there were few objects more valuable, because the golden plough represented a memory of abundance and a lesson about the importance of the land.

Or perhaps somebody, many centuries ago, looked at an old hill and invented a story to explain why nobody had yet dug it up. As one does.

Whatever the truth, the legend survives, and somewhere beneath the grasses of Belton Common, according to local tradition, there may still rest Norfolk’s most practical treasure.

Should any reader discover a golden plough whilst out walking, this correspondent would be grateful for notification.

Particularly given the current cost of farming equipment.

Extraordinary architectural difficulties reported at Bodham

By Percival Nemesis, Circular Buildings Correspondent, Occasional Devil Tracker and Advocate for Sensible House Shapes

Residents of Bodham may be familiar with the village’s celebrated Round House, a building whose unusual design is said to owe less to architectural fashion and more to supernatural interference.

According to local tradition, the house was originally intended to possess the standard four walls expected of a respectable Norfolk dwelling.

Unfortunately, Old Nick had other ideas.

Night after night, Old Nick reportedly reduced the builders’ efforts to rubble. While builders are celebrated for their serenity, patience and reluctance to use colourful language, even these admirable qualities have limits.

This arrangement proved unsatisfactory for all concerned, particularly the builders, who were being paid to construct a house rather than repeatedly watch one disappear.

Faced with a situation that was becoming increasingly theological, the builders decided a change of strategy was required.

If the Devil objected to four walls, they would build none: so they constructed the house in a circle.

Remarkably, this appears to have worked.

Whether Old Nick was genuinely confused by the absence of corners, became disorientated whilst attempting to locate the front of the building, or simply concluded that the occupants had become too peculiar to bother with remains unclear.

What is certain is that the Devil reportedly abandoned his campaign and departed the area.

The house remains to this day.

As methods of dealing with the Prince of Darkness go, it compares favourably with exorcisms, holy relics and prolonged theological debate.

Sometimes the answer is simply to build something so odd that even the Devil decides it is not worth the effort.

One suspects Norfolk has relied upon this strategy more than once.

Another Report on the Progress of Shuck Eight

By Percival Nemesis, Temporary Assistant Editor, Acting Deadline Observer and Victim of Repeated Enquiries

It has been brought to my attention, repeatedly and by a frankly exhausting number of people, that readers would like another update on the progress of Shuck Eight.

I would respectfully point out that I already provided an update.

The existence of a previous update would, in most fields, imply that the matter had progressed sufficiently not to require another one. Yet here we are.

Readers continue to stop me in the street, write letters and, on one memorable occasion, corner me beside a tray of sandwiches to enquire whether the forthcoming fairy edition of Shuck has finally appeared.

It has not.

This is particularly frustrating because the people asking the questions are often not responsible for producing the magazine.

Unlike certain other individuals. Nevertheless, I have once again undertaken the considerable burden of investigating the matter.

I can report that Shuck Eight continues to exist: I know this because I have seen it.

Indeed, I have seen so much of it that I am beginning to suspect it may now be longer than some recognised religious texts.

Articles have been written, illustrations have been completed, research has been conducted, the final interview has been completed, layouts have been assembled.

At this point, one might reasonably expect a magazine to emerge.

And yet.

Editor’s note. Percival, this is NOT what I asked for. Please see me. Aunt Ada.

Unexplained Vocal Disturbances Reported at Ancient Gillingham Residence

By Percival Nemesis, Rural Apparitions Correspondent, Temporary Marsh Historian and Observer of Unoccupied Doorways

Residents of Gillingham may be interested to learn of persistent reports concerning Winston Hall, an ancient farmhouse situated

near the old rectory and reputed by many to be among the most haunted residences in the district.

Unlike many ghosts, however, the alleged inhabitants appear reluctant to show themselves.

Witnesses report no spectral ladies gliding down staircases, nor headless noblemen wandering through walls. Instead, the manifestations are chiefly auditory.

Most commonly, a rustling sound resembling a lady in a stiff silk dress is heard progressing along a corridor at the rear of the house. At other times, heavy footsteps are reported during the night.

Most curious of all is a voice heard from an old external doorway, now little used.

“Are you there?” it asks.

The natural response, of course, is to investigate.

Yet those who do so reportedly find nobody present.

The ghost, if ghost it be, appears to favour conversation whilst objecting strongly to interviews.

The Hall itself is of considerable antiquity. Tradition maintains that Richard Cromwell, son of Oliver Cromwell and briefly Lord Protector of England, once lived there after retiring from public life. The old walled garden contains blocked-up doors and windows, together with brickwork bearing what appears to be the date 1661.

One cannot help feeling that a building containing sealed doorways, vanished occupants and unexplained voices is making a determined effort to encourage speculation.

The surrounding area possesses an equally curious history. Winston itself was once a separate parish before being absorbed into Gillingham in the fifteenth century, joining neighbouring Windell in the ranks of Norfolk’s lost villages. Both possessed churches dedicated to St Andrew, though neither church survives.

Indeed, much of the landscape seems haunted by absence.

Entire villages have vanished. Ancient estuaries have retreated. Ferries have become roads. Marshes once crossed by boat are now crossed by motorcars.

In the great floods, cattle were reportedly swept downstream as far as Beccles, where they were recovered and revived with brandy, a treatment this correspondent suspects would improve the spirits of most creatures, this one included.

Whether the sounds at Winston Hall originate from a restless former resident, a forgotten inhabitant of one of the lost parishes, or merely the natural creaks and sighs of a very old building remains uncertain.

What is certain is that if a voice should call “Are you there?” from the old doorway, the safest response may be to pretend one has not heard it.

Particularly after dark.

Shucks of (near) Norfolk (actually Suffolk): The Rendlesham Shug Monkey

By Percival Nemesis, Recorder of Black Dogs, Temporary Ape Correspondent and Firm Believer That Animals Should Make Up Their Minds What They Are

Readers of this series may reasonably expect that a column entitled Shucks of Norfolk would concern itself with Norfolk.

This month, regrettably, we must cross the border into Suffolk: I apologise for the inconvenience.

Our destination is Rendlesham Forest, already notorious for unusual happenings and best known for attracting everything from mysterious lights to enthusiastic alien enthusiasts.

Yet among the pine trees lurks something perhaps even stranger: not a black dog, not a monkey, but something entirely of itself.

The creature in question is known as the Shug Monkey, a name which sounds faintly ridiculous until one encounters a description of the beast itself.

In January 1956, a local man named Sam Holland was walking through the forest with his spaniel when he observed an enormous black creature approximately forty feet ahead.

At first glance he struggled to identify it, which, as you read on, will not be surprising.

The animal appeared to possess the body of a giant dog, the muscular build of a lion, the face of a gorilla and the general demeanour of something that ought not to be wandering around the Suffolk countryside.

It was reportedly around 10ft long (readers familiar with ordinary monkeys will appreciate that this exceeds the recommended dimensions by a considerable margin).

Holland described thick black fur, huge jaws, flared nostrils and intelligent eyes. As the creature stared at him, his dog reportedly began to whimper, which seems an entirely sensible reaction.

Indeed, it was considerably more sensible than standing one’s ground and continuing to examine the thing, which Holland nevertheless proceeded to do.

After a prolonged staring contest, the beast simply turned and disappeared into the forest.

Seven years later, in the same area, another witness named Peggy Cushing reported seeing an almost identical creature.

So far, so ordinary: except then it transformed into a winged gargoyle and flew away.

At this point, the investigation becomes challenging – one can compare a mysterious animal to a dog, a bear or an ape, but comparisons become more difficult once it starts changing shape and taking to the air.

Local tradition suggests the Shug Monkey has haunted the forests of East Anglia for generations.

One Suffolk police constable described it as a cross between a large rough-coated dog and a monkey, adding that it sometimes walked upright and at other times raced along on all fours.

Children were reportedly warned to avoid its favourite haunts after dark.

This advice seems entirely reasonable.

The name itself may derive from the same ancient root as Black Shuck, East Anglia’s famous spectral hound. If so, the Shug Monkey may represent a distant cousin in the ever-expanding family of East Anglian nightmares.

Whether the creature is a phantom dog, an oversized ape, a werewolf, an undiscovered species or simply Black Shuck having an experimental phase remains uncertain.

What is certain is that if you encounter a 10ft gorilla-dog-lion-gargoyle whilst walking through Rendlesham Forest, it may be prudent to follow the example of Mr Holland’s spaniel.

A little nervous whimpering is perfectly justified.

My most patient readers,

Summer advances upon Norfolk with all the confidence of a thing that knows perfectly well it cannot be stopped. The fields are stirring, the days are lengthening and somewhere beyond the edge of a hedgerow something ancient has opened one eye, observed the tourists arriving and immediately regretted it.

The wheel turns, the seasons change and, I regret to inform you, I have acquired a nephew.

Not in the ordinary sense, you understand. He was not purchased from a suspicious antiquarian, nor discovered beneath a fairy mound, nor delivered by a spectral black dog carrying administrative paperwork. He has simply been deposited upon me by relations who appear to have mistaken “writer” for “person with spare time.”

The child, I am told, requires work experience.

This strikes me as unfortunate for both of us.

Nevertheless, having spent many years complaining about the decline of editorial standards, I felt it only proper to contribute personally to their further erosion.

Accordingly, I have entrusted much of this month’s newsletter to him, him being my nephew, Percival Nemesis.

Some editors would hesitate before handing their publication over to an inexperienced youth whose chief qualifications include enthusiasm and an alarming capacity for consuming biscuits.

I am not one of those editors.

Besides, many of you are reading this newsletter entirely free of charge. Under such circumstances, I feel experimentation is not only acceptable but practically encouraged.

The boy has therefore been dispatched into the archives and instructed to report upon the strange, the unexplained and the mildly ridiculous.

He has returned with accounts of a public house in Great Yarmouth where a beef steak achieved independent flight; another encounter with Norfolk’s most persistent canine celebrity, Black Shuck, who continues to appear in lonely places despite having been dead, supernatural, legendary or some combination of all three for several centuries; and a report concerning mysterious lights above a field at Hemblington.

Why Hemblington, specifically, remains something of a mystery.

The lights themselves seem a plausible explanation until one learns that the boy has recently developed a keen and otherwise inexplicable interest in the village and its immediate surroundings.

As an editor, I naturally refrain from speculation.

As an aunt, I am considerably less restrained and therefore invite readers to draw their own conclusions.

Whether my assistant has improved these stories or merely rearranged them remains to be seen.

I shall reserve judgement until I have read them myself.

As for the magazine, I am aware that certain individuals continue to enquire after the progress of Shuck Eight. Such enquiries have become increasingly frequent and, I must say, increasingly pointed.

The matter is in hand, the matter has always been in hand. Whether it remains in hand for a sensible length of time is, naturally, a different question altogether.

You will find a further update from my temporary assistant later in this newsletter. He appears to have formed opinions on the subject.

This was not part of his brief.

Until next month, keep to the paths where possible, avoid making bargains with anything older than Christianity and if you happen to encounter a flying steak, a luminous sky or a gigantic spectral dog, do try to take notes, it saves an enormous amount of time later.

I now hand you over to my temporary assistant, whose enthusiasm remains intact despite prolonged exposure to the publishing industry. Dreadful place.

Ever yours, in delegation and plausible deniability,

Ada Nemesis

I am Percival Nemesis, currently undertaking a period of work experience under the supervision of my aunt. The supervision has thus far consisted primarily of being handed increasingly large piles of books and told to “look useful”. I hope you enjoy my work.

Extraordinary disturbance at a Great Yarmouth hostelry

By Percival Nemesis, Acting Public House Correspondent, Investigator of Paranormal Catering Incidents and Defender of Proper Meat Handling

Residents of Great Yarmouth will be interested, and perhaps somewhat alarmed, to learn of a singular occurrence said to have taken place within the kitchens of the White Horse Public House, Northgate Street.

The affair concerns a respected member of the culinary staff who, whilst engaged in his ordinary duties, was startled by the appearance of what h2e described as “a dark shape” standing silently within the room.

The figure, according to reports, possessed no clear features, but appeared sufficiently human in outline to inspire considerable unease.

Believing himself to be alone, the chef is said to have frozen in terror.

What followed has become the subject of much local discussion.

Without warning, a large beef steak reportedly left its place upon a nearby preparation table and flew through the air with great force, narrowly missing the unfortunate cook.

The missile struck the far side of the kitchen, causing a considerable commotion and prompting the immediate retreat of several members of staff.

No explanation has ever been satisfactorily offered as to how the meat became airborne.

The steak itself, having served its mysterious purpose, declined to make any further statement.

The incident, which happened in the early 2000s, has revived older rumours concerning the White Horse, which was converted into three town houses in 2004.

Patrons had long spoken of shadowy figures glimpsed in corners and reflected in mirrors, particularly after nightfall. One investigator of ghostly phenomena even claimed to have captured images of distorted faces appearing behind the public bar.

Whether these reports arise from supernatural agency, overactive imaginations, or the regrettable effects of strong ale remains uncertain.

Yet one question continues to trouble local minds.

If a spirit truly wished to make its presence known, why choose a beef steak? The answer, perhaps, lies beyond the veil, or simply confusion between a steak and a stake and a ghost and a vampire.

A report on the progress of Shuck Eight

By Percival Nemesis, Temporary Assistant Editor, Acting Deadline Observer and Unpaid Apprentice

Readers may be reassured to learn that Shuck Eight has neither vanished into the realm of Faerie, been carried away by spectral hounds, nor become trapped in one of those Norfolk lanes which appears on no map, possesses no signposts and nevertheless turns out to be exactly where you’re supposed to be.

It exists, I have seen it on several occasions.

Indeed, I have been shown pages, illustrations, notes, drafts, proofs and what I can only describe as alarming quantities of research. The magazine is therefore not imaginary, although there have been moments when its publication schedule has appeared to be.

The forthcoming edition concerns itself with faeries, though I feel obliged to repeat my aunt’s warning that these are not the decorative creatures commonly found adorning greetings cards, garden ornaments and the more regrettable corners of gift shops.

These are the older sort, the sort who remember promises long after the people who made them have forgotten, and who would almost certainly have strong opinions regarding missed deadlines.

This observation may become relevant later.

I am pleased to report that considerable progress has been made since the last update. Articles have been completed, illustrations have been commissioned, layouts have been assembled, research has been checked.

In short, the end is now clearly visible. Unfortunately, it is currently obscured by a single remaining obstacle: an interview.

More specifically, an interview which was supposed to have been conducted some time ago.

Now, in the interests of family harmony, I shall not dwell excessively upon the identity of the individual responsible for this delay. It would be ungenerous to mention that she is also the editor. Or that she recently entrusted me with writing this update. Or that she has spent the last several months referring to publication as “imminent” in the same manner that geologists refer to continental drift.

Instead, I shall simply observe that the interview remains outstanding, the interviewee has been remarkably patient and certain members of the editorial staff may wish to avoid entering into legally binding agreements with faeries until this matter has been resolved.

Nevertheless, I remain optimistic: Shuck Eight approaches steadily.

Whether it arrives before Midsummer’s Eve, when the fae are traditionally at their busiest, remains uncertain. It would undoubtedly be advantageous from a marketing perspective. It would also save me from having to answer the same question repeatedly on behalf of a publication whose editor is, at the time of writing, still “just finishing one thing.”

Readers familiar with my aunt’s work will know that this phrase has no recognised relationship with ordinary measurements of time, a fact I feel able to state with confidence because she rarely checks my copy before publication.

Editor’s Note: The author has been spoken to.

Assistant Editor’s Note: I have not.

Extraordinary illumination of the heavens above Hemblington

By Percival Nemesis, Acting Correspondent for Celestial Phenomena, Medieval Murals and Villages Chosen for Entirely Professional Reasons

An unusual occurrence is said to have taken place in a field near Hemblington during the year 1997, where five local gentlemen engaged in the respectable pursuit of metal detecting reported a spectacle which none could satisfactorily explain.

The party had assembled in hopes of discovering Saxon silver, Roman coins, lost buckles or, in accordance with long-established Norfolk tradition, absolutely nothing at all.

The evening appears to have been progressing in a disappointingly earthly fashion when the sky suddenly erupted into brilliant flashes of red, blue, green and purple light.

The illumination was so intense that the entire field was bathed in shifting colours.

One imagines the effect was rather as though a travelling fairground had somehow become detached from the Earth and drifted into the upper atmosphere.

The lights continued for some moments but then, as abruptly as they had appeared, they vanished. No sound accompanied the display and no object was identified, explanations did not emerge, rather it seemed that the heavens simply switched themselves off.

What makes the affair particularly interesting is its location.

For Hemblington is already home to one of Norfolk’s most remarkable medieval treasures: a magnificent wall painting depicting the adventures of St Christopher.

Visitors to the church may observe giants, devils, martyrdoms, miraculous staffs, miraculous healings, executions, conversions and enough supernatural activity to keep an entire monastery occupied for several centuries.

Indeed, St Christopher’s own story features a giant seeking the most powerful being in existence, eventually discovering that neither kings nor devils were equal to the task.

One cannot help wondering what the saint would have made of a sky suddenly flashing purple.

Whether the lights originated from visitors beyond our world, a phenomenon of the atmosphere, or some celestial display beyond current understanding remains unknown.

The five witnesses returned home without alien artefacts, messages from the stars, or even a decent Roman coin.

Instead, they possessed the customary harvest of bent wire, corroded iron fragments, and an object which one enthusiast confidently identified as a Saxon fitting until it was recognised as part of a lawnmower.

Such disappointments will be familiar to every detectorist in the county.

Shucks of Norfolk: Bergh Apton Shuck

By Percival Nemesis, Temporary Assistant Editor, Recorder of Black Dogs and Firm Believer That Walls Should Mean Something

An incident of a most singular nature is reported to have occurred upon the road between Thurton and Bergh Apton during the closing years of the late war.

The account comes from a respectable local gentleman returning home from a darts match shortly before midnight.

The witness was at pains to state that whilst he had consumed refreshment appropriate to the successful pursuit of darts, he was in no sense overcome by liquor.

Indeed, he remained sufficiently alert to notice the sudden appearance of what can only be described as an enormous black dog.

The creature reportedly emerged near a pond opposite Washingford House and launched itself directly towards the cyclist at approximately crossbar height.

This detail alone presents certain difficulties: ordinary dogs, whilst capable of enthusiasm, rarely attack bicycles by means of aerial assault.

The witness described the animal as being as large as a substantial Labrador, though considerably more alarming in temperament, possessing a shaggy underside and a mouth filled with formidable teeth.

“I expected to be knocked from my cycle and bitten,” he later recalled. Readers will doubtless sympathise, for there are few circumstances less desirable than meeting a gigantic snarling dog on a deserted Norfolk lane at midnight.

One can think of only two: meeting two gigantic snarling dogs, or meeting one gigantic snarling dog whilst pushing a punctured bicycle.

Yet the strangest part of the affair was still to come.

Having charged at the terrified cyclist, the beast abruptly appeared on the opposite side of the road and disappeared directly into a wall: not over it, not through a gate, INTO it.

This manoeuvre, whilst uncommon amongst Labradors, has long been associated with the spectral hound known throughout East Anglia as Black Shuck.

Descriptions of this mysterious animal vary considerably. Some report eyes blazing like red coals, others speak of breath hot as a furnace, some claim the apparition foretells death, while others insist it serves as a guardian of lonely places.

What all accounts share, however, is the conviction that the creature is not entirely bound by the ordinary rules governing dogs – or, indeed, walls.

The shaken cyclist pedalled home with commendable speed, establishing what may have been a local land-speed record for a gentleman returning from a darts fixture.

As for Bergh Apton itself, we note with approval that its village motto declares it to be “A village where wonderful things happen.”

One cannot help but admire the optimism. Most villages would hesitate to advertise the presence of a supernatural death-hound capable of emerging from ponds and passing through brickwork. Bergh Apton, it seems, simply considers this one of its attractions.

My prematurely optimistic correspondents,

April arrives not with gentleness, as you will insist upon claiming, but with a kind of calculated charm, the sort that suggests improvement while keeping a hand quietly on the latch of winter.

You will notice the light first, how it lingers a little longer in the evenings, stretching itself thin across fields that are still undecided, still holding damp in their bones.

You will call this progress. You will say, with gathering confidence, that spring has arrived, as though it were a guest who had committed to staying.

It has not.

What April offers is not certainty, but suggestion. A softening at the edges, a loosening. The occasional warm afternoon slipped, almost apologetically, between days that return you briskly to your senses.

You will respond, as you always do, with optimism disproportionate to the evidence: coats will be abandoned too early, windows opened with theatrical intent, outdoor plans made, declarations issued and then, inevitably, revised.

The hedgerows, however, are less easily persuaded.

They proceed with caution, unfurling leaf by tentative leaf, as though aware that any show of enthusiasm may be punished. Blossom appears, yes, but with a certain restraint, as though it has read the small print.

Even the birds, those tireless propagandists for the season, hedge their bets, singing with one eye on the sky.

And yet, despite all this, there is a shift.

Not a transformation, not the triumphant arrival you would prefer, but a gathering. A quiet accumulation of light, of colour and of small permissions.

The ground, which has resisted you for months, begins, reluctantly, to yield. Paths re-emerge, air moves differently and something, not yet named, begins to organise itself.

You will feel it, and because you are human, you will trust it. This is your perennial error.

April is not a promise. It is an overture. A testing of instruments before the full performance begins and one in which the possibility of discord remains very much on the table.

Proceed, therefore, with measured enthusiasm. Carry your tinted spectacles, certainly, but do not stray far from your coat. Admire the blossom, but do not assume its permanence. Accept the light, but do not yet rely upon it.

Spring is considering you and has not yet decided what it has in store for you.

Yours, with restrained encouragement,

Ada Nemesis

Blackthorn: blossom and bone

In April, when the hedgerows begin to loosen and the countryside allows itself, cautiously, to soften, blackthorn steps forward in white.

It does not arrive gently.

Its blossom appears before its leaves, a sudden spangling of pale flowers scattered across branches that remain otherwise dark and unyielding, as though winter itself has been briefly dusted with sugar.

From a distance, it reads as lightness, as promise, as something almost celebratory, but up close, the truth asserts itself.

Blackthorn is a tree of edges. Its branches are armed with long, unforgiving thorns, its wood dense and difficult, its presence less welcoming than watchful.

The blossom, for all its brightness, does not soften the structure beneath it but merely veils it, a momentary grace laid over something far older and less inclined to kindness.

In folklore, blackthorn belongs firmly to the darker half of the year.

It is often called the Mother of the Woods, not in any comforting sense, but as something ancient and governing, aligned with the Cailleach, the winter hag who shapes the land with a blackthorn staff, striking the ground into frost.

It is a tree of boundaries and thresholds, associated with the Crone, with endings, with the necessary severity that precedes change.

Its thorns made it useful in less gentle practices.

Blackthorn sticks were carried as protection, but also as instruments of conflict, shaped into Irish shillelaghs or, in quieter traditions, into wands said to hold a sharper kind of magic.

It was a tree both feared and relied upon, capable of warding off harm while never quite relinquishing its own. Even its flowering carries a warning.

The sudden cold snap that often follows its bloom is known as the blackthorn winter, a brief and bitter return of frost that arrives just as the land begins to trust in warmth.

It is a reminder, neatly timed, that the season has not yet settled, that softness can be interrupted. And still, it flowers.

A scatter of white against dark wood, a brightness that does not erase what lies beneath but reveals it more clearly.

Blackthorn does not pretend to be gentle, it offers instead a kind of stark beauty, one that understands that growth does not arrive without resistance and that even in spring, something of winter remains.

The mad monk of Morley

On 24 August 1964, viewers of Anglia Television settled down to watch a calm and methodical programme about ghost hunting, filmed at Morley Old Hall, a moated 16th-century house near Wymondham.

The aim was straightforward enough: the parapsychologist Anthony Cornell, known for his sceptical approach, was to demonstrate how such investigations were properly carried out, moving carefully through the building, explaining away rumours, and showing how most hauntings dissolve under close attention.

By the end of the programme, he had found nothing at all to suggest that Morley Old Hall was haunted. The ghost, however, appears not to have agreed.

Within hours of the broadcast, Anglia Television began receiving letters. Five viewers at first, each saying much the same thing and each quite certain of what they had seen.

During the interview with Cornell, they said, there had been a figure visible behind him, standing between the investigator and his interviewer, Michael Robson.

It had not moved or drawn attention to itself, but it had been there, unmistakably, a hooded monk, watching.

The programme was shown again: this time, 27 viewers wrote in.

Fifteen described a monk or priest, clearly visible in the frame, while others gave more unsettling accounts, one reporting the shape of a hooded skull, another describing a gaunt face that seemed, as the interview continued, to lean forward and peer into the room with what she called a “horrible leer.”

Mrs G. D. Hayden of Bromham wrote that both she and her daughter had seen the outline of a priest plainly, while Mr and Mrs Carter of Lincolnshire insisted the figure had been so clear that it could be drawn from memory.

From Norwich, Elvira Panetta described a cowled and bearded figure with raised hands, and from Suffolk came the account of a face that seemed to change as it was watched, as though it were not entirely fixed in one form.

The explanations, when they came, were measured and reasonable.

The Society for Psychical Research later reviewed the footage and suggested that the figure was no more than an illusion, caused by markings in the stonework behind Cornell that, under the conditions of filming, gave rise to the appearance of a human shape.

Cornell himself, along with his colleague Eric Gauld, presented the case in 1969 as an example of how easily the eye can be misled.

And yet, the viewers had not been misled in the same way.

They had seen the same figure, in the same place, with the same quiet certainty: it is this detail that has kept the story alive.

Because Morley Old Hall had not been without its stories before the camera ever arrived.

Earlier reports spoke of a woman seen at a particular window, looking out across the gardens, her presence felt rather than fully seen.

In 1966, the American investigator Hans Holzer visited the house with the writer Ruth Plant, who later described an experience that was not frightening so much as insistent, a sense that someone beautiful wished her to look out at the view, while elsewhere in the house came the sound of breathing and the soft movement of fabric, as though a dress had passed through an empty room.

But the figure seen by the television viewers was not a woman: it was a monk.

And local tradition, which rarely offers a name without a story attached, has long associated that figure with Alexander de Langley, once prior of Wymondham, a man said to have lost himself gradually to study until his mind gave way and something darker took hold.

There were whispers that he had committed a serious offence within Morley itself, something grave enough to require his removal and that he had been taken away in chains to Binham Priory on the north coast, where discipline replaced freedom and confinement replaced authority.

What followed belongs to that uncertain territory where history and telling overlap. It is said that he was subjected to harsh treatment, that his condition worsened rather than improved, and that in the end he was shut away completely, sealed into darkness when neither correction nor restraint seemed able to restore him.

Whether that detail is fact or embellishment, it carries the weight of something believed, and belief has a way of shaping what comes after.

Because whatever happened to Alexander de Langley did not end neatly.

At Morley, the figure stands where it is not expected, visible not to those present, but to those watching from elsewhere, as though distance offers no barrier.

It appears without announcement, remains without movement, and vanishes without explanation, leaving behind not proof, but agreement.

At other times, and in other tellings, he is not still at all, but walking, passing along unseen routes, appearing briefly where no living man could easily go, and always with that same sense of purpose, as though he is not wandering but returning.

Norfolk has always had its hidden paths, its ways that are not marked but remembered, and it is not difficult to imagine that a man once taken from Morley, carried away across the county and confined elsewhere, might leave behind more than memory.

Some journeys, once made, do not entirely end, and some presences, once fixed in a place, do not remain where they were put.

So he appears, when he chooses, within walls or on screens, in stone or in shadow, and though explanations may be offered, and reason carefully applied, there remains the quiet fact that enough people, on one August evening in 1964, saw the same figure standing where no figure had been expected.

And that, in Norfolk, is often enough. Because a ghost does not need to be proven to persist: it only needs to be seen.

Shuck Zine Eight

You may, at last, lay aside the black crepe. Shuck Zine has not expired, nor drifted into obscurity, nor taken leave of its senses. It advances.

Slowly, yes. Reluctantly, at times. But undeniably forward.

Edition eight continues to concern itself with faeries, though I must again stress, for the benefit of the overly whimsical, that these are not the decorative creatures of garden centres and gift shops, but the older kind.

The contractual kind. The sort who keep accounts, observe thresholds and remember, with unnerving clarity, every kindness neglected and every slight delivered, however small.

Since last I wrote, progress has been made: considerable progress, in fact, it would be unseemly to dwell upon the precise mechanisms by which this has been achieved, but let us say that a certain degree of…encouragement has been applied where necessary and that procrastination has found itself with increasingly limited room to linger.

I do not claim sole responsibility, of course, but neither will I go out of my way to refuse it.
As for myself, I stand now within sight of completion, with only one piece remaining to be coaxed into its final form, an interview with a human, no less. Thankfully he is worthy of my time. Just.

Shuck Eight is coming, friends. Hopefully before Midsummer’s Eve when the fae are at their busiest – it would be helpful in terms of our PR, methinks.

The Twelve Months of Shuck: when two local legends met

There are certain figures in Norfolk who feel fixed in place.

Amelia Opie is one of them: she stands, quite literally, above Norwich, looking out from her rooftop perch on the street that bears her name, a figure of conviction and clarity remembered for her words, her principles, and her refusal to look away from the injustices of her time.

Black Shuck is not fixed at all – he moves.

He slips between places, between shapes, between explanations, appearing where he is least wanted and most expected all at once.

Described as “as big as a calf and as noiseless as death,” he has haunted East Anglia since at least the 16th century, padding along coastlines and cutting across lanes, a creature shaped as much by fear as by sight.

Whether he brings warning or doom, whether he guards or hunts, seems to depend less on him and more on whoever happens to meet him.

It is not difficult to imagine that these two, so different in nature, might have passed within the same stretch of land.

In 1829, Amelia Opie travelled to Northrepps, just outside Cromer, to stay with her friend Anna Gurney, herself a formidable Norfolk woman and fellow abolitionist.

The village, quiet and self-contained, sits within easy reach of the coast, where the land begins to lift and the sea asserts itself in long, steady breaths.

It is here that the story takes a turn.

Writing later, Opie recalled a local belief, one spoken of with the kind of certainty that does not invite contradiction, that at twilight each evening a great dog was seen to pass beneath the wall of Overstrand churchyard, having come along the coast from Beeston.

Not a rumour, not a suggestion, but a thing observed, repeated, understood. This was no ordinary apparition.

Unlike most ghosts, which are content to remain just beyond certainty, this one was said to be both visible and tangible, a creature that could be seen clearly and, more unsettlingly, felt.

Other accounts insisted that Shuck rose directly from the sea near Beeston Bump, that great swelling of land above the shoreline, before taking the path inland, following what became known, with admirable directness, as Shuck’s Lane.

From there, his route grows uncertain, as such routes tend to do.

He was seen pacing the hills near Overstrand, circling the village and then, with a kind of terrible familiarity, entering the churchyard before vanishing altogether, as though returning to a place that had been waiting for him.

The sightings were not rare.

A gamekeeper, described as sensible and not easily troubled, spoke of encountering the creature at dusk, close enough to place a hand upon it, only to recoil at the realisation of what stood before him.

He could face any poacher, he said, on two legs or four, but this was something else entirely - its back, he reported, was rough and hard beneath his hand, its presence undeniable.

Others elaborated.

Sometimes Shuck was seen with a head, sometimes without. His eyes, when present, were said to burn “as big as saucers,” and the ground beneath him was occasionally found scorched, carrying the sharp, metallic scent of brimstone.

Storms were known to follow in his wake, as though the air itself had been disturbed by his passing.

One local telling offers a different kind of sadness.

A Dane, a Saxon and their dog, Shuck, drowned together while fishing, their bodies carried apart by the tide. The men washed ashore in different places, Beeston and Overstrand, while the dog, faithful beyond death, continued to roam the coastline between them, searching still.

It is a softer explanation, but frankly, it does not quite hold.

And so we are left with the image: Amelia Opie, walking perhaps in the fading light, her mind occupied with matters of reform and humanity, staying in a house not far from where the land tips toward the sea.

And somewhere along that same stretch of coast, at the same hour, something large and dark moving with quiet purpose, following a path worn not into the earth, but into story.

Whether she saw him is not recorded. But one thing is certain: he was there.

My seasonally overconfident correspondents,

March has arrived not as a promise, nor even as a suggestion, but as a corrective: a month that strides across the county with wind in cuffs and the air of someone who has read your forgotten new year resolutions and found them laughable.

You will insist, I know you will, that it is “practically spring,” and you will make this declaration while standing in a field that is still technically mud, pointing at a daffodil as though it were binding proof of redemption, while your ears redden and your optimism wilts beneath a North Sea gust that has not the faintest interest in your horticultural enthusiasm.

The Anglo-Saxons, whose practical pessimism I increasingly admire, named this month Hlyda, the loud one, and they did so, I suspect, not poetically but out of sheer irritation at the banging of shutters and the insolence of weather that refuses to remain decorative.

March is not gentle. It is not transitional in the way your illustrated calendars would have you believe. It is cross-examination conducted by wind.

You fling open windows at the first fragile warmth as though you have been personally pardoned by the sun, only to discover, moments later, that the same breeze which tempted you into bravado has redistributed your papers, your bonnet and your self-respect across the parish.

Observe the hares, if you require instruction: lean, volatile creatures boxing in open fields as though prosecuting private grievances against the season itself. You call them mad, I call them honest.

And at the month’s end, when March borrows a few days from April in order to deliver one final frost with vindictive precision, you will look surprised, as though winter had signed a contract promising to depart in an orderly fashion.

It did not.

The equinox will flatter you with the illusion of balance, equal light, equal dark, and you will interpret this as reassurance. It is nothing of the sort. It is the pause before momentum asserts itself, the inhalation before consequence.

March belongs to thresholds and to those who linger upon them, neither in nor out, neither concluded nor begun. If you must call it spring, do so quietly, and with gloves on.

Ever poised at the turn of the path,

Ada Nemesis

Mad March Hares

To call a hare mad is to misunderstand both hare and madness.

March is their season: as daylight lengthens and the earth loosens, hares gather in open fields and perform what appears to be ritual combat.

They rear on hind legs, striking one another with quick, precise blows, ears flattened, eyes bright.

The phrase “mad as a March hare” has lingered for centuries, but what we witness is not lunacy, it is courtship.

The boxing is often a female fending off an overenthusiastic male: consent being policed in fur and muscle.

Hares have long carried folkloric charge.

Unlike rabbits, they do not burrow but lie in shallow forms scraped into the earth - they belong to the surface world, to liminality, to the space between cover and exposure.

Their speed is legendary, so is their silence.

In British folklore, hares were associated with witches, particularly those who could transform themselves to escape pursuit.

To wound a hare was to risk wounding a woman, to see one cross your path was an omen, though whether good or ill depended entirely on your temperament.

In East Anglia, tales persisted of white hares appearing at crossroads or near ancient mounds, guardians of older things.

Three hares chasing one another in a circle appear carved in medieval churches across Europe, including Devon, though their origin remains disputed. Pagan symbol? Trade motif? Or something that slips through worlds intact?

March hares are creatures of transition: they do not live in colonies, they keep their distance, they erupt into motion without warning.

They are not pets or pastoral decoration, they are wildness momentarily visible: if you see a hare in springtime, you have found gold.

Shuck Zine Eight

You may remove the black crepe from your lapels: Shuck Zine has neither perished nor eloped with obscurity. It persists, obstinate as a nettle in a churchyard.

Edition eight concerns itself with faeries.

Not the sugared-winged décor of garden centres, but the contractual sort. The ledger-keeping, threshold-haunting, gift-demanding kind who do not forget an unpaid courtesy nor forgive a slight across generations.

Once again, I am accompanied by Mrs Siofra Connor and Mr Matthew Willis, who continue to follow me into territories that sensible citizens mark “do not enter.”

I am pleased - no, serene - to report that I am now only two pieces away from completing my own contributions to this fine and possibly inadvisable publication.

I therefore await my esteemed colleagues to…how shall we phrase it…accelerate.

One of them, incidentally, will be editing this very newsletter, so I had better watch my sharp tongue lest the editing knife falls on my best efforts.

It is coming, friends. Have patience.

The Borrowed Days

At the ragged end of March come the Borrowed Days.

The story goes that March, dissatisfied with its allotted weather, borrowed three days from April in order to deliver one final insult of frost and storm.

In Scotland, the rhyme is sharp and unsentimental:

“March said to April,

‘I see three hogs upon a hill;

If you will lend me three days,

I’ll find a way to kill.’”

April, obliging and perhaps naive, lent the days.

March unleashed sleet and bitter wind and the hogs perished - and ever since, the final days of March are watched carefully.

The Three Hogs are variously interpreted: livestock caught out by late cold, farmers too eager to trust a false thaw, or simply the arrogance of assuming the season has turned.

The Borrowed Days remind us that winter is not obliged to leave neatly and that calendars are agreements, not commands.

In Norfolk, where wind off the coast can undo an afternoon’s optimism in a matter of a minute, the tale feels less like superstition and more like a normal Tuesday.

Do not plant too soon, do not boast too early and never assume that March has finished speaking.

The Twelve Months of Shuck: The Spectral Wolf of Southery

Shuck, as any sensible observer will concede, has never displayed the courtesy of consistency.

In Southery, that former island in a sea of fen where mist performs theatrical experiments with distance and sound behaves as though it were independently governed, the shape of Shuck elongates toward wolf.

Walter Barrett, in his Tales from the Fens (1963), recounts a 14th-century calamity which reads less like history and more like a cautionary parable written in blood.

Monks from Ely, engaged in the pious labour of church-building, were discovered with their throats opened and their modest belongings vanished into the reed-dark margins of the landscape.

The Abbot, unwilling to concede defeat to unseen assailants, sought aid from the Baron of Northwold, who dispatched wolfhounds as guardians.

Guard they did not.

Provisions dwindled. Discipline eroded.

The hounds, having exhausted the monks’ stores, turned first to the dead and then, with a logic as old as hunger, to the living.

Villagers fled, monks retreated: of the pack, only one remained: a vast female creature, formidable as a small horse and no longer aligned with any comprehensible allegiance.

A Fenman, displaying that peculiar Norfolk pragmatism which borders on fatalism, found her near death and restored her strength.

Thereafter she became, improbably, benefactor rather than scourge, dragging stags and livestock back across the marsh as though provisioning a beleaguered settlement under siege.

Then she disappeared, and returned pregnant, though no suitable sire had been observed within miles.

The offspring grew prodigious and unnatural, neither wolf nor dog but something intermediate and disquieting, a living footnote to theological discomfort.

When the Bishop of Elmham rode in to consecrate St Mary’s, accompanied by armed retainers and expectations of civility, one among them recognised the beast and succumbed to panic. Steel met fur and blood answered.

When arrows concluded the exchange, the dying creature’s howls travelled across the fen like a torn fabric of sound - and they are said to travel still.

And when, in 1945, Mr J. A. Cochrane heard baying beside him near Modney Bridge, near Downham Market, accompanied by the unmistakable scrape of a chain dragged with deliberate emphasis along the road, he required no ecclesiastical interpretation to understand that he was not alone.

He ran.

The sound passed him, close enough to measure breath and later, he insisted that he had been pursued by Black Shuck.

Whether wolf, hound, or something that declines both categories, the fens have never been entirely candid about what moves within them.

And Shuck, in whatever head he chooses to wear, remains content to let the argument continue.

My indefatigable readers,

February has made its entrance: not boldly, nor with any sense of cheer, but in the correct manner: thin, pale, and faintly reproachful. It is a time of thresholds and half-measures, of light that slowly improves without committing itself and of people, people like you, who insist that it is “nearly spring” while shivering like damp sparrows in the long shadows.

In my day, and if we had survived the endless boredom of January, February arrived knowing its place, a month for reckoning, ritual and restraint. Candlemas then followed with its stern little flames to remind us that light must be earned, not flicked on by thumb.

You, of course, have turned this into an excuse for yet more garish scented candles, ill-judged optimism and ‘mindfulness’ about the light, turning even the word winter into a verb so that now you’re not cold and miserable, you are ‘wintering’. It is so queasy it makes me feel permanently at sea.

A warning: do not chase away the darkness too fast, friends, it cloaks a multitude of things you may not wish to see.

Norfolk, at least, conducts itself with some dignity. This is the season of Jack Valentine, that peripatetic moralist who wandered the county dispensing gifts, puzzles and discomfort in equal measure.

He understood that generosity without intelligence is vulgar, and that a surprise poorly chosen teaches nothing at all. His cousin, Snatch Valentine, less sentimental and considerably more instructive, reminds us that February’s gifts have always come with a price.

And, of course, we have the Valentine’s Day King’s Lynn Mart, a dazzling spectacle of steam-powered wonder, the gallopers transporting people into a bright and exotic new world (I do not refer to Wisbech), of circus acts, lantern-slide shows, waxworks and mirror houses.

Then there will be Shrove Tuesday, limping along under the ridiculous alias of Pancake Day and taking what was once an act of confession and sensible deprivation and inflating it into a spectacle of sugar, noise, and performative flipping.

Pancakes were a solution, not a celebration and that you have forgotten this explains a great deal about the state of your terrible, wicked world.

And then we arrive at Leap Year, and the peculiar notion that women are, on the 29th of February, permitted to propose.

The language alone should shame you. A woman of substance does not seize novelty dates nor cling to superstition, she does not coerce, nor cajole.

She establishes such certainty of character, such clarity of intention, that the man (or woman) in question approaches the matter as one approaches a cliff edge: carefully, reverently, and fully aware that retreat or fear will be noted.

February is not gentle and it is not indulgent: it is a month of assessment, of light weighed against darkness and of people revealed under strain. Conduct yourselves accordingly.

Ever yours and remaining just in the corner of your eye,

Ada Nemesis

Norfolk’s Valentine’s Day fair

Valentine’s Day, in King’s Lynn, has never belonged to flowers or fainting sentiment.

While the rest of the nation fumbles with cards and overpriced affection, Lynn does something far more sensible: it opens the Mart.

Eight centuries old and still turning up on time, the Valentine’s Fair is not so much an event as a summoning.

Granted first by King John and sharpened into permanence by Henry VIII in 1537, it arrives every February as instructed, regardless of weather, war, plague, or the general collapse of manners. Romance may wilt, but the Mart does not.

Once it was all about trade, with merchants from Germany and Italy hauling cloth and wares into the cold streets, haggling with stiff fingers and sharp eyes.

Then came entertainment, because commerce alone will not sustain the human spirit, nor distract it sufficiently.

By the 19th century, Lynn had developed a taste for spectacle.

A gigantic ox was exhibited in 1826, measured, weighed, and stared at with deep satisfaction: gentlemen paid sixpence to see the ox, working men threepence.

The ox, I note, was not consulted.

Plague tried to stop the Mart but failed – the event was moved to Tuesday Market Place in 1584 to give death a little less elbow room, an early form of social distancing.

The only thing to halt the fair since was a modern pestilence in 2021, which I suspect the Mart took very personally.

Its true transformation arrived on a hiss of steam when Frederick Savage, Norfolk-born, poverty-hardened and possessed of a mind that would not stay in its lane, looked at the future and decided it should spin faster.

His steam-driven roundabouts, velocipedes, and racing peacocks dragged the fair from trade into motion (flying pigs would follow, food for thought for those that think Norfolk backward).

Moving pictures arrived in 1897, ghostly illusions flickering to crowds who had never seen the dead move so convincingly.

Now the Mart still opens the showmen’s year, a proving ground for bigger rides, brighter lights, and louder promises.

The Mayor rides the dodgems to declare it begun, which feels correct: authority should always wobble slightly at the start of things.

So soon it will be here again: a Valentine fair that prefers shrieks to sighs, sugar to sentiment, and history that refuses to sit quietly.

Love may be blind, but the Mart has always kept its eyes open.

Candlemas

Candlemas arrives on February 2nd, the 40th day after Christmas, which is to say just long enough for piety to sour and for winter to remind you that it has not finished speaking.

This is the day upon which light is officially acknowledged again, not welcomed, not trusted, merely recognised as something that still exists and has not yet abandoned you entirely.

The Church, predictably, gives it many names.

The Feast of the Presentation of Christ, The Purification of the Virgin Mary: titles layered thickly, like draught-proofing.

Beneath them lies a simpler scene, a poor couple arriving at the Temple in Jerusalem with a child and very little else, no lamb or finery, just two pigeons, the offering permitted to those with empty purses and lowered eyes.

Mary is declared clean enough to continue and Jesus, her firstborn son, is redeemed in accordance with Mosaic law, a ritual necessity rooted in the memory of the 10th plague, when other firstborn sons were not redeemed at all but quietly removed from the world. Candlemas remembers that survival has conditions.

Light enters the story here, not as poetry but as procedure: candles are blessed, wax is sanctified, flame is authorised.

These candles were once kept close throughout the year, brought out for storms, sickness, childbirth, and death.

In Poland they tell of Mary as Matka Boska Gromniczna, the Mother of the Blessed Thunder Candle, walking the edge of sleeping villages while wolves prowl with empty bellies and bright teeth.

She lifts her candle not for comfort but for command and her flame is not gentle, it is a warning: stay back, do not come tonight.

Candlemas understands that light is not a decoration, it is a boundary and a protection.

Elsewhere, the flame is carried indoors as in Scotland, where the Creeping of the Candles sends a child through the darkened house, room by room, holding a single light.

Shadows are confronted directly, corners are inspected and the house is reminded that it is inhabited: one hopes the child is brave, or at least fast, because darkness resents inspection.

Outside, the day is judged like a witness under oath as Candlemas is one of the great forecasting days, its skies interrogated for signs of mercy or punishment.

“If Candlemas Day be fair and bright,

Winter will have another flight;

If Candlemas Day be wind and rain,

Winter has gone and will not come again.”

Sunshine is treated with suspicion as a bright Candlemas promises more cold, more frost, more disappointment while cloud and rain are preferable, signs that winter has spent itself and is finally loosening its grip.

Churches once answered the darkness with excess, their interiors glowing after dark with hundreds of candles, buildings ablaze like defiance made visible.

The light was hoarded, stacked and dared to run out.

Snowdrops followed soon after, Candlemas Bells, Mary’s Tapers pushing through frozen ground like small, pale acts of resistance.

Candlemas is also, quietly, a feast of women. In the north of England it was known as the Wives’ Feast Day, a fertility festival dressed in respectability when bodies were acknowledged, cycles were noted and creation was discussed without blushing.

And then there are the pancakes with France, as ever, understanding the assignment.

Pope Gelasius I fed pilgrims crepes in the fifth century, round and golden like the sun itself, a gesture both practical and symbolic, to eat the sun was to invite its return.

Peasants took this seriously and a failure to make pancakes on Candlemas meant the wheat would fail too.

So, Candlemas stands at the centre of winter, flame in hand, watching refusing to promise spring or reassure, but it does offer light, briefly, conditionally and asks you what you intend to do with it. The wolves are still out there, use your light wisely.

Shuck Zine Eight

You may set aside your black armbands: Shuck Zine has not expired, nor slipped quietly into obscurity, nor been devoured by something with too many teeth. It persists.

Edition eight is currently being coaxed into existence and has chosen, with characteristic great judgement, to concern itself with faeries.

Not the fluttering, pastel nonsense sold to children and optimists, but the proper kind: the ancient, contractual, easily offended sort, those who speak sweetly, keep accounts meticulously, and consider eternity a reasonable length of time to hold a grudge.

Once again, I am joined by my loyal accomplices, Mrs Siofra Connor and Mr Matthew Willis, who continue to follow me into places that sensible people avoid.

Together we are trespassing through hedge-lines, hollow hills and the less hospitable corners of Norfolk and Suffolk, cataloguing what peers back at you when you think you are alone.

Expect Hikey Sprites, thresholds that should not be crossed, and presences that have never cared for your explanations.

We will, of course, outline the traditional methods by which the fae may be welcomed to one’s door, offered in the same spirit as instructions for summoning storms or insulting royalty. Educational, not encouraging.

The pages are filling, the circle has been drawn with appropriate reluctance, ink is being spilt in quantities that suggest poor outcomes.

Edition Eight is taking shape, and it does not appear inclined to be gentle.

The heart of the Mart

Back to King’s Lynn and the Tuesday Market Place which likes to think of itself as convivial with its bright lights, music, rides that spin and festivals that insist upon cheerfulness.

A civic smile stretched wide across the face of King’s Lynn, but at its heart, there is darkness.

On the north side of the square, between commerce and refreshment, numbers 15 and 16 bear a small and sad ornament.

High above a window, cut crudely into red brick, sits a diamond and inside it, a heart. It is not decorative, it is accusatory.

This is not a token of love, it is a memorial to the cost of being female, inconvenient and alive at the wrong moment in history.

The most commonly told story names Margaret Read, burned in this very square in 1590, long before Matthew Hopkins made a profession of terror.

Her crime was witchcraft, a charge that required no evidence beyond age, solitude, sharpness of tongue or the refusal to die quietly.

Tuesday Market Place had seen executions before: hanging, burning, the theatre of punishment performed for crowds who called it justice.

Legend insists that as Margaret burned, her heart burst from her chest, struck the wall where the carving now sits, then fled.

It beat its way across the stones to the River Ouse and sank beneath the surface, the water boiling as if offended. A woman silenced, but not entirely contained.

Another version is offered, because one cruelty is never enough: a housemaid, a mistress, a whispered promise of inheritance, a man eager to believe, a woman accused of treachery and burned for it.

She swore her innocent heart would prove her truth and it did.

It burst free, because that is what hearts in Lynn are said to do when pressed too hard by injustice.

You will notice the pattern. The heart is always innocent. The punishment never is.

These stories survive because the square would rather remember its entertainments than its victims. The brickwork disagrees. It keeps the mark. It refuses to smooth itself over.

So when you stand in Tuesday Market Place, amid noise and laughter, spare a thought for the women whose hearts were judged too loud, too stubborn, too alive. This town still beats because theirs were broken first.

The Twelve Months of Shucks

You will, of course, believe you know Shuck: everyone does.

A great black hound, coal-dark and broad of shoulder, eyes lit like well-set fires, padding along lanes and lingering in churchyards with professional intent.

Norfolk and Suffolk have rehearsed this terror for centuries but familiarity breeds not only contempt but laziness, and Shuck has never limited himself to a single shape for the convenience of the living.

Allow me, then, to introduce the black sheep donkey of the family.

In the eighteenth century, Melton acquired something it had not ordered and could not return: a Shuck with a donkey’s head.

Not a poetic flourish or a misunderstanding caused by drink or moonlight, a smooth, velvet-bodied thing, quite dog-like in its hide, topped with the unmistakable head of an ass.

The account comes to us via layers of respectable telling, which is how truth prefers to travel.

An innkeeper’s son, 70 years old and therefore past the age of invention, recalling the tale as told to him by his father, who kept the Horse and Groom when toll-gates still pinched the road and men believed a gun was an appropriate response to confusion.

Goodman Kemp of Woodbridge burst into the inn one dark night, frantic, demanding a firearm to shoot a “Shock” hanging upon the toll-gate bars.

Emboldened by company, Kemp did what men so often do when faced with the inexplicable: he reached for it, at which point the creature turned, bit his thumb, and vanished.

No sulphur, no sermon, just absence.

Kemp bore the mark of that bite to his dying day and told the story of his ‘shock’ encounter for just as long, his scar a souvenir for curiosity.

The inn has changed names since then, the toll-gate is gone and the gentlemen in our tale are dust.

But something with the wrong head once stood in Melton long enough to be grabbed, and that should trouble you and remind you that Shuck does not always arrive as expected. Sometimes he comes as a joke, sometimes as a warning, and sometimes with the head of a beast long associated with stubbornness, foolishness, and the refusal to move when pushed.

My most enduring readers,

January has arrived. Of course it has, it always does. Cold, colourless and faintly accusatory, like an unpaid debt or a letter you hoped would never be delivered.

The decorations lie dead in boxes, the year stretches ahead like an unlit corridor, and you find yourselves once again trapped in the longest month ever devised by man or God. How very appropriate.

And so, as the fog thickens and the marshes resume their rightful gloom, we begin something new. This January marks the first instalment of The Twelve Months of Shucks, a year-long wandering through the many shapes, sightings and sinister habits of the Black Shuck. Each month, a different tale, each month, the same uncomfortable question: what, precisely, was walking beside you when the light failed?

Do not imagine this will be a comforting project. Shuck is nothing if not inconsistent: one moment a protector, the next a portent, sometimes a dog, sometimes something wearing the idea of a dog rather loosely.

You will grow used to him, I expect and that is when he becomes most dangerous.

January also gives us time, too much time, to dwell on matters best examined slowly and without screaming. We shall be looking closely at six individuals in Suffolk whose feet, rather than being lost, chose to depart entirely. They did not wander, they did not mislay themselves, they simply detached.

One cannot help but admire the decisiveness, though sympathy will be extended sparingly.

And then, the sea. Norfolk’s coast, thick with seals, those sleek observers with their dark, knowing eyes. Folklore has long warned you about creatures that move between skins as easily as between tides. You would do well to remember that not everything hauled up on the shore wishes to remain what it appears to be.

So welcome to January, welcome to Shuck. Wrap yourself in blankets, keep the fire fed, and do not assume that what you glimpse at the edge of the page is merely imagination. This year will unfold whether you like it or not.

Ever yours, in frost and reflection,

Ada Nemesis

The family who lost their feet

In the village of Wattisham in Suffolk, an 18th-century stone tablet in St Nicholas’ Church records a calamity so grim it resists embellishment. A family of six lost their feet: not metaphorically, not accidentally, they simply dropped off.

Beginning in January 1762, 16-year-old Mary Downing suffered agonising pain, blackening flesh, and a sensation she described as dogs gnawing at her legs.

Her feet detached at the ankle and she died soon after.

Her mother followed, losing both feet but surviving and then siblings fell one by one: ankles, knees, limbs taken with horrifying efficiency. Even the infant, removed early to a wet nurse, did not escape.

Villagers raised funds in pity and terror, physicians were baffled, witchcraft was suspected, something unseen was clearly at work.

The culprit, alas, was not supernatural but no less dreadful: ergot, a fungus growing on badly stored rye.

Known in the Middle Ages as St Anthony’s Fire, it caused seizures, madness, gangrene, and death. That more families were not destroyed by it remains remarkable.

Sometimes the bogeyman is not a monster at all, but bread.

Of seals and borrowed skins

Finally, we turn to the coast. Norfolk’s shores are thick with seals, watching, waiting, lifting their heads from grey water with unsettling attentiveness.

Folklore has long warned you about beings that slip between animal skin and human skin, sea and land, love and loss.

Selkies, seal-folk who shed their skins to walk as humans, appear across northern folklore: they marry, they pine, they leave. Children are born marked by webbed fingers, longing for the sea, or both.

The theft of a skin is never forgiven: the sea always calls its own back.

Do not mistake these tales for romance - they are stories of captivity, of homesickness so profound it becomes fatal. Norfolk’s great seal colonies give these legends an uncomfortably local edge.

If you find a skin on the shore, leave it be.

Shuck Zine returns

You will be relieved, no doubt, to learn that Shuck Zine has not perished. Quite the opposite.

Edition Eight is in production, and its theme is faeries.

Not the insipid, wing-dusted trifles of nursery books, but the old sort. The sharp-toothed. The silver-tongued. Creatures fond of bargains, riddles and irreversible regret.

Alongside my long-suffering and willingly imperilled collaborators, Mrs Siofra Connor and Mr Matthew Willis, I am once more venturing into their thorn-choked territories with what can only be described as reckless scholarly enthusiasm.

Expect accounts of the hidden folk of Norfolk and Suffolk, of Hikey Sprites and others who linger just beyond the edge of your vision. We shall explain how one might invite the fae to one’s threshold, though I advise you, with genuine feeling, not to try it.

The circle is cast, the ink flows, the tales are being pressed, reluctantly, into pages. Be ready for whispers and be ready to order.

As for our credentials, I conducted a straw poll in Rosary Cemetery. Shuck was declared the finest folklore zine in existence. The other contenders failed to rise to the occasion. Or indeed, rise at all.

Keep your salt handy, your cream fresh, your iron close. They are coming.

The Twelve Months of Shucks

January: White Shuck of Great Snoring

You will, of course, think you know Shuck. Everyone does. A coal-black hound with eyes like hell’s embers, stalking lanes and churchyards as an omen of death: Norfolk and Suffolk have shivered at his name for centuries.

But allow me to introduce his lesser-known relation: White Shuck.

In the deceptively named village of Great Snoring, in the late 1930s, a farmer driving at night encountered what appeared to be a large white dog standing in the road. He did not stop in time: his vehicle passed straight through it.

White Shuck was reported repeatedly in the years before the Second World War, dashing in front of cyclists and motorists, howling as it vanished into fields and hedgerows.

One motorcyclist, after colliding with the creature, abandoned his machine entirely. A sensible decision.

Black Shuck is said to foretell individual death. One cannot help but wonder whether White Shuck appears before something larger, something communal, something catastrophic.

National Storytelling Week runs from January 31 to February 8: here’s one I wrote earlier

I was walking home along Riverside Road, the Wensum to my left, dark and unbothered by me. Fog had settled in the way it does there, not dramatically, just enough to rearrange distances and soften decisions. Norwich felt folded away, the streetlights glowing like thoughts on the edge of your memory.

Ahead of me walked someone in a long coat. Floor-length, the sort you do not see often now, the colour of wet stone. It skimmed close to the pavement, close enough that I listened for the sound of it brushing stone.

There was no sound.

I told myself this was nothing: the fog swallowed noise, the river carried it away. Still, I found myself smiling.

After years of telling stories about ghosts, you start to look for them.

A tall coat, a slow pace, a soundless tread, a dark night…I laughed under my breath at my own foolishness. Imagine, I thought, finally catching up with a ghost of my own.

I laughed, quietly, because that is what you do when the world presents you with something ridiculous. Imagine it: all these years talking about revenants and lantern men and Black Shuck’s passing shadow, and now I am behind a ghost who cannot even hurry.

Fog thickened and the river vanished.

The coat ahead of me did not stir, though a breeze lifted my own collar. I quickened my step, more out of politeness than courage, and drew level with the figure just as the path narrowed before the row of shops ahead of the roundabout.

I glanced down first. Habit. My father had always told me that shoes tell you everything you need to know about a person.

There were no feet.

The hem of the coat hovered an inch above the ground and beneath it, pale things moved. Tentacles, I thought, absurdly.

Soft, blind ropes easing forward, tasting stone and leaf and the thin residue of human passing. They made no sound, they did not touch the ground so much as persuade it.

The figure turned its head. Not all the way, but enough.

Its face was familiar. That was the worst of it: it was my own, older by a kindness I had not earned. Eyes filmed with river-light, mouth shaped as if mid-story, waiting for a listener.

“Don’t stop,” it said, very gently, “they like it when you stop.”

I did not ask who they were, I did as I was told without question. I walked on and I never looked back.

Even now, when the fog comes in low along the Wensum, I hear something behind me moving patiently, learning my pace, amused that I ever thought the dead would hurry.

My most persistent congregation of November’s gloom,

The clocks have been pulled back and the light has fled, leaving us to dwell in afternoons that feel like evenings, and evenings that feel like eternities.

November is the season of the extinguished wick, when the year droops like a withered banner, and the air is laden with smoke; gunpowder, bonfire, and the sweet reek of something blackened beyond saving.

You cling still to Halloween, to your masks and your sweets, but I tell you: the feast of shadows has not ended. November ushers in the true tide of souls. Allhallowtide, Hallowmas, All Saints and All Souls, this trinity of holy days stitched together by prayers, bells, and the baking of soul cakes.

Poor men once went from door to door, not in nylon capes but in rags, asking not for Mars bars but for mercy. And in return for their alms they promised prayers, whispered bargains with heaven to spring your dead from purgatory.

Imagine it: a soul loosed for every currant baked into a cake. Such sweet and simple magic, far older than your fun-size confectionery.

But if the promise of prayer did not stir you, then the crackle of fire surely did. November the Fifth: the Gunpowder Plot foiled, the traitors drawn, hanged, and quartered, and their memory kept alive by children rattling coins in cups and effigies burning like damned souls across the fields.

Penny for the Guy, sir? Penny for the condemned. Centuries pass, and still you light your fires, though fewer remember the men who burned before the straw-stuffed substitutes.

And yet, even as these customs smoulder on, I must pause to note, ah yes, here comes the sour breath, the sudden rush of Jenny Greenteeth-come-latelys to the folklore fire.

Everywhere I look, another little club has sprung up, another gathering of the newly bewitched, all declaring with wide eyes that ghosts exist, that witches once walked, that monsters have bones.

Welcome, I suppose, though forgive me if I do not clap my pale hands raw with delight. We have been tolling this bell for more than a decade; in truth, for centuries. Today’s chip paper is tomorrow’s papier mâché mask, and fickle fashion will soon flutter away to some shinier haunt.

But we remain, as we always have, at the root and marrow of the tale. There is room enough in the graveyard for all, but never doubt who tends it best.

And so November passes: a month of gunpowder and soul cakes, of prayers whispered to windows and sparks shot into the vast indifference of the sky. You huddle at your hearths while the wind prowls outside like a disappointed lover, you bake, you burn, you beg, you bury.

And through it all I walk, unseen, with smoke in my hair and frost in my veins, whispering in the cracks of your doors: Do not mistake the dying year for silence. It has teeth still.

Yours, with fond derision and eternal patience,

Ada Nemesis

Postscriptum: Should another troupe of bright-eyed folklorists announce their “new discovery” of ghosts in the East, I shall personally introduce them to one.

Diwali: The Festival of Lights

Too often I write to you of graves, of whispers, of all that fades and withers – but tonight, I would have you turn your faces not to the crypt, but to the lamp.

For this month, across India and across the wide scattered world, millions ready themselves for Diwali, the Festival of Lights. How strange, and how lovely: an entire people reminding the night that it cannot win.

Diwali comes when the moon is absent, Amavasya, the dark of the month, yet the earth is brightened by rows upon rows of diyas, earthen lamps lit and lined like tiny rebellions against despair.

The word itself tells you this truth: Deepawali, a row of lights, each flame a spark of resistance and the tales that gather round Diwali are many, like garlands strung on a single thread.

The return of Rama to Ayodhya, after 14 years of exile and the conquest of Ravana, greeted by a city blazing with welcome. The triumph of Krishna over the demon Narakasura, washed clean in oil baths at dawn.

The devotion of a wife who lit lamps all night to keep her husband from death’s grasp, her prayers softening even Yama, Lord of the End. The freedom of Guru Hargobind Singh, released with fifty-two kings from Jahangir’s prison, marked with lanterns in every gurdwara.

Everywhere, the stories speak the same refrain: light over darkness, justice over cruelty, hope over the long shadow of fear. And how sorely we need that refrain now. The world has grown coarse with division, the tongues of tyrants wag louder by the day, and hatred struts as if it were heritage.

Yet still, houses are swept clean, new clothes donned, gifts exchanged, and families sit together while sweets dissolve like promises of joy. Across continents, candles flare, and neighbours pause at doorways dazzled by colour.

I, who linger in draughts and ashes, who know the language of loss, cannot help but be moved: what a delicious affront to despair, to insist upon brightness when the night is at its fullest. To answer cruelty with feasting, fear with song, endings with fire.

So I say: let this month’s light leak even into my realm.

Place a lamp in your window not only for your gods, your ancestors, your stories, but as an act of rebellion against every sneer that tells you to divide, to dim, to despair.

Let the flames speak across borders and tongues, whispering to one another: we endure, and we shine. In the hush of November, I bow to those millions of flames.

Even I, Ada Nemesis, who keep the company of shadows, cannot help but smile at a world so intent on burning bright.

Coming Soon: Shuck Eight – Faeries

The news you have been waiting for has washed up, waterlogged and whispering, on the Foreshore of Promise.

Shuck Zine returns.

Edition Eight is in production, and the theme is perilously enchanting: faeries.

Not the fluttery darlings of childhood picture books, but the old kind - sharp-toothed and silver-tongued, fond of riddles and ruin. Myself and my unfortunate yet willing co- conspirators, Mrs Siofra Connor and Mr Matthew Willis, are delving into their thorny realms with reckless scholarly abandon.

Expect accounts of the fae in Norfolk and Suffolk; the old folk, the hidden ones, the Hikey Sprites who flit just beyond the corner of your eye. We shall reveal how to invite the fae to your threshold (though I strongly advise against it), and share tales never told before (perhaps for good reason).

We are casting our circle, setting our ink to paper, and binding the wild to page. The countdown has begun. Be ready for whispers. Be ready to order.

And for those doubting our credentials: I conducted a straw poll in Rosary Cemetery, and Shuck was declared the finest folklore zine in existence. The other entries failed to rise to the occasion. Or indeed, rise at all. Keep your salt handy, your cream fresh, and your iron close. They are coming.

The magic of Topaz

November is a hungry month, all bare trees and brittle light, and yet those born to it are given jewels that glow as if they carry the sun inside.

This month’s birthstones are topaz and citrine, two golden-hued gems so often mistaken for one another through history that their stories are hopelessly entwined.

Topaz, clear in its purest form, has long been confused with diamond. Yet it can blaze in colours from pink and violet to blue, green, and the familiar yellows and browns: the rarest and most precious of all is Imperial topaz, a reddish-orange flame trapped in crystal.

Some say the name “topaz” comes from the Sanskrit tapaz, meaning fire, others trace it to a mist-wreathed island in the Red Sea, known to the Greeks as Topazios.

Its folklore is just as varied: the Greeks wore it for strength; African shamans treated it as sacred; in India, a topaz worn over the heart was said to bring long life, beauty, and wisdom.

In the Renaissance, a charm of topaz tied to the left arm was thought to deflect dark magic.

It has been called a talisman against nightmares, madness, and even housefires: not bad for a stone born of granite and lava.

Citrine, meanwhile, takes its name from the French citron, meaning lemon. A form of quartz, it is usually pale yellow to deep honey-orange, a colour given by traces of iron.

The ancients thought citrine carried the heat of the sun: Egyptians set it in talismans, Greeks carved their gods into it, and Romans wore it on their priestly rings.

Its powers were many: to heal the heart, to protect against snake venom, to bring calm where there was anger, and, most enduringly, to attract wealth. Traders in the Middle Ages called it the Merchant’s Stone and slipped it into purses and tills, hoping it would multiply gold.

Today, much of the citrine sold is amethyst transformed by fire, heated until it turns from violet into gold. A reminder, perhaps, that even under great trial, something beautiful may emerge.

So here stand November’s guardians: topaz, the fiery talisman, and citrine, the sun caught in quartz, one promising strength, the other prosperity, both defiant against the darkness.

If you were born beneath these shortening days, take comfort: your jewels are not pale, but blazing. They remind us that even in the bleakest month, the light has not gone out.

Cadaver graves in Norfolk

If ever you should wander into St Michael’s Church in Aylsham, look down: beneath your feet lie two skeletons who grin as if the grave were not so solemn after all. These are Richard Howard, Sheriff of Norwich in 1488 and the man who built the church porch whose name is still carved into the roof, and his wife Cecily.

Their memorial is no noble knight in armour, nor stately lady in prayer, but a pair of cadavers, lying side by side in their shrouds. Each is barely nineteen inches tall, engraved in brass around the year 1499 in a Norwich workshop.

Husband and wife mirror one another almost exactly, as if to remind the living that in death, all distinctions vanish. Beneath them, the plaque begs your prayers for their souls. Such works are called cadaver tombs or transi tombs when doubled.

They show the dead not in their prime but as corpses: shrouded, skeletal, even worm-eaten. Their purpose was plain: to remind every passer-by of mortality, of the briefness of life, of the certainty of decay. Memento mori.

By the fifteenth century, they had become fashionable among the clergy, gentry, and merchants of England. Some chose double tombs: above, themselves in earthly splendour; below, their bodies stripped of all honour, food for worms.

Often these monuments were commissioned before death, a constant reminder to their owners of the fate that awaited.

In Canterbury Cathedral, the tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele (d.1443) shows him robed in state on one level, and on the next, lying shrivelled in his winding sheet. The epitaph reads: “ I was a pauper born, then to primate here raised, Now I am cut down and served up for worms. Whoever may be who pass by, I ask for your remembrance.”

These grim brasses first crept into England in the 1420s, part of a broader medieval taste for the macabre. Norfolk was particularly fond of them - no surprise, as Norwich rivalled London as a great medieval centre.

Some of the most haunting examples in our county include:

• St Peter and St Paul, Salle: John Brigge, 1430, said to be the first English shroud brass.

• Norwich Castle Museum: Robert Brampton and wife Isabel, 1468, carved in a Norwich workshop.

• St Andrew, Kirby Bedon: William Dussyng and wife Katherine, 1505.

• St Mary and St Walstan, Bawburgh: Thomas Tyard in his shroud.

• St Margaret’s, Cley-next-the-Sea: Symondes and wife Agnes (1508) in their shrouds, with eight children shown in everyday dress: William, Ralph, Aleyn, John, Cecily, Anne, Agnes, and Rose.

• St Miles, Coslany: Henry Scolows and wife, 1515.

• Holy Trinity, Loddon: Dame Catherine Hobart and second husband John, 1536.

• St Andrew, Frenze: Thomas Hobson, c.1520, in his winding sheet.

• All Saints, Great Fransham: Cecily Legge, 1500.

• St Martin’s, Fincham: An unusual shrouded woman in the nave.

Norwich Cathedral: Thomas Gooding, mason, 1600. He paid richly to be buried upright, certain that this would give him a head-start on Judgement Day. His epitaph is as sharp as a tolling bell:

All you that do this place pass bye,

Remember death for you must dye.

As you are now even so was I

And as I am so shall you be.

Thomas Gooding here do staye

Wayting for God’s judgement daye.

It is said the dead keep better company than the living, and in these tombs we see why. They smile their skeletal smiles across centuries, whispering their lesson: that flesh fails, worms wait, and yet memory endures in brass and stone. So, remember death, dear reader, for you too must die.

The Grand Opera House…of Norwich

This spectacular building opened on August 3 1903 and was renamed within a year. The Hippodrome Theatre was designed in an Italian Renaissasnce style and was the first place where actor Cary Grand performed (at the age of 12, and then called Archie Leach) and where Laurel and Hardy would enchant Norwich in 1954.

In 1931, a new Western Electric sound system was installed and the venue also became a cinema – it controversially aired a film called Morgenrot in 1934, a German submarine film set during World War One which was released three days after Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor. In April 1942’s Baedeker raids, Hitler’s planes bombed the Hippodrome and three people were killed, the manager, his wife and a sea lion trainer. Alternating between cinema and theatre, the building finally closed in April 1960 and, after being empty for four years, was replaced with St Giles’ multi-storey car park.

My Dearly Beloved, my gathering of kindred in shadows,

October at last, the month of my heart, my marrow, my eternity: the veil frays, my darlings, threadbare at the edges, and I slip my fingers through the rents.

The air is sharpened, like teeth beneath velvet lips; the mists rise from the earth as though the graves themselves are exhaling.

Each dusk arrives earlier, grander, more triumphant, as if the dark is reclaiming its rightful throne.

This is the month when the world remembers it is mortal: you light your lanterns, carve your gourds into grinning skulls, and mutter charms to keep us at bay, and yet…we walk among you. Oh, how easily we walk among you.

Samhain approaches: the old feast of the dead, the hour when the doors creak open and the past comes to supper.

All Souls’ Day follows, with its procession of prayers and candles, but what use are prayers to the departed when the departed prefer footsteps? Mine shall echo with yours, heel for heel, through fallen leaves slick with fog.

Do you feel it yet? That nip in the air that is not quite cold, but something older? Do you sense the presence of company when you walk alone?

October makes confidantes of the departed; they lean close, they breathe upon your neck, they tell you secrets you would rather not know.

Do not flinch, do not flee, this is the season of our communion, your breath in the air, my breath in the dark, together at last.

Yours, adoringly, impatiently, eternally,

Ada Nemesis

Postscript: I trust you have laid in enough candles.

Coming Soon: Shuck Eight – Faeries

The news you have been waiting for has washed up, waterlogged and whispering, on the Foreshore of Promise.

Shuck Zine returns.

Edition Eight is in production, and the theme is perilously enchanting: faeries.

Not the fluttery darlings of childhood picture books, but the old kind - sharp-toothed and silver-tongued, fond of riddles and ruin. Myself and my unfortunate yet willing co-conspirators, Mrs Siofra Connor and Mr Matthew Willis, are delving into their thorny realms with reckless scholarly abandon.

Expect accounts of the fae in Norfolk and Suffolk; the old folk, the hidden ones, the Hikey Sprites who flit just beyond the corner of your eye. We shall reveal how to invite the fae to your threshold (though I strongly advise against it), and share tales never told before (perhaps for good reason).

We are casting our circle, setting our ink to paper, and binding the wild to page. The countdown has begun. Be ready for whispers. Be ready to order.

And for those doubting our credentials: I conducted a straw poll in Rosary Cemetery, and Shuck was declared the finest folklore zine in existence. The other entries failed to rise to the occasion. Or indeed, rise at all. Keep your salt handy, your cream fresh, and your iron close. They are coming.

Drimial Agus Thorial: a wicked spell

Forget your apple peel charms, your dainty daisy chains, and your mirrors held to catch a phantom lover’s face - love, in folklore, was not always about sighs and sweetness.

There was another way: darker, brutal, obscene.

It was called Drimial Agus Thorial, and it was nothing like the sentimental parlour games whispered of on Halloween night: this was no spell for the faint-hearted.

To bind a man to her will, a woman was instructed to step not into candlelight but into the graveyard.

At midnight, with the devil as witness, she and her accomplice dug up a newly-buried corpse and from the cadaver’s head to its heel they sliced a long strip of skin.

This flayed ribbon of death was wound about her waist as a belt, a girdle of human flesh and with solemn invocation - never once daring to name God -she bore it for a day and a night.

The spell’s climax was more dreadful still.

She waited until her chosen man slept and then, winding that same strip of graveflesh around his body, she completed the unholy binding.

When he awoke, there would be no escape.

His will would be broken, his heart, his hand and his very soul would be chained to hers and no priest, no prayer, no pleading could sever the tether.

He would be forced to marry her.

And the price? The children born of such unions bore the mark of their cursed conception: a black band about the wrist, visible to all, a living scar of their mother’s pact.

They were shunned as sons of the devil, set apart from the rest of humankind.

Drimial Agus Thorial is a reminder that love magic was never just lace and longing, it was also fear, coercion, and the desecration of the dead.

In the end, perhaps that is the truest horror of this spell: not that it bound men, but that it revealed the lengths to which human hearts might go when they mistake obsession for love.

The fear hidden in Fritton

If you go down to Fritton Woods at night, tread carefully.

The air there is heavy, as though it remembers things too monstrous to name – I took a solitary walk once between its oaks and pines, long after my bones had stilled, and reader, I was not alone.

The year was 1997 and two souls, still tethered to the world of breath and heartbeat, had taken their motor-car into the woods.

Why they lingered there at such an hour I shall not say, for their reasons are their own, but as they sat in the silence, they saw two figures standing beside a tree.

At first, they thought them people. Poor fools.

They looked harder, and the shapes revealed themselves: too tall, their necks stretched like pale stalks, their hands too long, too thin, jointed in ways that whispered of wrongness.

They were not human, but a cruel echo of humanity, a mask stretched over something unspeakably other.

The watchers in the car did what all mortals do when faced with the uncanny: they sought the light.

With trembling hands, the driver started the engine, flooding the woods with the hard glare of headlights. And yet…there was nothing.

The creatures slid away, folding themselves into the dark behind a tree, vanishing as though they had never been: but the forest remembers.

Fritton is not innocent soil. Once it rang with the cries of young soldiers stumbling through trenches, playing at war until war came for them in earnest.

It has drunk the sweat of American infantrymen who practised for slaughter beneath its boughs. It has hidden munitions, and it has hidden worse: do you think such ground sleeps quietly?

There are other tales, too. Across the world, mortals whisper of the black-eyed children, young forms draped in rags of outworn clothing, their eyes as void as the abyss, their voices soft and pleading.

Always asking, always waiting at the threshold, radiating a terror so deep that no one has dared discover what happens if you let them in.

The tall ones at Fritton, long of neck, slim of hand, are kin to those children, I believe, different masks, same abyss behind the eyes.

They come not from the stars but from the cracks in your courage, the fissures where reason fails and fear seeps through.

The living believe they are alone in the woods, that the silence is theirs, but silence is never empty. It is a mouth, waiting to open.

So if you should wander into Fritton after dark, remember this: the headlights of your car will not banish what waits between the trees.

They are watching, stretching their necks towards you, and they will ask, oh yes, they will ask. Pray you never learn what answer they desire.

The terrifying Hand of Glory

Few objects in folklore are as unsettling as the Hand of Glory. A symbol of sorcery, crime and corrupted flesh, it is the severed hand of a hanged criminal, preserved and transformed into a tool of darkness.

The hand was not merely macabre trophy-hunting: ritual was essential. The limb was salted, pickled with saltpeter, long pepper and other spices, and left to dry in the heat of the sun or an oven fed with fern and vervain. Once mummified, it was ready to work its dreadful office. A candle was fashioned from the fat of the same hanged man, mixed with virgin wax and Lapland sesame, and either placed between the clenched fingers or set into the palm. In other variations, each finger became a wick. To light those flames was to awaken a sinister power.

The Hand of Glory was the burglar’s charm, the old-world equivalent of slipping something in a drink. While the wicked little fire burned, all within the house fell into a sleep so deep they could not be roused. Locks sprang open. Chests and cupboards yielded as if touched by skeleton keys. Only milk—not water, not beer, not tears—could quench the unholy fire.

There is a story told of a servant girl who spied a ragged stranger set such a hand upon the kitchen table of an inn, its waxy fingers guttering with flame. Everyone in the house, no matter how she shook them, remained asleep. Only the girl herself was spared, for one finger had refused to catch. She seized the awful relic, and only by drenching it in milk did the flames die. The thief was caught and hanged, but the tale lingers—a warning of what malign tools men might use.

Norfolk has its own curious entanglement with this relic of terror. In the 1960s, Raymond Howard of Field Dalling—keeper of the so-called Coven of Atho—produced a pamphlet on “white witchcraft.” Among its teachings was mention of the Hand of Glory. In Howard’s telling, the Hand did not mean a shrivelled relic burning with cold fire, but rather the secret greetings and signs by which members of the Order recognised each other.

And yet, in placing this phrase alongside his rites of Atho, Howard could not help but summon the darker echoes of history—the whispers of pickled hands carried into houses at midnight, the flames that meant no one inside would ever wake in time.

The Hand of Glory is folklore’s cursed narcotic, a perverse tool designed to rob the innocent of their will. Whether you see it as a witch’s sign, a burglar’s talisman, or simply a relic of superstition, it remains one of the most frightening artefacts ever imagined.

Places in Norfolk we wish we had visited: The Lost Temple of Reffley

Ah, Reffley. Norfolk’s temple-that-was, its shrine-that-is-not, a sanctum swallowed by time and by ivy.

Once, by a spring rich with iron and myth, the Brethren gathered in secrecy, their cups raised to Bacchus and to Venus, their laughter ringing through the trees. Wine and love, intoxication and desire: what finer twin patrons for such a place?

In 1756 the spring was crowned with stone: an octagonal temple, roof pointed heavenward, its shadow lengthened by an obelisk whose face bore words in Latin…words of warning.

Two sphinxes crouched on guard, as though the Valley of the Kings itself had bent its knee to Norfolk. And yet, all temples must taste ruin.

The years unmade its splendour, vandals struck, and those who dared deliver the final blow found themselves shackled by a curse. For it was written: Whosoever shall remove this or bid its removal, let him die the last of his race.

How easily mortals forget that words carved in stone are rarely idle.

The centuries carried the Brethren still, men who whispered their toasts in the locked, shuttered house by the spring, as trains screamed across the county and fashion fled elsewhere.

And still, the little temple held its silence.

In 1936, the press marvelled at its mystery, fast forward to 1978, near Midsummer’s Eve, the last public celebration drained the spring of laughter, leaving only echoes in the grass.

Now, the temple is gone.

The woodland enfolds it, the basin sleeps beneath moss, and the spring runs dry, or perhaps it only waits, for such places never die entirely.

They wait for thirsty lips, for eager hands, for trespassers bold enough to disturb their slumber and when the spring flows again, as flow it

My Dearest, my earthbound creatures of flesh,

At last. At last the sun grows weary, dragging its tired gold into earlier graves, and the evenings gather length like a miser hoarding coin.

September: finally, a season worth speaking of, a season I can breathe in.

The heat withdraws, the leaves begin their quiet rustle of surrender, and the air tastes faintly of smoke and damp earth.

I feel the long nights stretching, promising frost, promising dark, promising the velvet cloak of winter pressing down upon us all. The Things that do not love daylight stir at the edges of hedgerows again: how we have missed them.

This is the month when the pulse of the year quickens towards its rightful end, and those with ears to hear may already catch the beat of the great drum: boom, boom, calling us to October, November, December.

Nights of firelight. Nights of spirits. Nights of shadows thick as treacle.

Somewhere, near Diss, a woman weeps still in her bonnet and grey gown. The White Lady of Scole, dripping sorrow upon the staircase of an inn.

They say her husband’s jealousy murdered her, though I suspect jealousy murders more than husbands ever admit. Beware that sound, my darlings, the sobbing you cannot explain, the cold at your shoulder when no window is open.

The world is about to turn, and we, the shades, are waiting. With delight. With impatience. With teeth.

And September is only the beginning.

Yours, in the returning dark,

Ada Nemesis

Postscript: I have curated this entire edition this month, if you want a job done well, do it yourself, as my Mother always said, as she gave me her jobs and then claimed credit for them herself.

Emma, the White Lady of Scole

There are ghosts who shriek and rattle, there are ghosts who claw and terrify, and then there are those, like Emma, who simply weep, and whose sorrow soaks a place until every beam, brick, and floorboard remembers it.

The Scole Inn, near Diss, is one of Norfolk’s great coaching inns, raised in 1655. Its oak beams and sprawling staircases once welcomed King Charles II, Lord Nelson, and a fair company of rogues besides. (Do not imagine royalty and rogues never drank together. They did, they still do). Highwaymen found it a comfortable haunt, which of course made the respectable uneasy.

In the mid-18th century, Emma arrived at the inn with her husband, ordinary travellers, no different from countless others. But in an atmosphere thick with smoke, ale, and suspicion, her husband’s mind twisted.

He convinced himself that Emma had been unfaithful, not only unfaithful but with one of the very highwaymen who prowled the Scole Inn’s corridors. It was nonsense, of course, but jealousy has murdered more than knives ever have.

In their bedroom that night, Emma’s husband extinguished her flame in a fit of rage, his furious envy drowning his wife’s protestations. Her death was hushed, but it was not forgotten.

Now Emma drifts endlessly through the inn, bonneted, cloaked in grey, climbing the staircase in tears.

Guests in “Emma’s Room” report beds shaking violently, objects moved with unseen hands, and, most dreadful of all, the sensation of her sitting gently beside them, as though still trying to plead her innocence.

She is not a ghost of rage. No bloodied hands, no shrieking vengeance. Hers is worse: a sorrow that seeps into your very marrow: to encounter her is to taste grief and to know, in your bones, the cold weight of betrayal.

The Scole Inn remains an inn, warm and welcoming. But if you wander its oak-panelled corridors, pause by the staircase: listen. If you hear sobbing when there is no one near, it will not be for you. It is Emma, still begging to be believed.

Some guests say she lingers to remind us how swiftly suspicion curdles into violence, but I, for one, admire her quiet persistence.

I myself would not walk those stairs forever weeping, I would haunt with a sharper hand. But Emma? Emma teaches sorrow. And in that, she has become eternal.

Coming Soon: Shuck Eight – Faeries

The news you have been waiting for has washed up, waterlogged and whispering, on the Foreshore of Promise.

Shuck Zine returns.

Edition Eight is in production, and the theme is perilously enchanting: faeries.

Not the fluttery darlings of childhood picture books, but the old kind - sharp-toothed and silver-tongued, fond of riddles and ruin. Myself and my unfortunate yet willing co-conspirators, Mrs Siofra Connor and Mr Matthew Willis, are delving into their thorny realms with reckless scholarly abandon.

Expect accounts of the fae in Norfolk and Suffolk; the old folk, the hidden ones, the Hikey Sprites who flit just beyond the corner of your eye. We shall reveal how to invite the fae to your threshold (though I strongly advise against it), and share tales never told before (perhaps for good reason).

We are casting our circle, setting our ink to paper, and binding the wild to page. The countdown has begun. Be ready for whispers. Be ready to order.

And for those doubting our credentials: I conducted a straw poll in Rosary Cemetery, and Shuck was declared the finest folklore zine in existence. The other entries failed to rise to the occasion. Or indeed, rise at all. Keep your salt handy, your cream fresh, and your iron close. They are coming.

The acorn’s spell

I cannot help but admire an acorn. Such a small, glossy nut, easily crushed underfoot, and yet it carries in its smooth brown shell the promise of an oak that might live for centuries. (You may call that potential. I call it patience: something the dead know all too well.)

Folklore has always favoured the acorn.

Carried in pockets and tied in pouches, it was a charm against illness, bad luck, and even lightning itself.

Airmen, steeplejacks, and those who clambered high above the ground trusted this tiny talisman to keep thunder at bay: imagine placing your faith in a nut against Thor himself!

But then again, belief has always been the strongest protection humankind can muster.

The oak, of course, was sacred long before England was England. The Druids held their rites in oak groves, and Celts saw the acorn as a seed of fertility and rebirth, bound to the turning of the seasons.

To carry an acorn was to carry a promise: that light and life would return, no matter how dark the winter. A comfort I would have liked when my own season ended.

But acorns are more than charms; they are lessons.

They whisper that from the smallest beginning may come the greatest strength; a seed becomes a tree, a tree becomes a forest, a forest becomes a kingdom.

The English oak itself has been cut, carved, and pressed into the very bones of this island: its timbers once built the Navy’s “wooden walls,” its bark tanned hides, its galls stained ink to the page. Even now, pubs, coins, and emblems wear the oak as a badge of endurance.

And yet, oak trees are also portals.

Look carefully at their boles, where time has hollowed them, and you may find a fairy door or a spirit’s path. (Do not knock unless you are willing to meet whoever answers. Some doors are best left closed.)

So, if you should find an acorn in your pocket, keep it.

It is a talisman of strength, a charm for luck, a seed of possibility or, at the very least, it is a reminder that what seems small and ordinary may grow into something that outlives you by centuries.

And if you do not keep it? Well. Perhaps it will sprout where you drop it, and in time, I shall be standing in its shade, watching you.

Places we wish we could have visited in Norfolk: Godwick: Norfolk’s Ghost Village

Norfolk is full of places that whisper, but few murmur so clearly as Godwick.

Near Fakenham, a fragment of church tower still stands guard over what was once a thriving village.

Today, its people are centuries gone, yet their outlines remain: streets pressed into the earth as long green hollows, ditches and banks marking boundaries, low mounds where homes once leaned against the wind.

They left more than 400 years ago. Some starved, some sickened, some drifted away in search of better fortune.

Ghost villages are rarely caused by one thing, but by a cruel tangle of them all. (I assure you, there is nothing romantic about decline when one is living through it, despite what poets like to claim.)

In 1597 Sir Edward Coke, a lawyer with a keen eye for land, built a huge barn across one end of the abandoned main street. It still stands today, no longer filled with barley but with wedding guests.

A curious irony, don’t you think? The vows of the living echoing over a village that could not endure. Champagne where once there was hunger.

Because the land has been grazed by livestock rather than ploughed, the skeleton of Godwick has never been buried.

Walk there and you will find sunken tracks where villagers once trudged, fields where hall and cottages stood, the jagged remnant of the church tower. (Half of it lost in a storm in 1981: time and weather being crueller than any conqueror, though just as thorough.)

The last stones of the Old Hall were taken down in the 1960s, when ruin became dangerous. How disappointing: I should have liked to wander its rooms, to see whether shadows gathered there with purpose. But even without walls, the silence of the fields is haunting enough.

Godwick is open to visitors, dawn to dusk on Mondays, Fridays and Sundays, and dawn to midday the rest of the week. Walk its invisible streets, and you will not need me to tell you: a village may die, but it does not forget.

My Dearest, my earth-side friends damp with perspiration.

July. I could write no more and the horror would be sufficiently conveyed.

But let us not spare the ink. July, that blistered goblet of wasps and sunscreen, has arrived again, dragging with it the unrelenting heat of a sun that refuses to mind its own business.

The air grows thick and indecent with scent: overripe fruit, hot tarmac, the sulphurous cheer of barbarous barbecue smoke. It is not the season of the soul, it is the season of dreadful footwear and the malodorous stench of the unwashed.

There are festivals now, and parades. Morris dancers flinging bells at the indifferent sky, villagers tying floral garlands to fence posts and declaring it tradition. I watched a grown man chase a wheel of cheese downhill while screaming: the mind boggles, the spirit recoils.

But… a faint stirring…a disturbance in the undergrowth. A whisper that does not belong to the living world.

August approaches, and with it, the Black Shuck Festival.

Yes, my companion in afterlife, my curse and comfort: Bungay prepares to honour his name again, with torchlit processions and tales that almost remember the truth.

I shall be there, not seen, of course, but very much felt. You may find the air a little heavier in the church porch, or the pub may boast one stool colder than it ought to be. That will be me. And him.

And I am told, although who truly tells me anything in this modern age of email and emoji, that a new edition of Shuck Zine is being worked upon, and that this time the subject matter is my old friends, faeries.

Finally: tricksters, thieves, changelings, shadows in lace. Creatures who, like me, do not sparkle, but bite.

A glimmer, then, in the long and hateful light, something ancient beneath the festival bunting. We endure, as ever, in secret.

Yours, in eternal shade and mild irritation,

Ada

Coming Soon: Shuck Eight – Faeries

The news you have been waiting for has washed up, waterlogged and whispering, on the Foreshore of Promise.

Shuck Zine returns.

Edition Eight is in production, and the theme is perilously enchanting: faeries.

Not the fluttery darlings of childhood picture books, but the old kind - sharp-toothed and silver-tongued, fond of riddles and ruin. Myself and my unfortunate yet willing co-conspirators, Mrs Siofra Connor and Mr Matthew Willis, are delving into their thorny realms with reckless scholarly abandon.

Expect accounts of the fae in Norfolk and Suffolk; the old folk, the hidden ones, the Hikey Sprites who flit just beyond the corner of your eye. We shall reveal how to invite the fae to your threshold (though I strongly advise against it), and share tales never told before (perhaps for good reason).

We are casting our circle, setting our ink to paper, and binding the wild to page. The countdown has begun. Be ready for whispers. Be ready to order.

And for those doubting our credentials: I conducted a straw poll in Rosary Cemetery, and Shuck was declared the finest folklore zine in existence. The other entries failed to rise to the occasion. Or indeed, rise at all. Keep your salt handy, your cream fresh, and your iron close. They are coming.

The shapeshifting horror of the Hateful Thing

It walks the Angles Way, that stretch of river-hugging wilderness where Norfolk and Suffolk dissolve into one another: ghost lands of bog and bramble, marsh and meadow, where the candlelight still flickers in forgotten windows and the veil between this world and the next feels as thin as cobweb.

This is home to the Hateful Thing.

It was Margaret Helen James who wrote of it first, in 1891’s Bogie Tales of East Anglia, decades before her cousin, M. R. James, gave nightmares their names.

Margaret had been raised in the shadow of Great Livermere, a place so soaked in spectral dread that her cousin’s visions turned into some of the greatest ghost stories ever written. But it was Margaret who dared describe something worse.

She called it “an uncomfortable sort of ghostly terror, in beast form,” that prowled the liminal land between counties. The Churchyard Beast. The Hell Beast. The Hateful Thing.

A creature that appeared not to frighten, but to herald: “a sign that some great and unusually horrible wickedness is about to be committed, or has just taken place.”

It was seen in Geldeston, where the River Waveney marks the border and where tax was once paid at the Geld Stone.

Here, a respectable old charwoman named Mrs S saw it with her daughter, A. A was born under the chime hours - between bells at 8pm, midnight, or 4am - and so, like many born in such hours, she could see what others could not.

That night, walking back from Gillingham, she saw what she first thought was a dog, then something bigger than a horse – black, shifting: a ‘swoundling’, Margaret wrote - a swooning shadow that caused the heart to slow and the knees to buckle.

Only when her daughter touched her did Mrs S see it too, thumping alongside them, changing shape, never falling behind.

It vanished into the lane that leads to St Michael’s churchyard, where church beasts still wander and the air hangs thick with omen.

Some say it was a Church Grim, a spirit buried in the foundations of sacred places to guard - or curse - the land. Others call it a shapeshifter. A guardian. A harbinger.

No matter the name, all agree on one thing: if you walk in Geldeston after dark, you must walk slow, walk steady—and never, ever look back.

Old Midsummer’s Night: The Forgotten Festival of July

We all know Midsummer’s Day as June 24: a time for bonfires, feasts, mayhem, and magic. But once upon a time, Midsummer arrived later - on July 5.

This wasn’t a quirky regional tradition, it was, in fact, the original date for Midsummer celebrations across England, prior to a calendar shake-up courtesy of Pope Gregory XIII.

In 1582, he introduced the Gregorian calendar to replace the old Julian one, correcting its drift from the actual solar year.

Countries across Europe obediently adjusted their dates - England, however, was not among them: true to form, we dug in our heels and kept the Julian calendar for nearly 200 more years.

It wasn’t until 1752 that Britain finally adopted the Gregorian calendar and in doing so, chopped 11 days from the month of September and shifted familiar feast days. Midsummer’s Day slid back to June 24, aligning with the feast of St John the Baptist.

But many communities, especially in rural England, carried on celebrating “Old” Midsummer on July 5, clinging to the rhythms of the old calendar like folklore barnacles.

It was a night thick with superstition and possibility: a liminal evening when bonfires were lit, herbs were gathered at their most potent, and people believed the boundary between this world and the next grew thin.

Though it’s largely faded from public consciousness, Old Midsummer’s Night still lingers in pockets of the countryside, whispered about in tales of ghost sightings, faery encounters, and ancient rituals performed beneath a swollen summer moon.

So, if the air feels charged on the night of July 5, and the shadows in the hedgerow seem to move of their own accord, you might just be brushing up against the old magic of Midsummer, slightly out of sync with the modern world, but right on time in folklore.

13 simple things to do for Lammas

Be prepared for August 1st and the first harvest, the first loaf, the first whisper of autumn on the air.

1. Bake a loaf of bread. It doesn’t have to be fancy: packet mix counts. It’s the intention (and the smell) that matters.

2. Have a harvest picnic. Lay out a feast with seasonal bits such as plums, cheese, bread, honey, and eat it outside, even if it’s on your front step.

3. Make a corn dolly. Or a wheat woman. Or a barley boy. Use what you’ve got—straw, grass, raffia, string.

4. Light a candle at sunset. Say thank you for what’s grown, what’s changed, what’s survived.

5. Gather herbs. This is the time to cut mint, sage, rosemary and dry them for the darker months.

6. Visit a well or a stream. Make a small offering - coin, petal, word, silence.

7. Visit a field. Any field. Stand in it. Breathe. That's the whole ritual.

8. Tie a ribbon to a tree. Ask for a good harvest, and not just in crops, but in creativity, love, or luck.

9. Write a list of what you’ve grown this year. Not plants necessarily, maybe it’s confidence, friendship, peace or a baby.

10. Start something. A journal, a spell, a new recipe, a tiny rebellion.

11. Weave a wreath or crown. Wear it with full theatrical commitment.

12. Look at the moon. You don’t have to say anything. Just acknowledge her.

13. Be still. It’s been a long year already. Sit down. Breathe. You made it to the first harvest. That’s enough.

Places we wish we could have visited in Norfolk: The hall where Queen Elizabeth I slept and where a secret laboratory produced diamonds

Costessey Hall is one of Norfolk’s great Gothic losses. Today just one ivy-clad ruin remains, watching balefully over the 18th fairway on Costessey Park Golf Course.

William the Conqueror awarded land in Costessey to the Earl of Richmond, after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. By 1555, Queen Mary Tudor had gifted the manor to Sir Henry Jerningham (then Jernegan) for his support in helping her to the throne two years previously.

Despite removing Sir Henry from his executor duties after Mary’s death in 1558 on grounds of his Catholicism, successor Queen Elizabeth remained on good terms with the Jerningham family, calling in at the Tudor mansion when she visited Norwich in 1578: on August 20 of that year, she spent the night in Old Costessey.

Little did Queen Elizabeth know that above the bed where she slept there was a secret: a hidden chapel where Catholics could worship away from prying eyes. A later Jerningham owner, Fitzobert, used to try to produce commercial diamonds from coal in his personal laboratory at the hall, an experiment which came to an abrupt end when an unscheduled explosion occurred and along with it, minor injuries.

The War Office commandeered the building for the training of infantry, cavalry and artillery troops to serve in World War One and by the end of the war, the building was trashed and largely demolished

My Dearest and Dimmest,

A curse upon June. There, I have said it.

The year turns, and the pendulum swings not in our favour. The nights, my precious, patient nights, shrink like salted slugs, and the days swell obscenely, bloated with sunshine and gaiety. How vulgar. Midsummer approaches with all the subtlety of a brass band at a funeral, and everywhere I turn I am affronted by golden light, laughing children, and - most offensively - optimism.

The sun rises before I have properly finished brooding and does not deign to set until nearly tomorrow. What am I to do, I ask you, when the shadows are pushed into corners like disobedient servants and the moon is nothing but a washed-out wisp? Even the owls seem annoyed. It is an intolerable situation for those of us committed to sorrow.

Oh yes, you may celebrate your solstice, your Litha, your honeyed teas and sunflower wreaths. You may dance barefoot like lunatics in meadows thick with insects and hope. I shall not stop you. But know this: the longest day is but a turning point: from here, the light begins, imperceptibly, deliciously, to die.

And what of St John’s Wort, that blazing, infernal little weed that dares bloom in June with all the enthusiasm of a street performer thrown a farthing? Burn it if you must, rub it on your doorways, slip it beneath your pillows, none of it will shield you from the truth that the earth spins ever toward its grave. I find no comfort in its golden smile, no magic in its blood-red oil. It is the flower of fools.

The living world shouts now, thrumming with bees, with festival, with fire. But I, dear reader, am not of the living. I am of dust and silence, of sighs behind the wainscot and footsteps where there should be none. I belong to the hush between the chimes of midnight, to the damp underside of stone, to the flicker that snuffs out the candle.

Still, I linger. Watching. Listening. Waiting.

And if, during your solstice merriments, you find the air turn suddenly cold, or see the shadow of someone who ought not be there, do not trouble yourself to look behind you. It will already be too late. In the meantime, I will continue my essential work for the Society for the Repeal of Daylight.

Ever yours in darkness and disdain,

Ada

The stench of death that overwhelmed Ketteringham

It was a scandal that left the sweet air of Ketteringham cloyed with the unmistakable scent of death.

In 1853, under the veil of night and secrecy, Sir John Boileau of Ketteringham Hall ordered the unthinkable: six long-buried souls, laid to rest beneath the chancel of the parish church of St Peter, were exhumed by torchlight.

Their sin? Simply lying in the way of Sir John's wife, who was gravely ill and who required a sacred resting place: and no spot was holier than the sanctuary beneath the altar.

But even the dead protest when disturbed.

Within hours, the village filled with whispers.

Reverend Wayte Andrew, the church’s incumbent, noted the horror in his diary: “The stench in the church was insufferable. The long-pent odour of death, released after so many years, hung about the pews like a miasma. The matter could not be hid. Before many hours had passed, the entire village knew what had been done.”

Worshippers gagged through services, heads bowed less in reverence than in revulsion and the sanctuary, once a sanctified space, became something fouler, polluted not only by physical decay but by the moral rot of entitlement.

Relatives of the disinterred were outraged - letters were written and eventually, the Dean of Norwich intervened, ordering Sir John to reverse his desecration.

And so, with reluctant hands, the remains were returned to their rightful place: or as near to it as possible.

Chastened, but not defeated, Sir John turned to stone for his next move.

A mausoleum was erected in the churchyard, a lasting monument to pride and penance, housing first his ailing wife and later, himself.

The building still stands: a curious edifice amid the lichen-spotted gravestones, its presence a quiet reminder that privilege has always had its own architecture.

The story is told with haunting clarity in Victorian Miniature by Owen Chadwick, which entwines the diaries of Sir John and Reverend Andrew in a clash of class, conviction and crumbling coffins.

What emerges is not just a local scandal, but a vivid portrait of Victorian village life: the deference, the dissent, the quiet wars waged between rectory and hall.

St Peter’s Church itself is a jewel box of memory.

Its interior, carved and coloured with devotion, is crammed with monuments to lives long passed. One wall bears the name of Charlotte Atkyns, a Drury Lane actress turned would-be saviour of a queen.

Legend insists she was a close friend of Marie Antoinette and made three daring attempts to rescue the monarch from the shadowy confines of the Conciergerie during the French Revolution.

Her missions failed and the Queen met the guillotine in 1793, and Atkyns faded into genteel obscurity here in Norfolk, her tale written in marble among the local dead.

In Ketteringham, history clings to every stone, but never more tightly than when the stones are disturbed.

The Magic of St John’s Wort

As summer reaches its zenith, hedgerows and roadsides glow bright yellow with Hypericum perforatum—better known as St John’s Wort.

This unassuming “wort” (from Old English for “plant”) is far more than a common weed: it carries the warming power of the sun, cleanses spiritual shadows, and whispers of midsummer magic in every golden bloom.

St John’s Wort reliably flowers around June 24th, the Feast of St John the Baptist.

In Celtic tradition it’s called sol terrestis, the “terrestrial sun,” its radiant blossoms mirroring the solstice sun at its highest.

During Midsummer celebrations, households would hang sprigs over doorways, windows, and even religious icons, to ward off demons, invite blessings, and claim the plant’s purifying energy.

On St John’s Eve, revellers would toss bundles of the herb into bonfires and, for the daring, leap through the flames, to purify body and spirit.

Others wove nine-flower bouquets (always including St John’s Wort from nine different locations) and slipped them beneath their pillows; Swedish legend held that the sleeper would dream of their future beloved.

Meanwhile, German huntsmen anointed their arrows with the herb’s crimson oil, aptly nicknamed “St John’s Blood”, to ensure unerring marksmanship.

Folklore also casts St John’s Wort as a protector against mischievous faeries and malicious witches, thought most active at midsummer.

Wanderers venturing into dense woods would carry sprigs to safeguard against faerie trickery, while homebound folk rubbed door frames with its oil to seal out curses.

Today, many still anoint dice for luck or swipe the red-tinted oil on doorposts to banish bad fortune.

Beyond its magical cachet, St John’s Wort boasts a storied medical heritage. Medieval herbalists prescribed it for “madness”; modern practitioners brew its flowers into teas, tinctures, and oils for anxiety, depression, nerve pain, and skin ailments. Within those sunny petals reside glycosides (including the red‑pigmented hypericin), flavonoids, tannins, and volatile oils that bring both soothing relief and mystical allure.

Harvesting St John’s Wort is an act of respect: for the plant and its pollinators.

If you spot a hedge heavy with buds, gather just a few stems at dawn, leaving plenty for the bees that adore its nectar.

Bundle your cuttings to dry for teas, or steep them in oil: watch the infusion deepen from gold to crimson, as if stained by the very blood of its namesake.

Today, St John’s Wort reminds us that magic often thrives in plain sight.

A roadside “weed,” yet steeped in centuries of solstice rites, saintly lore, and healing traditions, it bridges the mundane and the mystical.

This June, pause when you see those glowing flowers. Hang a spray by your door for protection, press a bloom into your journal of curiosities, or brew a cup of St John’s Wort tea at sunrise and taste both herbal warmth and that ancient promise: wherever St John’s Wort blooms, light and safeguarding follow close behind.

11 magical things to do for Litha

Litha – or the Summer Solstice – falls around June 21, the longest day of the year. It’s a time of full bloom, fiery energy, and ancient celebration.

The sun is at its peak, the wheel of the year has turned to its brightest moment, and the world is bursting with life.

Midsummer is a time to honour abundance, passion, protection, and joy—whether with a garden feast, a kitchen spell, or a late-night wander through the wild.

1. Welcome the sun: Get up early and greet the dawn—bonus points if you do it barefoot in the dewy grass or at the place where the sun reaches the east first, at East Point on Lowestoft beach.

2. Make a solar wheel: Craft your own sun symbol using willow or foraged sticks tied into a circle. Decorate with yellow and orange ribbons, sunflowers, lavender, and dried citrus. Hang it on your door or above your altar.

3. Feast: Eat with the season: strawberries, honey, leafy herbs, edible flowers, fresh bread, and fiery foods (think chilli or ginger). Make honey cakes or lemon posset, or serve up a garden picnic with homemade elderflower cordial or a glass of mead.

4. Brew a sunshine potion: Make a solar tea by placing lemon balm, mint, calendula, or chamomile in water and leaving it to infuse in the sunlight for a few hours. Sip slowly with intention: Litha is about joy, clarity, and personal power.

5. Visit a standing stone or sacred site: Stone circles were ancient observatories of the sun. In Norfolk, you can visit the site Henge at Holme or make your way to Bloodgate Hill Iron Age fort near South Creake for a dose of sun-kissed, timeworn magic.

6. Make a flower crown: Think midsummer blooms: roses, honeysuckle, daisies, and elderflowers. Wear it with pride or lay it on your altar.

7. Light a candle and set a solstice intention: If you can't light a bonfire, a single flame will suffice. Sit in stillness, focus on the flame, and speak your intention aloud for the months ahead. Litha is a good time to harness energy for courage, creativity, and confidence.

8. Go herb gathering: Traditionally, herbs harvested at Litha are at their most potent. St John’s Wort, yarrow, thyme, and mugwort are all associated with midsummer magic. Dry them for incense, teas, or spell jars. (Always forage with permission, and never take more than you need.)

9. Leave a gift for the fae: The veil to the Otherworld shimmers again at Litha. Leave a tiny offering - berries, bread, honey, a shiny coin - at the base of an old tree or in a hollowed-out stone. Just don’t look back once you’ve left it…

10. Create a dream charm: Midsummer nights are ripe for vivid dreams and messages. Tuck mugwort or lavender into a small pouch and place it beneath your pillow. Ask for clarity or guidance as you sleep—then write down what you remember come morning.

11. Watch for the Wild Hunt: Though often associated with darker months, there are tales of the Wild Hunt riding out on solstice nights, charging across the skies in search of wayward spirits and wandering souls. Listen for hooves, howls, and the beat of phantom wings over a sleeping Norfolk.

Solstice blessings to all who walk in light and shadow—may your midsummer be golden and a little bit wild.

From the whispers of history and the shadows of time, we bring you Shuck 7: Witches.

And what a magnificent collection of treasures it is – learn about witch bottles and witch stones, the very last witch trial in Norfolk (held during World War 2), the Kittywitches of Great Yarmouth and how to make your own witch cake. A warning: the witch cake will require the collection of urine.

There are stories of farmers and witches, a witch’s curse that cast a shadow over a Norfolk village for centuries and see the Witch of East Somerton (we know her name but will not share).

Then we have a map of Norfolk witches, a spell to bring magic to you and your home, we learn of Norfolk’s male witches and follow the county’s first witch trial where two ‘hill hunters’ were accused of enchantment. Then there are familiars, Toadmen, your own paper doll witch and our cover story, that of Monica English, Norfolk’s High Priestess of the Grey Goose Feather Coven who practised until only a few decades ago. Let us welcome you in:

Shuck’s latest creation awaits you HERE.

PS Work continues on Shuck 8. Guess the theme, friends.

Stonehenge: 13 Strange Truths for the Summer Solstice

1. It hums when you hit it: Some of Stonehenge’s boulders are ‘ringing rocks’. Strike them just right and they emit a loud, resonant chime—ancient soundscape or Bronze Age xylophone? Some believed the vibrations had healing powers. Part of it’s missing—and it’s on purpose.

2. Many of the stones are buried: Stone 56, one of the tallest, stands at 6.58m but actually extends a further two metres underground. Like ancient icebergs.

3. You’re not allowed to touch it: but everyone already has: Stonehenge is scarred with graffiti from every era: Bronze Age dagger shapes, medieval mason’s marks, and even Christopher Wren’s signature. Victorian visitors could rent a chisel and take home a chunk. Geology tourism at its worst.

4. Blake saw death, Hardy saw doom: William Blake called it “a building of eternal death.” Thomas Hardy set Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ final night of freedom among the stones. Not exactly glowing reviews on TripAdvisor.

5. It once hosted cricket matches and choir practice: Victorians treated Stonehenge like a particularly scenic park. Day-trippers held concerts among the trilithons, cyclists picnicked under the sarsens, and Sunday school children played ‘it’ between the lintels.

6. It sings of sun and moon - but so does Bath: The Georgian masterpiece, The Circus in Bath, was inspired by Stonehenge’s circular layout. Local legend claims the Circus represents the sun, while the nearby Royal Crescent mirrors the moon

7. Royalist hideout: Charles II allegedly passed through Stonehenge while fleeing after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. The ancient stones took on Royalist symbolism, akin to the oak tree that sheltered him.

8. Stonehenge vs the State: The Battle of the Beanfield: In 1985, police violently clashed with New Age travellers en route to hold the Free Festival at the stones. Vehicles were smashed, bones broken. The stones stood silent as ever.

9. There are 1,300 stone circles in the UK: From Orkney’s Brodgar to Cornwall’s Merry Maidens, the UK is littered with prehistoric rings. But none have the brooding magnetism of Stonehenge. It’s the Beyoncé of stone circles. The headliner.

10. A gynaecologist once said it was a giant vulva: In 2003, Dr Anthony Perks proposed that Stonehenge was a fertility symbol shaped like female anatomy. His article was titled The Vagina Monoliths. Not universally embraced by scholars, but memorable.

11. It’s older than the pyramids: Stonehenge’s first phase predates the Great Pyramid of Giza. It’s been a burial site, observatory, calendar, temple, rave spot and tourist trap. Or maybe all of the above. Or none. It remains unsolved. And we love it for that.

12. It’s aligned with the solstice: On Midsummer’s day, the sun rises through the Heel Stone and floods the centre of the monument with light. On Midwinter’s day, the sun sets in near-perfect symmetry.

13. It’s always been a place of power and performance: From Druid ceremonies to countercultural raves, solstice rituals to royal hideaways, Stonehenge endures as a theatre of the uncanny. And while we can no longer touch the stones, they still touch us - with awe, wonder, and weirdness.

Places we wish we could have visited in Norfolk: The prison where Norwich’s first ‘private’ execution took place

Perhaps not the most idyllic day trip, it would have been fascinating to look at the Norwich City Gaol and House of Correction which once stood where St John the Baptist Cathedral is today.

The gaol opened in 1826 and prisoners from the Bridewell in the parish of St Andrew (now the Museum of Norwich on Bridewell Alley) were taken there when the Bridewell became a tobacco and snuff factory.

The prison had airing yards, three treadmills and a place of execution. Six of the airing yards were sunk three feet below the others so the governor could see them all from the ‘inspecting gallery’ of his house.

William Sheward, who confessed to murdering his wife and then depositing her body parts across Norwich, was given the city’s first ‘private’ execution behind the prison walls on April 20 1869 – but a crowd of 2,000 still arrived to see the black flag raised to signal that Sheward was dead.

The gaol was closed in May 1878 and prisoners were moved back to Norwich Castle – the cathedral was built shortly afterwards.

My dear and dimly flickering companions in gloom,

May. Even the name is a sigh - insipid, saccharine, and sunlit. I do not care for it.

The light grows too bold, crawling into corners where it was never invited, pawing at velvet drapes with insolent fingers of gold. Even the graveyard shadows, those old friends, begin to recede. There is nowhere to watch from. Nowhere to wait.

And yet I do wait.

Because May is not so innocent as she pretends. Beneath her garlands and gaiety, her blossoms and bells, there is a treachery that suits me very well indeed.

Did you know, my sweetlings, that to wed in May was once to beckon ruin? “Marry in May and rue the day,” they said, and rightly so. The Romans blamed Flora. The Scots blamed the stars. I blame the light—for it reveals too much, too soon, and not always kindly. The heart, when exposed, burns easily.

In Norfolk, we remember St Walstan, the holy ploughboy who abandoned wealth for toil. They say that when his corpse rested on the road to Bawburgh, a spring burst from the soil. Water from the dead. May is full of such contradictions: saints and sickness, flowers and funerals, sunshine and sorrow.

In Suffolk, there stands a gate that leads to a plantation at Livermere – ask the locals, if they will speak of it, if the face ever left. M.R. James claimed it was a dream, a childhood fear: but I know better. He saw something. We all did. Those of us who listen in the hush between footfalls, who breathe the breath between candle and snuff.

There are places the light cannot cleanse.

May Day brings its ribbons, its dancing, its foolish crowns of flowers, but beneath the Maypole is mud, and in the hedge-witch’s smile is warning.

Do not trust a month that wears both frost and flame, do not pick the Lily of the Valley with bare hands - the fae drink from those bells. The dead whisper through them.

I have heard them.

You call it spring. I call it a mask. And masks, as you well know, can slip.

Ever watching (though with fewer shadows to hide in),

Your devoted Ada Nemesis

The ghastly gatekeeper of Livermere: The haunting that created a horror master

He was the master of the English ghost story, the conjurer of shadows, the architect of dread. But what if the night terrors of M.R. James were born not from imagination—but from something real?

In the heart of Suffolk, cradled by fens and reeds and close to the Norfolk border, lies the village of Great Livermere. It was here, in the rectory beside the old church, that young Montague Rhodes James lived from the age of three, and it was here, too, that something unnatural may have marked him forever.

In his final story, A Vignette, James describes a recurring nightmare: a presence in the garden, a movement by the gate. At night, the boy hears footsteps on the stairs. A hand on his door. He wakes screaming. Again. And again.

One evening, drawn to the garden by a dreadful curiosity, the boy peers through a hole in the gate - staring back is a pink, malevolent face with wide, unblinking eyes. As he flees, he glimpses a shrouded figure melting into the trees: the face was never forgotten. The feeling - of being watched, hunted -never left him.

Others have seen it too. Villagers speak of a jester-like figure near the rectory gates, a woman in red who steps into oncoming traffic and vanishes, a phantom cyclist, and a monstrous black dog that prowls the Mere.

Local researcher Beryl Dyson wrote of dreams so dreadful in the old nursery that guests refused to stay another night—dreams tied, perhaps, to darker histories of the house. James never confirmed the vision. But the gate still stands. And the eyes that watched him? They may be watching still.

Livermere does not forget its dead. And sometimes, neither do its ghosts.

The Folklore of May

May might be the month of blossom, bluebells and burgeoning warmth - but tread carefully, for the folklore of this fair month is more thorn than rose.

In the old calendar, the first three days of May were known as the "sharp days"—a trio of ill-favoured mornings where wise folk dared not begin any new venture.

No digging gardens, no laundering linens: to start something new then was to ask for bad luck to take root. It was certainly no time to tie the knot: “Marry in May and you’ll rue the day,” warned generations of would-be mothers-in-law.

Some say this reluctance has roots in ancient Rome, where the last day of Floralia, a festival of riotous excess in honour of the goddess Flora, was thought unlucky - an ill-starred moment to begin a life of virtuous matrimony.

In Scotland, May was considered the most unlucky month of all for weddings, and even today the superstition lingers, like pollen on the wind.

Yet if May began with a warning, it soon burst into celebration.

Folklorist Steve Roud claims that May Day traditions were once second only to Christmas in the English calendar, touching every tier of society from manor to meadow.

May 1 is a riot of old rituals: bringing in the May with fresh-cut branches and flowers, garlanding doors and livestock, singing May songs to wake the land from slumber.

There were Maypoles danced around, May Queens crowned, and May Fools too—also called May Goslings—a springtime echo of April’s jesters.

In Gloucestershire, the Sunday after May Day was known as Low Sunday, when Stroud became a playground of reversal for the Lord of Misrule, a mock ruler appointed to preside over mirth and mischief.

In Cornwall, May’s joy is found in the Helston Furry Day, with the Floral Dance winding through the streets in a jubilant procession of music and blossoms.

These are festivals where winter is banished and summer begins - not by date, but by shared belief and communal dance.

May is full of feast days that anchor the month in older rhythms.

On May 8, St Michael's Feast Day was marked in fishing communities with the blessing of mackerel nets - a prayer for bounty and safety at sea.

St Dunstan’s Day falls on May 19, honouring the patron saint of blacksmiths, who is said to have pinched the devil’s nose with red-hot tongs.

Later still comes Oak Apple Day on May 29, a royalist commemoration where people once wore oak leaves in remembrance of Charles II hiding in an oak tree after the Battle of Worcester.

And in Norfolk, we remember St Walstan, the humble ploughman saint.

Born into privilege, he chose a life of toil, piety and generosity. After his death in May, legend says a spring of holy water burst forth where his body rested on the way to Bawburgh—a site still said to hold healing powers.

So, May is no quiet month: it begins with a warning and ends in riotous colour, a dance between superstition and celebration.

One foot in the furrow, one hand in the garland, May reminds us that the past is never more alive than when the hawthorn blooms.

May’s Flower: The witchy whispers of Lily of the Valley

Do not be fooled by its dainty bells and snow-white sweetness—Lily of the Valley is no innocent bloom. Beneath its perfume lies poison, and within its folklore, power. May’s flower of the month is a plant of paradox: at once a bringer of joy and a harbinger of doom.

Tied deeply to femininity, the lily is rarely neutral. In Irish lore, it's a protective spirit when planted outdoors, said to guard against evil and promote purity in the garden. But bring it indoors—especially into a woman’s home—and misfortune may follow. One widespread superstition warns that a woman in the house will fall mysteriously ill should Lily of the Valley cross the threshold.

The flower bleeds myth. In 6th-century Sussex, Saint Leonard fought a dragon in the woods. Where his blood soaked the forest floor, lilies bloomed in the spring. They still do. These tiny flowers are said to sprout where violence met virtue, standing as pale witnesses to a battle long past.

But this is no mere passive blossom. In magical folklore, Lily of the Valley is a protector. Need to ward off witchcraft? Shield yourself from unwanted attention? This little flower will have your back - if treated with respect. Some say it calls to the fae, who use the blooms as cups and hats, marking the flower as a gateway to otherworldly realms.

Its religious connections also run deep: known as "Our Lady’s Tears", the blooms are said to have sprung from the Virgin Mary’s weeping at the crucifixion, symbolising sorrow and redemption. But even here, sweetness is laced with sorrow.

Toxic to the touch and sacred to saints, feared in homes yet beloved in forests—Lily of the Valley walks a tightrope between light and shadow. It is a flower of thresholds, of protection and poison, of endings and beginnings.

Approach it with care, with reverence, and perhaps with gloves.

A toast to the Queen of the May: Hawthorn Blossom Cordial

As May unfurls her green-gold skirts across the land, there is no more magical companion than the hawthorn tree - guardian of thresholds, favoured by fairies, and sacred to goddesses of love, fertility and rebirth.

In full bridal bloom, she marks the moment where spring tips into summer, her creamy-white flowers scenting the hedgerows and weaving enchantment through the air.

This gentle, heart-healing cordial captures the soul of May itself. Light and floral with soft vanilla notes, it’s a drink worthy of fairy queens and mortals alike. Whether sipped as a sparkling toast to the season, stirred into a gin cocktail or drizzled over cakes and puddings, this potion is as beautiful to behold as it is to taste.

Do remember: if you gather hawthorn, always ask permission and leave a small offering in thanks: she is a powerful tree, and one not to be taken lightly.

Hawthorn Blossom Cordial

Ingredients

75g hawthorn blossom (roughly 75g, green stems removed)

400g caster sugar

500ml water

1 unwaxed lemon (zest and juice)

Method

Place your prepared hawthorn blossoms in a large heatproof bowl or jug.

In a saucepan, combine the sugar and water. Heat gently until the sugar dissolves, then bring to a boil for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and let cool slightly for 2 minutes.

Pour the hot syrup over the hawthorn blossoms and stir. Transfer everything back into the saucepan.

Add the lemon zest and juice, then heat on the lowest simmer for 25 minutes. Do not let it boil.

Allow the cordial to cool, then strain through muslin, a coffee filter or a fine sieve into a sterilised bottle.

Keep refrigerated. It will last for up to two weeks.

To serve: Dilute with still or sparkling water, or pair with prosecco, gin or vodka for a bewitching Maytime cocktail.

• Recipe adapted from www.gathervictoria.com

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Places we wish we could have visited in Norfolk: Chapelfield’s Pagoda

In 1880, a slice of Japan bloomed in the heart of Norwich.

Rising elegantly from the green expanse of Chapelfield Gardens stood the Chapelfield Pagoda, an ornate, cast-iron masterpiece designed by celebrated Victorian architect and designer Thomas Jeckyll.

Purchased by the Norwich Corporation for £500, the pagoda had been created at the Barnard Bishop and Barnards’ Norfolk Iron Works, a foundry renowned for its striking ornamental creations from iron.

Jeckyll’s signature sunflower motif was proudly displayed - 72 radiant blooms formed part of the railings that surrounded the pagoda, standing like golden sentinels around the building. Towering at 40 feet and weighing an impressive 40 tons, it was a spectacle of Victorian ambition and aesthetic flair.

Inside, it was no less extraordinary.

Draped in Japanese-inspired textiles and decorated with artistic flourishes that reflected the era’s fascination with the East, the interior was a wonderland. 2Some of these original fabrics survive today in the Costume and Textile department at Norwich Castle Museum.

The pagoda became a hub of excitement, hosting glittering events that transformed Chapelfield into a scene from an opium-scented dream. It was exotic, extravagant and a far cry to what happens in the gardens today.

Sadly, the magic was shattered in 1942 when bombing raids during the Second World War left the structure severely damaged: it was dismantled soon after.

But fragments remain: original sunflower motifs can still be found in the gates at Heigham Park, while faithful copies adorn the gates of Chapelfield Gardens - a quiet tribute to a lost Norwich landmark that once dazzled a city.

My ever-credulous and fleetingly mortal readers,

April creeps in on wet feet, trailing mist and mischief, a month of deceit and revelation in equal measure. The air is thick with the scent of rain-soaked earth, and the sky—ever the capricious artist—paints in sunbeams only to wash them away in torrents an hour later. Fool’s weather for a fool’s month.

Beware the whispers of April. This is the season of false promises: warm afternoons that lure the unwary into discarding coats, bright mornings that dissolve into thunderous downpours, the first flush of spring hiding winter’s last sharp teeth.

But it is also a month of omens, of thinning veils and spectral processions. Have you never heard of St Mark’s Eve? The night when the devout—and the damned—keep watch at the church porch, waiting for the silent parade of those doomed to die within the year? Such a delightful pastime. Perhaps I shall attend this year.

And then, of course, there is St George, England’s dragon-slayer, his day marked by flag-waving and dubious patriotism. Yet even he, noble though he may seem, walks in the shadow of older rites, his triumph but a newer tale woven into the fabric of a land that remembers the old gods still.

What is the dragon but winter’s last stand? What is the saint but spring’s inevitable victor? It is an old story, older than chivalry, older than saints, and April plays it well.

But the true shift, the true reckoning, waits at the month’s end. April is but the prelude to Beltane, the fire-lit threshold between seasons, when winter’s grip is finally broken and summer stirs in the embers.

Can you not feel it? The land breathes. The blood quickens. The world tilts, and the spirits step lightly between the shadows, eager for what is to come. Enjoy your last dalliance with the dark, my dears. May is waiting and I, of course, begin my own wait – for the return of the dark.

Ever yours in mist and moonlight,

Ada

Postscript: Should you seek ghosts on Walpurgis Night, I suggest you try the puppet theatre in Norwich. Some stages are never truly empty.

An Easter story with a difference: the Norfolk man eaten by cannibals

Norfolk has produced its fair share of missionaries, but few met as gruesome an end as Oliver Fellows Tomkins, the Great Yarmouth man who sailed to New Guinea in 1901, determined to spread the word of God.

Born in Yarmouth in 1873, Tomkins was a man of conviction. He was educated in Switzerland, trained in medicine, and spent his youth preaching to fishermen on the North Sea fleet. But his true calling, he believed, lay in the far-flung reaches of the world, where the gospel had yet to be heard, and by the turn of the century, he had joined the London Missionary Society and secured a post in New Guinea.

Half his support was paid for by members of the Home Magazine Missionary Band, who enthusiastically funded young men to carry Christianity to distant, often unwelcoming lands.

Tomkins set sail with Reverend Albert Pearse in December 1899, arriving in New Guinea just as the new century dawned. He soon fell under the wing of the veteran missionary James Chalmers, a Scotsman whose zeal was matched only by his belief that no tribe was too savage to be tamed by faith.

Chalmers ignored all warnings about the dangers of the Fly River delta, an area known for its fierce, headhunting inhabitants. He saw only souls to be saved.

On April 7, 1901, Tomkins and Chalmers boarded the Niue and sailed towards the Aird River, an area home to the Goaribari people. The villagers greeted them with curiosity, swarming the mission ship in their canoes.

Tomkins recorded the moment in his diary with optimism, noting how the islanders admired the ship’s rigging and their shirt buttons, urging the visitors to come ashore. The missionaries declined, promising to visit their village the next morning.

That morning was Easter Sunday. Chalmers suggested Tomkins remain on the ship. The young missionary refused, and together, they waded ashore at Risk Point, stepping into history - and their doom.

They were led to a newly-built dubu, a ceremonial house for warriors - inside, the mood shifted. Piles of human skulls lay next to crude wooden idols. There was no warning, no chance to flee.

In a sudden, frenzied attack, both men were clubbed from behind, decapitated, and dismembered. Their bodies were divided among the villagers, their flesh cooked with sago for a sacred feast. The 12 native Christians who had accompanied them met the same fate.

Weeks later, colonial officials arrived, hoping to retrieve the remains. All they found was Chalmers’ hat.

Back in England, Tomkins’ death sent ripples through missionary circles. His name was etched into stone at a Yarmouth cemetery and on a plaque in Norwich’s United Reformed Church. It reads simply: “Taken by the natives.” A quiet epitaph for a young man whose faith carried him too far.

The Pink Moon: April’s spellbinding light

April’s full moon rises like a spell in the sky, casting a glow over old stories and superstition.

Known as the Pink Moon, not because it blushes, but named for the wild ground phlox that carpets meadows in spring, it has long been seen as a moon of transformation.

Winter’s grip finally weakens, the world thaws, and under its light, change stirs. Folklore tells us that this is a moon of renewal, a time when what was hidden emerges. It’s the moon of the hare, an animal tied to both fertility and witchcraft and on clear nights, some say you can see it outlined in the lunar glow, racing across the fields.

In parts of Norfolk, a hare seen under an April full moon was once thought to be a shapeshifter, a witch in disguise, slipping through the night before dawn stripped her of her magic.

The Pink Moon has also been called the Egg Moon, the Sprouting Grass Moon, and the Growing Moon, all names that nod to the season’s shift.

In medieval England, it was said that if you made a wish as the April full moon rose, it would be carried away on the wind and come true before the next full moon - if, that is, you kept it secret.

Sleep lightly under the Pink Moon, though. Some say dreams are stranger, the mind restless, and for those prone to sleepwalking, it’s a night when the veil between waking and wandering is thin.

Watch the sky, listen to the stillness, and step carefully—April’s full moon has long been a night for secrets and change.

Ada writes Walpurgis Night, April 30

Ah, April 30th! A night thick with whispering winds and the rustling skirts of unseen figures.

You call it Walpurgis Night now, though I recall when it was but an unnamed terror, a date when the veil between the living and the dead grew so thin that even those without my unfortunate predicament might glimpse the other side.

Walpurgisnacht, the hallowed eve before May Day, has long been known across Europe as a time of revelry and dread. In the Harz Mountains, it is said that witches, clad in tattered robes and wreathed in sulphurous smoke, soar to the Brocken Peak to cavort with dark forces.

Bonfires are lit to drive them away, their embers sparking skyward like desperate prayers. And should you hear laughter upon the wind or see figures dancing in the glow—look away! For not all revellers have the good manners to remain among the living.

Here in Norfolk, the night carries its own peculiar weight.

The old ones knew better than to wander past twilight, to leave offerings for the unseen, to hush their voices when the phantom hounds prowled the lanes. And yet, dear friends, I see that modern minds remain untroubled by such superstitions.

Boldly, you gather beneath creaking beams and faded curtains, in the company of wooden things with painted faces. Yes, I speak of the Norfolk Folklore Society, who have chosen this most haunted of nights to convene in a theatre where the very puppets seem to breathe when no one is looking.

It is one thing to summon spirits in jest—it is quite another to find that they have answered.

Will you hear the marionettes whisper? Will the air turn thick with something more than candle smoke? Will you leave that place with all your number intact? I do so hope so. But then again, some stories are best left unfinished.

So, light your fires, ring your bells, and whisper your prayers, for the night belongs to those who walk between worlds. And as for you, dear readers—should you hear a voice in the dark, calling your name, think twice before you answer.

A Shuck Guide to eight magical things to do for Beltane

1. Jump the flames – Beltane is all about fire, passion, and transformation, so if you can’t dance around a bonfire, light a candle and write down a wish for the summer ahead. In Norfolk, you could visit the fire pits at The Lion’s Den at Bishopgate in Norwich and make a toast to the turning of the wheel!

2. Make a flower crown – Adorn yourself with hawthorn (the May tree) which is blooming in Norfolk’s woods this time of year.

3. Seek out a Sacred Well – Water is just as vital as fire at Beltane, symbolising healing and renewal. The Walsingham Well, believed to have been sacred for centuries, is a perfect spot for a quiet moment of reflection or a whispered wish.

4. Visit a fairy-haunted place – Beltane is one of the liminal times of the year when the veil between worlds is thin. Take a walk through the heath at Bawdeswell where it is said the entrance to St Martin’s Land where it is always dusk and where the Green Children and pixies live or look out in Diss, where fairies were spotted in 1872.

5. Feast like a Pagan – Honey, oats, and dairy are traditional Beltane foods. Celebrate with a cream tea, some mead or a home-baked honey and oat cake. Or, if you’re feeling indulgent, an Assembly House Afternoon Tea—because what’s more magical than that?

6. Dance in the first light of May – It’s tradition to greet the May Day sunrise with dancing, so why not take a dawn walk along the shore at Wells-next-the-Sea or Blakeney? If you’re lucky, you might even see a seal or two, which is always a good omen.

7. Perform a simple love or luck spell – In days past, Beltane was a time for love divination. Tie a ribbon to a tree in Mousehold Heath and make a wish, or carry a sprig of rowan for protection and luck as the days grow warmer.

8. Listen for the Black Shuck – Beltane is a time of wild spirits, and none are wilder than our own spectral hound. If you find yourself out on a Norfolk lane at midnight, keep an ear out for heavy paws padding in the dark. He may not be a bad omen after all—just a reminder that magic is never far away.

Beltane blessings to all who wander beneath the May moon!

Places we wish we could have visited in Norfolk: The Duke’s Palace in Norwich

So far, we have travelled back in time to visit Old Boyland Hall, Shipden and the drowned village of Eccles-on Sea, today we find ourselves at the Duke’s Palace in Norwich.

Norwich has always been a city of contradictions—splendid yet squalid, cultured yet cutthroat, a place where wealth and ambition rise as high as the cathedral spire, only to be swallowed by the shifting, treacherous earth beneath.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the Duke’s Palace, a grandiose statement of power and pride that stood for barely a century before vanishing into history.

Commissioned in the 1540s by the Third Duke of Norfolk, a man with a keen eye for status and, apparently, poor foresight in construction, the palace was intended as a fitting residence for a family who lived, at least occasionally, under the shadow of the executioner’s axe. (One of the Duke’s sons, Thomas, was later beheaded for his unwise attempt to woo Mary, Queen of Scots - romantic, perhaps, but ultimately fatal.)

At its height, the palace boasted courtyards, fountains, a grand tower, a bowling alley, and covered tennis courts, marking it as a seat of both leisure and excess. But its magnificence was as short-lived as the political fortunes of its owners. By 1711, less than 40 years after an ambitious 1671 remodelling, demolition had begun.

Why? Theories abound. Some whisper of subsidence - hardly surprising in a city built on soft ground and shifting wills. Others claim it was a grudge match between the Duke and the Mayor of Norwich, proving once again that civic disputes in this city can be as dramatic as any royal scandal.

Like so many of Norwich’s lost wonders, fragments of the palace survive in unexpected places: the columns of John Harvey’s house on Colegate are said to have been salvaged from the wreckage, a ghostly echo of past grandeur.

The palace’s old bowling alley became a workhouse, then a pub—the Duke’s Palace Inn—before that, too, was reduced to nothing but memory.

Today, a car park stands where dukes once plotted, poets once scoffed, and history was made, then unmade. It is, as one visitor in 1681 put it, a place “seated in a dung-hole.” But what a glorious dung-hole it must have been.

My most restless and impatient readers,

March arrives, untamed and tempestuous, with the bite of winter still clinging to its breath yet the promise of spring coiled beneath its damp and muddied skirts.

It is a month of uncertainty, of shifting moods and treacherous skies, where one may bask in the sun’s feeble warmth at noon only to be lashed by rain before the hour is out. The wind howls through the streets like a thing enraged, rattling shutters and snatching hats from unsuspecting heads—how delightful.

The land, for all its sodden misery, begins to stir.

The air is thick with the scent of earth waking from its long slumber, and the birds—heedless, foolish things—sing as though they have never been betrayed by a late frost. The hares, ever the tricksters, dance beneath the silvered moon, their wild games stirring old memories in those who still listen to the whisper of the fields.

This is the season of threshold places, of between-times, when winter and spring wrestle for dominion, and the world is neither one thing nor the other. A perfect time for hauntings.

And, of course, there is the madness of March—the old belief that this is a time for recklessness, for mischief, for the kind of folly that leads men to ruin and hares to box in open fields.

Have you never felt it, dear reader? That sudden urge to throw off the weight of winter and do something wholly unwise? To chase the wind, to follow a shadow down an unknown path, to answer a call you cannot quite hear? Beware. The veil may be thinner than you think.

March is not a gentle month. It is a month of storms, of tempests both in the sky and in the soul. It is a month of hares and omens, of wild winds and treacherous thaws. The land stirs, the spirits wake, and the living—poor, dear, oblivious things—go rushing forward into the unknown. How I envy you.

Ever yours in storm and shadow,

Ada

Postscript: Shuck eight grows ever closer.

Mad as a March Hare

Perhaps no creature is more entwined with March than the hare. As the days lengthen, these wild-eyed creatures take to the fields to box, leap, and lurch in erratic, frenzied battles. For centuries, this spectacle baffled observers—was it madness? A warning?

In truth, it is a contest, where female hares test the mettle of their would-be suitors with swift and brutal jabs. But folklore whispers other explanations: hares are shapeshifters, witches in disguise, spirits of the land made flesh. They dart through stories as messengers of the Otherworld, slipping between realities with their long-limbed grace.

To see a hare cross your path was once an omen—good or bad, who could say? But one thing was certain: if a hare looked back at you, you had best turn for home.

The Grey Ghost of Great Dunham

As they gathered within one of Norfolk’s oldest places of worship, the visitors expected to hear stories of history, faith, and tradition. But the tale the Vicar told was of a ghost—not the Holy one they might have anticipated.

His son, he revealed, had seen a spectral figure inside the church only a month before. Pressed further, he reluctantly shared a more chilling encounter.

The Rev. D. H. Briggs was addressing the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society during their September 1938 excursion to St Andrew’s, Great Dunham.

The church, a patchwork of history, held echoes of past centuries in its very fabric—Roman bricks, salvaged from a once-grand villa, embedded within its Saxon walls. It is the last survivor of two medieval churches in the village; the other, St Mary’s, has long vanished, its remains now hidden beneath the rectory or absorbed into St Andrew’s itself.

Among its many curiosities, the church boasts an old coffin-shaped slab set into the east wall, graves with strange inscriptions, and the resting places of the Greengrass family—names as unusual as their stories: Adolphus, Alpheg, Alethea, Hegesias. Most curious of all is the memorial to young William Greengrass, who died in 1815 at the age of 23. His epitaph proclaims:

"This young man was a great student. He understood the French, Italian, Hebrew, Greek and Latin languages: also astronomy and astrology. He wrote his own nativity and predicted the time he was to die. OH DEATH, THOU HAST STOPPED HIS CAREER."

A prophecy fulfilled? Or simply a misjudged confidence in fate?

But among the ancient stones and whispered stories, something else lingers. Ghosts, it is said, haunt St Andrew’s—both within its hallowed walls and beyond them.

The archaeology society had come to Great Dunham to admire its layers of history, its Saxon past, its Roman relics. They had not expected to hear of those who refused to remain in history. Yet thanks to a report in a local newspaper we know their day trip took a most peculiar turn.

Until that moment, Rev. Briggs’ communications from the church had been filled with charmingly mundane parish notices. A letter from July 1935, for example, invited villagers to a garden fête to raise church funds.

"Please everyone, roll up and do your best!" he urged. "In addition to the usual competitions, we are going to have a Baby Show, a parade of decorated bicycles and prams, a judging of noses and ankles, a hat-trimming competition for men, and Bowls. Mrs. Everington and Mrs. Warnes have most kindly promised to organise a Children’s Dress Parade (the dresses ought to be the cheapest and the most original). Then, of course, comes the Comic Cricket Match (reversed sexes)."

But by September 9, 1938, a rather more unsettling notice appeared in the paper: "Visiting the ancient church of Great Dunham in the course of a day's excursion yesterday, members of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society heard a strange story of a ghostly figure that has been seen in and near the building."

"While the members were inspecting the interior, the Rector (the Rev. D. H. Briggs) mentioned quite casually that ‘a grey ghostly figure’ was seen to walk across the chancel and to enter the vestry during Evensong about a month ago.

“Eagerly questioned by members, some of whom were distinctly sceptical, Mr. Briggs said, ‘My son, aged 24, saw the figure walk across the chancel and disappear into the vestry. It was also seen by another member of the congregation. It happened while we were singing a hymn.’

"There is no legend of a ghost haunting Great Dunham so far as the Rector knows, though he has held the living for eight years. But he revealed that his gardener claimed to have seen a great, hooded figure walking across the churchyard.

“He was on the road when it appeared, and he stood ‘rooted to the ground and shaking with terror.’

"The Rector was at a loss to explain why the ghostly visitor at Evensong should have entered the vestry—a comparatively modern addition to the building.

"Asked if he had seen it himself, Mr. Briggs replied: ‘I am not one of the sort that sees these things.’”*

No further accounts of the grey ghost or the hooded figure have surfaced.

Yet Great Dunham lies only a few miles from Castle Acre, where William de Warenne, a knight who fought beside William the Conqueror at Hastings, founded a great Cluniac priory in the 1070s. By the 12th century, 36 monks lived at Castle Acre, clad in grey or black habits, following the Rule of St Benedict.

But not all of them were pious. In 1265, the monks of Castle Acre were reprimanded for “the habit of journeying and riding about the country, eating and drinking indifferently in the houses of laymen and secular persons.”

Could it be that the Archaeological Society were not the first to enjoy a day trip to Great Dunham?

And is it possible that one monk never returned to Castle Acre—left behind, wandering, a spectral figure condemned to walk the path between chancel and vestry for all eternity, his spirit forever caught in time?

A new series for 2025: places we wish we could have visited in Norfolk

The drowned village of Eccles

Swallowed by the greedy sea, most of the ancient village of Eccles-on-Sea is now underwater or beneath the sand we walk on today. All that is left of another of Norfolk’s vanishing villages is the pre-war Bush Estate which hides behind the sand dunes: the thriving medieval village that was once here is now beneath the waves or underneath the sand. St Mary’s Church was one of the last survivors of the village lost to the North Sea – some say you can still hear its bells ringing underwater as you sail by.

Probably built during the 12th century with a belfry added 200 years later, St Mary’s appears to have been in use until the late 1500s. Three horrific storms in 1570 wiped out swathes of the village houses and left the church in a dreadful state of disrepair and led to it being largely dismantled. The tower, however, was left standing, a useful seamark to aid navigation for passing ships.

By the beginning of the 18th century, the church was on the landward edge of the dunes but sand began to bury it, leaving only the octagonal belfry visible. But unusually high tides on Boxing Day 1862 carved into the sandhills and left the tower exposed, once again, like a late Christmas present for the villagers of Eccles.

In Norfolk Life, by Lilias Rider Haggard (1892 – 1968), she remembers the eerie sight of the stranded church tower and, even more terrifyingly, the hideous sight of sea-bleached skeletons exposed in the sandy graveyard.

Between 1986 and 1996, tell-tale flint circles or rings of clay bricks in the sand gave away the locations of 11 wells which, at the end of their useful life, had become medieval toilets and rubbish dumps – creating a time capsule of history beneath the Eccles sands. But at Eccles, the ruins have not been seen since about 2000 after the Environment Agency’s urgent work to build an offshore rock reef and recharge the beach to protect homes and property.

My most wistful and sentimental readers,

February arrives draped in damp mist and tattered lace, a month of pale melancholy and false promises. The days lengthen, though grudgingly, and the sun, when it deigns to appear, is a feeble thing—more a memory of warmth than the thing itself.

Snowdrops, brave and foolish, pierce the earth, harbingers of spring for those desperate enough to believe in its return. Imbolc whispers of renewal, of light creeping back to banish the dark.

But I remain unconvinced.

For February is the month of longing, and longing is a cruel mistress. It is a time of sighs upon frosted panes, of letters never sent, of footsteps echoing in empty corridors. The living clutch at love in this season, chasing it with flowers and verses, as if a confection wrapped in silk ribbon might soften the inevitable passage of time. A quaint delusion, yet one I find most amusing to watch.

Yet in this corner of the world, there is another figure who walks unseen in February, a spirit of mischief rather than romance—Jack Valentine. A shadow at the door, a whisper on the wind, a rap of knuckles upon the wood just as dusk settles its chill across the land. He is no simpering cherub, no garish merchant of roses.

No, Jack slips unseen into houses, leaving gifts upon thresholds before vanishing into the night. A trickster, some say. A phantom, others whisper. And some—those who truly understand—know that love is at its most thrilling when it is a mystery, a fleeting spectre glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye.

I have observed many a lover, long past their earthly prime, still lingering. Some haunt doorways where once they waited in vain, some press phantom lips to letters grown brittle with age. A few are luckier—two souls, long since departed, wandering hand in hand through the places they once cherished. They are rare.

Far more common are those who pine for what was lost, or what never was. Love is the ghost that haunts even the living. It lingers in empty chairs, in songs half-remembered, in the scent of a perfume worn long ago. It is a spectre that cannot be banished, no matter how many candles are lit, nor how many chocolates are consumed in desperate consolation.

And so, my dear correspondents, as you move through this month of roses and regret, spare a thought for those of us who watch unseen. We neither woo nor weep, yet we know more of love than you can imagine. After all, what is love if not a haunting?

Ever yours in shadow and longing,

Ada

Postscript: Work has begun on Shuck 8. A magical theme, friends. Can you guess what it might be?

February: The threshold month

February is a doorway. It belongs to neither winter nor spring but exists in the eerie hush between them, when the air still holds its breath, waiting.

The ghosts of winter linger, but the green shoots of spring press through the earth, insisting on renewal.

It is a month of flickering candlelight, of whispered names, of white flowers nodding in graveyards, and of old goddesses shifting beneath the ice. As Imbolc’s fires burn and the snowdrops bloom, we are reminded that even in the coldest months, something stirs beneath the frost, waiting for its moment to return.

So, if you find yourself walking through the February dusk, watch the ground for the first flowers, listen for the whisper of the wind through the bare branches, and tread carefully—this is the month when the veil thins, when past and future brush against each other, and when even the smallest flame is enough to keep the darkness at bay.

The cruel Lenten tradition of the Stócach at Shrove

In Ireland, it wasn’t just delicious food which people gave up for Lent: once, it was all pleasurable things that were forsaken for God, including wedding nights (and weddings).

This meant that Shrove Tuesday became one of the most popular days of the year for marriages and priests would regularly have a queue of couples keen to pledge their troth before the iron curtain of Lent came down. With a focus on marriage, Shrove Tuesday also became a day which shone a light on those who were not married and who were unlikely to marry.

And, with human nature often being a fairly horrid thing, a practice began which involved large sections of the community mocking those who hadn’t married with a series of pranks which ranged from light-hearted to downright unpleasant.

At one end of the scale would be chalking the back of a bachelor’s coat as they went to church to mark them out as potential suitors. At the other, were the Stócach scarecrows.

Folklorist Shane Lehane has gathered tales of the Stócach after being told about them as he gave a lecture in County Cork. An attendee explained that a stócach was “…an effigy of a man placed on the roof of a house of anyone unmarried at this time of year. Equally, it was sometimes the outline of a man painted with tar on the wall of the house.”

Another man, Pat O’Hanlon, told Lehane about seeing what he called a scarecrow hanging from the telegraph wires in front of the house of two unmarried ladies. His mother told him the effigy was “an old man to take to Skellig with them”.

This refers to another (frankly terrifying) Irish ritual: Skelliking or Skellig Day (Skeleton Day) when boys were given free licence to chase girls, corral them with ropes, tie them up and drench them with cold water.

With prohibitive Lent rules outlawing certain food and drink and sex, the name was thought to come from the medieval island of Skellig Michael off the Country Kerry coast, which once kept a different calendar to the mainland.

This meant that Easter and Lent were later on the island than elsewhere and therefore people could marry – and party - later in the year after Lent had begun on the mainland.

The earliest reference in history to the Skellig Islands dates back to 600AD. During the time of the Penal Laws, Skellig Michael and Little Skellig became a haven for many Catholics whose beliefs and rights were being suppressed. The largest of the Skelligs is Skellig Michael (Sceilg Mhichil) and was home to one of the earliest monastic settlements in Ireland.

The monks of St. Fionan’s monastery led simple lives and lived in stone, beehive shaped huts. They would descend the 670 steps early every morning and fish for the morning’s breakfast and would spend the rest of the day praying in the church, tending to their gardens and studying.

The huts, which are round on the outside and rectangular on the inside, were carefully built so that no drop of rain ever entered between the stones. The monks left the island in the thirteenth century and it became a place of pilgrimage.

According to an 1895 account: “All the marriageable young people, men, and women, in any parish, who are not gone over to the majority at Shrovetide, are said to be compelled to walk barefoot to the Skellig rocks, off the Kerry coast, on Shrove Tuesday night.”

The Haunting of February: Folklore, Imbolc, and the whispering snowdrops

February is a month of contradictions. It is both deep winter and the first stirring of spring, a time of ice-laced winds and the first tentative glimpses of green. It is haunted by the ghosts of winter yet touched by the gentle hands of returning light.

In folklore, it is a month of thresholds, when the world shifts from dormancy to awakening, and nowhere is this more evident than in the traditions of Imbolc and the folklore of the snowdrop.

Falling on February 1st or 2nd, Imbolc is one of the ancient Celtic fire festivals, a midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Its name likely derives from the Old Irish imbolg—“in the belly”—referring to the pregnant ewes that herald the promise of renewal. Dedicated to Brigid, the goddess (and later saint) of fertility, poetry, and smithcraft, Imbolc is a celebration of returning light, flickering candle flames against the lingering dark.

But it is also a festival of the uncanny. Brigid herself straddles the worlds of gods and mortals, her story echoing older pre-Christian traditions of liminal figures who move between realms. In Scottish folklore, February 1st marks the moment when Brigid wrestles dominion from the Cailleach, the winter hag. If the weather is bright, it is said that the Cailleach has made the day fair so she can gather more firewood, extending winter’s grasp. But if the day is stormy, it means she is sleeping, and spring is truly near.

One of the first flowers to bloom in the new year, the snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis) is often seen as a hopeful emblem of spring. But in folklore, this delicate white bloom is steeped in both beauty and death.

In many parts of Britain, snowdrops are known as ‘corpse flowers’ or ‘death’s tapers,’ as their pale, nodding heads were thought to resemble shrouded souls. It was once considered unlucky to bring them into the house, particularly before Candlemas (February 2nd), for fear that they would summon death to the household.

The association likely stems from their presence in graveyards, where they were planted to symbolize the souls of the departed and the cycle of rebirth. In Norfolk, whispers persisted that snowdrops in the home would ‘chill the milk’ or ‘still the baby in the womb.’

Yet, despite these ghostly superstitions, snowdrops are also a symbol of resilience, blooming defiantly through frost and snow. They embody the spirit of February itself: fragile yet persistent, caught between death and life, winter and spring, past and future.

A new series for 2025: places we wish we could have visited in Norfolk: Old Boyland Hall

At a lost hall in a lost village near Morningthorpe there is a persistent rumour that Oliver Cromwell’s repentant ghost was said to appear on the staircase. Boyland Hall was a large Elizabethan house to the north of the village which was rebuilt in the 19th century in the Gothic Revival style but fell into disrepair after the death of its owner in 1930 and was demolished in 1947.

The only account of the ghost seen on the stairs at Boyland Hall notes that the ghost was recognised as Oliver Cromwell and was said to haunt the hall because he had once had an extra-marital affair with a former occupier. There is little evidence that Cromwell had an affair, in fact his love for his wife was well-documented in letters exchanged between the pair. the hall was a sight to behold in its heyday.

My most esteemed and curious readers,

January cometh, shrouded in fog and melancholy, a month as wild and cheerless as a soul unshriven, as bleak and unyielding as the grave. This is the time when shadows deepen, when the howling gale rattles the panes like ghostly fingers, and when the fire’s meagre glow seems but a pale mimicry of the warmth it promises. The world lies cloaked in a pall of frost and misery, how WONDERFUL.

Here in the East, January reigns with a frigid majesty, its icy sceptre casting frost upon the marshes and gloom upon the skies. The pavements, slick with rain, glisten like the scales of some slumbering wyrm beneath the dim and flickering lamplight. A shroud of mist creeps over the horizon, blurring the line between this world and the next—a fitting stage for the phantoms who walk among you, unseen, yet ever-present.

Yet even in this dismal month, there are moments of unearthly beauty. Have you gazed, dear reader, upon the dying sun as it succumbs to the iron grasp of winter’s twilight? Glorious hues, soft as whispers, streak the heavens for but a fleeting moment, a cruel jest of nature to remind you of what has been lost. Before one can draw breath to admire it, the colours are snuffed out, swallowed by the eternal grey. How this fleeting beauty must torment you living souls! For my part, I find solace in the relentless monotony of the gloom.

And what of the fireside, that refuge for the living in this bitter season? It is there, amidst the flicker of flames and the hiss of damp logs, that tales of terror and wonder are best spun. I myself once listened intently to such tales, though now, I confess, I find greater joy in watching your faces as you tell them—how your eyes widen, your hands tremble, your voices falter! The stories may be old, but the fear they stir is ever fresh.

January, too, holds its secrets and superstitions. Here in Norfolk, some still whisper of wassailing the orchards, of singing to the trees to wake their spirits and ensure a bountiful harvest. There are those who believe in guardians who linger in the shadows of the woods, protectors of groves and glades. A quaint notion, but I wonder: do you not feel a prickle at the nape of your neck when you wander too close to the ancient oaks? The land remembers, dear reader, even if you do not.

And so, my cherished correspondents, as you trudge through this bleak month, heed my counsel: draw close to your hearths, secure your shutters against the wailing winds, and leave an extra log upon the fire. Should you hear a tap-tap-tapping at your door, think twice before you answer. For not all who seek entry on these dark nights come bearing glad tidings.

Ever yours in shadow and frost,

Ada

Postscript: Work has begun on Shuck 8. A magical theme, friends. Can you guess what it might be?

The Devil’s Hill in Thetford

It's the highest Norman motte in England although no trace remains of the castle built in turbulent times which it housed: but today's tale regards the hill, not what topped it.

Legend surrounds the imposing hill, which is partly sunken into a deep surrounding ditch and which is second only to Silbury in terms of man-made mounds in the UK.

Townspeople in Thetford know it as High Castle Hill and the ascent to the top is either reached by the 'running path' or the steps, while the ramparts are known as the little hills or the wooded hill.

The ruins of Thetford Castle, a Norman hillfort destroyed in 1173 under the orders of Henry II, have remained a popular tourist attraction on the outskirts of the market town for centuries.

Believed to have been constructed shortly after the Norman Conquest, either by Ralph Guader, Earl of East Anglia until his rebellion in 1076, or by Roger Bigod, his successor as Earl, the castle controlled important crossings of the rivers Thet and Ouse and dominated the town of Thetford which, at the time of the Domesday survey in the late 11th century, was among the six largest towns in the country.

A local story claims that Castle Hill wasn't man-made, but rather Lucifer-made: when the Devil finished his dyke-building work at Newmarket, Narborough and Garboldisham (or possibly after digging the Devil's Pits at Weeting), he leapt across to Thetford, shook his foot and the earth that fell from it created the mound.

Some say that if you walk round the hill seven times at midnight you can summon the devil, while others believe Satan haunts a depression in the moat north-east of the wooded hill which sometimes fills with mud. The Devil's Hole is also a hotline to the Devil if you walk round it the regulation seven times.

Another tale is spun which says that a king once owned a magnificent mansion on the hill but when his enemies landed close by in force, he buried not only his treasure, but also his entire home beneath the mound, forming a hill.

There, under the earth, are riches beyond our wildest dreams.

But the most persisting story about the hill has rung out across the centuries.

It is said that when the early 12th century Cluniac priory, which was founded close to the site by Roger Bigod, was ransacked after the Reformation, six (or seven) silver (or solid gold) bells were missing from the church as they had been taken from the priory and hidden beneath the mound for safekeeping.

Whether the gold, silver, riches or house is under the hill is unknown – testing the Devil's link to the castle mound is, however, far easier. See you at midnight.

January folklore

As the first month of the year unfurls its pallid wings, let us turn to January—a time when the veil between the seen and the unseen hangs heavy with frost. This is the season of dormancy, when nature sleeps beneath her icy shroud and whispers her most enigmatic secrets to those willing to listen. It is no wonder, then, that January abounds with folklore as brittle and brilliant as hoarfrost upon a midnight branch.

Foremost among these tales is the ancient custom of wassailing—a ritual steeped in cider and song, meant to awaken the orchard trees from their winter slumber. Picture, if you will, a small band of revellers braving the cold, their voices raised in boisterous harmony as they pour libations of spiced ale upon the roots of apple trees.

“Oh, apple tree, we wassail thee,” they cry, imploring the spirits of the orchard to grant a bountiful harvest. Candles flicker in the darkness, shadows leap upon bark and bough, and if one peers closely, might one not catch a glimpse of the tree guardian? For legend tells of a protective spirit who dwells within these groves, a spectral sentinel clad in bark and moss, its eyes aglow with an ancient, green fire. Norfolk, too, has its whispers of such a being, though some claim it is but a tale to keep trespassers at bay.

And what of the eldritch omen of the blackthorn? In January, its skeletal branches may be seen etched against the bleak sky, bearing small white blossoms that defy the frost. Folklore holds that these blossoms are not of this world, but harbingers of strife and change. To pluck one is to invite misfortune, yet to admire their ghostly beauty is to court the blessing of clarity in the year ahead.

The wolf moon also rises in January, casting its spectral glow over the land. Named for the howling of wolves that once echoed through the barren woods, it is said to awaken primal instincts and stir the soul’s deepest yearnings.

On such nights, beware the frost wraith - a fleeting spectre glimpsed only in the corner of one’s eye, said to steal the warmth from unwary travellers.

The latest edition of Shuck

From the whispers of history and the shadows of time, we bring you Shuck 7: Witches.

And what a magnificent collection of treasures it is – learn about witch bottles and witch stones, the very last witch trial in Norfolk (held during World War 2), the Kittywitches of Great Yarmouth and how to make your own witch cake. A warning: the witch cake will require the collection of urine.

There are stories of farmers and witches, a witch’s curse that cast a shadow over a Norfolk village for centuries and see the Witch of East Somerton (we know her name but will not share).

Then we have a map of Norfolk witches, a spell to bring magic to you and your home, we learn of Norfolk’s male witches and follow the county’s first witch trial where two ‘hill hunters’ were accused of enchantment. Then there are familiars, Toadmen, your own paper doll witch and our cover story, that of Monica English, Norfolk’s High Priestess of the Grey Goose Feather Coven who practised until only a few decades ago. Let us welcome you in:

Shuck’s latest creation awaits you HERE: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/SHUCKzine

Perchta’s visit on Twelfth Night

In a snow-dusted village nestled in the shadow of the Alps, young Greta sat by the hearth, spinning wool as her grandmother dozed.

It was Twelfth Night, and Greta’s fingers trembled as she worked. “Perchta will come,” the old woman had whispered earlier, “and she sees all…rewarding the diligent, punishing the idle.”

The winds howled outside, and the fire flickered low. Greta’s thread snapped. She scrambled to fix it, but her hands stilled as the room grew suddenly quiet.

From the shadows emerged a figure cloaked in frost and moonlight. Perchta.

Her form shimmered, shifting between a radiant maiden with hair like spun silver and a gnarled crone with eyes as sharp as icicles.

“Have you worked hard, little one?” Perchta’s voice was both melodic and menacing.

Greta swallowed her fear. “I’ve tried, goddess. But my thread—”

Perchta raised a hand, and the broken thread lifted, mending itself in a golden glow. She smiled, her beauty warming the room. “You’ve spun with care, despite the hour. Such diligence deserves a gift.”

She waved her hand, and Greta’s spinning wheel glimmered. “This wheel will spin the finest thread, faster than the swiftest hands. Use it well.”

Then Perchta turned toward the sleeping grandmother, her form twisting into the fearsome hag. She scowled at the heap of unfinished wool by the old woman’s chair. “Laziness invites misfortune.” With a snap of her fingers, the wool vanished.

As the goddess disappeared into the night, the fire roared back to life, warming Greta’s trembling hands. From that night on, Greta’s golden thread brought prosperity to her family.

But every Twelfth Night, she left a finished skein by the door, a humble offering to the shape-shifting goddess who saw all.

A new series for 2025: places we wish we could have visited in Norfolk

Shipden: the village under the sea

It is the vanishing village that just can't stay silent, a forgotten parish from the Norfolk coast that was swallowed by the sea, the county's own Atlantis just a stone's throw from the famous Cromer Pier. The Domesday Book tells us that Shipden boasted 117 residents, three acres of meadow, 36 swine and four-and-a-half plough teams, a harbour, several manor houses and two churches – one that served Shipden-juxta-Felbrigg and Crowmere, the other the village itself.

Villagers fought hard to save St Peter's from the ravages of the sea in the 14th century, watching helplessly as the graveyard was claimed by the tide and then taking action by building a jetty in a bid to save the building. Their efforts were in vain.

Guidebooks from the 18th century claim that the church was still visible at low tide and this remaining rocky relic from a lost village was named Church Rock, with romantic souls claiming the three bells from the building could still be heard at the pier's edge, carried by high winds.

My most revered and curious readers,

As the frosted tendrils of December creep upon us, I find myself once again reaching across the veil, to whisper to you through the frosty breath of winter. Now, with November’s sombre cloak shed, the season turns towards December—chill and wondrous, marked by festivity, yet shaded always by a touch of darkness. Office parties and so forth. Enforced jollities. Shudder.

December, that month when light and shadow entwine like ivy upon the yew, is ripe with ancient rites and elder customs. A season where the Yule log burns, casting flickering shades across the room, and a season when spirits such as myself find ourselves nearer to the hearth, not for warmth, but to watch you shivering, chilled to the bone. And so, as you tend to your merrymaking, do take heed, for many a ghastly soul finds solace in December’s frostbitten nights.

December folklore tells of creatures that roam when the nights are longest—the Yule Cat, prowling for those left ungarbed in new clothes; the Wild Hunt that sweeps the skies, tearing through the chill, stirring the mist with fury and dread. Remember, dear readers, to leave an offering for the Nisse lest you incur their mischief. How little has changed since my time; it amuses me to see how your so-called modern world still bows to ancient fears (although you do well to heed them, for they are there. Waiting to catch you off guard).

And then, there is the mistletoe, that ghostly plant kissed by frost, hung above doorways to ward off ill spirits—and yet, I have seen it work as a lure, tempting a wayward soul closer, closer still, as it dangles its spectral berries overhead. Indeed, it was beneath such a sprig that I once spied two lovers...but I digress. There is no time before sunrise to commit such tales to paper.

I encourage you to revel in Shuck Zine’s December issue, where you’ll find stories both festive and phantasmagorical—strange tales woven with holly and shrouded in smoke. Take caution, for amongst the revelry and ringing of bells, there are those who listen from afar, drawn to the light yet craving darkness. Should you hear a knock upon your door after nightfall, consider carefully before opening. For not all visitors wear warm smiles and rosy cheeks.

And so, my dear readers, may you sip your mulled wine with cheer, but keep a weather eye on the shadows that dance upon your walls. For while the Yule flame may burn bright, I, like the spirits of this season, remain ever near.

Ever yours in the icy twilight, Ada.

A new edition of Shuck

From the whispers of history and the shadows of time, we bring you Shuck 7: Witches. And what a magnificent collection of treasures it is – learn about witch bottles and witch stones, the very last witch trial in Norfolk (held during World War 2), the Kittywitches of Great Yarmouth and how to make your own witch cake. A warning: the witch cake will require the collection of urine. 

There are stories of farmers and witches, a witch’s curse that cast a shadow over a Norfolk village for centuries and see the Witch of East Somerton (we know her name but will not share).

Then we have a map of Norfolk witches, a spell to bring magic to you and your home, we learn of Norfolk’s male witches and follow the county’s first witch trial where two ‘hill hunters’ were accused of enchantment. Then there are familiars, Toadmen, your own paper doll witch and our cover story, that of Monica English, Norfolk’s High Priestess of the Grey Goose Feather Coven who practised until only a few decades ago. Let us welcome you in:

Shuck’s latest creation awaits you HERE.

The folklore of Holly 

For many of us, the sight of holly leaves and berries brings an instant association with Christmas. Whether you’re celebrating this season as a religious or secular festival, holly plays a vivid role in winter traditions, its prickly green leaves and red berries reflecting light and adding life to the dark days of Yule. 

In parts of Britain, the plant was once simply called “Christmas,” and before the Victorian era, what people meant by a “Christmas tree” was often a holly bush.

Bringing holly into homes at Christmastime has deep symbolism. Christian tradition links its spiky leaves to the crown of thorns worn by Jesus, with red berries symbolizing the drops of blood for humanity’s salvation—a connection echoed in the carol, The Holly and the Ivy. But even this association recalls earlier, pre-Christian lore: young villagers once paraded a boy dressed in holly and a girl in ivy to help guide Nature through the darkest part of the year, ensuring the return of fertility and growth.

Holly also served as a mystical protection against malevolent faeries in the home. Folklore claimed that smooth-leaved holly invited faeries to shelter safely indoors, while prickly holly kept mischievous spirits at bay. Another superstition held that the first holly type brought into the house each Christmas would determine whether the husband (prickly) or wife (smooth) ruled the household for the coming year!

In Celtic mythology, the Holly King ruled from the summer to the winter solstice, only to be defeated by the Oak King at Yule, marking the start of the Oak King’s reign until midsummer. This struggle was later woven into Yuletide mummers’ plays, with the Holly King often depicted as a giant man draped in holly, carrying a branch like a weapon. Arthurian legend’s Green Knight may even reflect this figure—a powerful, holly-covered figure whose challenge Gawain accepted one fateful Christmas.

Holly’s magical reputation also extended beyond the winter season. Known for its protective properties, holly was often left uncut in hedgerows to deter witches, who were thought to travel along hedge tops. Farmers, meanwhile, prized the tree for more practical reasons: its evergreen shape helped them mark straight lines for ploughing in winter. Despite a general taboo against felling whole holly trees due to bad luck, branches could be taken for decoration, and holly was coppiced for livestock feed—a nutrient-rich winter staple. Its hard wood was valued for making chess pieces, tool handles, and riding whips, the latter in part due to a belief that holly had a natural affinity for controlling horses.

Planting holly trees near houses was said to guard against lightning, a belief rooted in European mythology that associated holly with thunder gods like Thor. Today, science lends support to this old belief, showing that the tree’s spiny leaves can act as miniature lightning conductors, subtly protecting anything nearby.

Krampusnacht 

As December sweeps in, bringing long, frosty nights and the comforting glow of candlelight, there’s one night when the Yuletide season takes on a darker edge. On December 5th, as the eve of Saint Nicholas Day arrives, so too does Krampusnacht—the Night of Krampus. Across many regions of central and Eastern Europe, this is a night of ancient lore and chilling spectacle, for this is when the dark creature known as Krampus is said to roam.

In folklore, Krampus is a creature as ancient as the mountains themselves. A twisted and fierce figure, he’s often depicted as a monstrous being with thick black fur, horns like a goat’s, and piercing red eyes that gleam with a devilish spark. Chains hang from his arms, clanking as he stalks through snow-covered villages, while a bundle of birch branches swings at his side, ready to dole out punishment. Krampus is no friend of the cheerful Saint Nicholas who brings gifts and blessings; rather, he is the shadow to Nicholas’ light, seeking out those who have fallen from grace.

It’s said that on this night, families would gather together, children listening wide-eyed as the elders shared the tale of Krampus, warning them to be on their best behavior. For the good, there was no need to fear—but for those who’d been naughty, there were few sounds more terrifying than the jangle of chains or a heavy step upon the porch. If Krampus found such a child, the story goes, he might rattle his chains at their windows, or even whisk them away, tucked into the sack he carries to parts unknown.

So, if you find yourself in one of those mountain towns on December 5th, be sure to glance over your shoulder and keep close to the light, for you might just see a shadow with horns, lurking in the misty night air.

You can get your own Krampus from The Folklore Box HERE.

The mystery of the living ghost of East Rudham

On Boxing Day in 1908, a Norfolk vicar was seen at his church—a curious fact, considering he was actually recovering 1,700 miles away in Algeria after a horrific train accident.

This strange event, the “Vicar Apparition of East Rudham” has puzzled scholars of the supernatural for over a century. The tale first appeared in a Norfolk newspaper following an article about Reverend Dr Astley, who, with his wife, had been en route to Biskra, Algeria, when their train derailed. 

Though both survived, Dr Astley sustained a head injury, and Mrs Astley a broken leg. News of their accident reached East Rudham on the morning of December 26, just as his parishioners gathered for a Boxing Day service.

Shortly after, three credible witnesses claimed to have seen the vicar in East Rudham. Mrs Hartley, his housekeeper, reportedly spotted him sitting at an outdoor desk where he liked to read in summer. 

When she summoned Reverend Brock to see the vision, he also saw a figure wearing clerical garb. Even more eerily, Florence Breese, the maid, said she’d seen the vicar on the grounds earlier that day.

The story spread, with The Times sending a reporter who witnessed the vicar’s books but not the figure himself. While some attributed the sightings to "astral projection" or heightened emotions, Dr Astley, amused by the tale, confirmed he was bedridden in Algeria at the time.

Could stress create a double? Or was it all a trick of the mind? To this day, the tale of the vicar’s “ghost” remains one of Norfolk’s most enduring Christmas mysteries.

Did you know…?

That traditionally, December was a time of sexual restraint and was encouraged  from Advent until Candlemas on February 2? This was for a number of reasons: summer babies had a better chance of being healthy children and pregnant women were no use during the harvest. 

Somewhere strange to visit in Norfolk this month: Arminghall Henge

Arminghall Henge is Norfolk’s answer to Stonehenge (the two sites were of comparable size) a lost landscape which was once hugely significant to our ancestors.

A footpath from White Horse Lane just outside Norwich leads to a wide meadow which dips and rises as if the turf has been laid haphazardly by a giant.

Spanned by pylons leading to a humming electricity sub-station and ringed by train lines and the drone of the Southern Bypass, you have to work hard to tap into the old magic.

But it is there, hidden in those dips, rising once a year to greet the winter sun.

This site was discovered from the air in 1929 by Wing Commander Gilbert Insall VC, who spotted circular cropmarks on a flood bank of the River Tas below its junction with the Yare.

A week later, prehistoric Britain expert and archaeologist Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford visited the site but it was not until 1935 that it was first excavated.

Arminghall’s hidden henge is surrounded by ring ditches, banks and funeral barrows within one of the densest collections of Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age monuments in Eastern England. Its significance cannot be underrated.

Sir John Grahame Clark’s original excavation established that the circular rings spotted from the sky were two ditches, with the soil between them heaped up to form a bank between them. A viewing platform, it is believed.

In the middle of the ring would have been a wooden henge, eight huge tree trunks up to 10m tall that dwarfed the people who stood below them.

The horseshoe of posts stood like silent sentries, as part of a wider group of ceremonial sites in this area which also includes nearby Markshall and a clutch of funeral barrows close by.

Arminghall henge is believed to have been aligned with Chapel Hill to the south-west, now obliterated by the London to Norwich railway line, where in midwinter, the sky offered a gift to those who watched it.

Here was a magical gateway to a winter wonderland: as the Winter solstice sun set, if you viewed it from what was once a mighty henge, it set down the slope of nearby high ground, like a ball of fire rolling down a hill and into the river.

Archaeologists estimate that the size of the site means that gatherings of up to 2,000 people could have happened here, and the winter solstice would have been hugely significant.

After endless long nights, when stocks of food were low after the bounty of summer and autumn, when the ground was frozen like iron and the sun barely scraped above the horizon all day, that rolling ball of fire would have signified hope that days would lengthen and warmth would return.

You have to work hard to summon the magic today, but it is still there. In 2024 the winter solstice will occur on Saturday 21 December at 09.21am, while sunset is at 3.42pm.

My Most Esteemed and Thoughtful Readers,

As the veil of All Hallows’ Eve now flutters back into shadow, I find myself once again addressing you from the depths of autumn—November, that sombre month of mists and memory.

Gone are the garish frivolities of Halloween, replaced by something altogether more profound, more secretive. It is as though the earth itself now exhales, weary of the year that grows ever colder, its breath heavy with the weight of forgotten souls. How I love it.

This is a time when the living—though so fond of their comforts—cannot help but be drawn toward the mysteries of death and the afterlife, if only in fleeting glances. For November is not merely a passage toward the darkness of winter but a month rich with the morbid whispers of tradition.

As the days grow shorter and shadows stretch long, festivals such as Martinmas and All Souls’ Day remind us of our impermanence, echoing the rituals of remembrance in every quiet village and forlorn cemetery.

In the issue of Shuckstack before you, we explore, briefly, the folklore of the blackthorn—ominous and fascinating, with its delicate blossoms blooming only after its cruel thorns have pierced the wind. From its fruit, we draw sloe gin and port—concoctions whose warmth defies the chill of the encroaching frost. Dear reader, they are fit to warm even the iciest of spirits, should you care to indulge. Drink responsibly, might I add, by which I mean heavily.

As a girl, I recall how we adored the November displays of light and fire, though with far more pomp and trepidation than your modern explosive spectacles. How quaint to think that, in our time, the fiery celebrations of November 5th, while boisterous, were often a reminder of fire’s destructive power—of the fragility of homes, lives, and the very boundaries between the living and the dead.

You will also read the tale of the spirit said to haunt the well at Coxford. A tale I shall say little of here, for the true horror lies within the details. But suffice to say, this forlorn entity lingers at the water’s edge, bound to it by a tragedy long forgotten by most—though not by the well itself. Water remembers, friends, it is humans that forget.

In this edition of Shuckstack, we also have news of our Shuck Zine—its latest edition is now ready to grace your hands. Inside its pages, as ever, you will find tales of the strange, the unusual, and the wonderfully macabre. And, of course, it would be remiss of me not to mention another destination for the curious wanderer.

But alas, I must away, for November is a month best spent in reflection, with one’s thoughts drifting as gently as the last of the autumn leaves. Do enjoy these colder days, wrapped in your shawls by the hearth, as you sip your sloe gin and read our humble offerings. However: though you may find comfort in warmth and revelry, the darker forces that govern this season are never far away, watching you from the shadows as the year wanes. I am amongst them.

Ever yours,

Ada.

A new edition of Shuck

From the whispers of history and the shadows of time, we bring you Shuck 7: Witches. And what a magnificent collection of treasures it is – learn about witch bottles and witch stones, the very last witch trial in Norfolk (held during World War 2), the Kittywitches of Great Yarmouth and how to make your own witch cake. A warning: the witch cake will require the collection of urine.

There are stories of farmers and witches, a witch’s curse that cast a shadow over a Norfolk village for centuries and see the Witch of East Somerton (we know her name but will not share).

Then we have a map of Norfolk witches, a spell to bring magic to you and your home, we learn of Norfolk’s male witches and follow the county’s first witch trial where two ‘hill hunters’ were accused of enchantment. Then there are familiars, Toadmen, your own paper doll witch and our cover story, that of Monica English, Norfolk’s High Priestess of the Grey Goose Feather Coven who practised until only a few decades ago. Let us welcome you in:

Shuck’s latest creation awaits you here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/SHUCKzine

Blackthorn: potent for the protected and ominous for the wicked

The blackthorn sets out its store for all to see: its petticoat of white blossom may be beautiful but beneath the froth hide spikes that repel those that wish it harm.

A tree with the power to protect against wrongdoing, create impenetrable boundaries, inflict strife on those that deserve it, in folklore blackthorn is the sister to hawthorn, both trees reflecting the light and dark seasons of the year.

A Blackthorn Winter in England is a spell of unseasonably cold weather in early April which often coincides with the blossoming of blackthorn, the pure white blossoms matching the snow or hoar frost in the fields.

It is said that blackthorn crosses the barrier between this world and that of the spirits or fairies and that meditating under the tree will allow you to talk to both – ensure you have an amulet with you to ensure you can make your way back to our realm.

Many superstitions are stitched into the history of the blackthorn: it is a tree that can heal and harm, one that is used in exorcisms and to dispel negativity.

The blackthorn thickets of Anglesey were so strong that they were said to have repelled a Roman invasion, ensuring it remained a Druidic stronghold. When self-proclaimed witch Major Thomas Weir was burnt alive in 1670 - declaring “I have lived as a beast and I must die as a beast!” – his blackthorn stick, which he claimed to use for his dark arts burned alongside him.

And as recently as 1940, poet Robert Graves discovered that people in rural Devon still feared those carrying blackthorn walking sticks, believing they were used by village witches.

This link with witchcraft is woven with superstition – people believed the wickedly sharp thorns were used to jab flesh and that they were tipped with poison to bring death to those whose skin was pierced.

Ada would like to remind us all that just as night falls, the sun rises and that Blackthorn is a beautiful tree with far more positivity within it than negativity.

Its plump black berries, or sloes, make for one of her favourite winter drinks (do not wait until the first frost to gather your sloes, make your own frost in your new-fangled ice box) and when the sticky sloes are strained from their slumber in gin they can be eaten on puddings and fancies.

Their juice, it is said, soothes inflammations in the mouth, as good a reason to take gin regularly as any, Ada believes, and equally as good a reason to be thankful for the much- maligned blackthorn.

How to make Sloe Gin and Sloe Port

Ingredients:

Enough ripe sloes to half-fill the jar you will be steeping them in

Golden caster sugar

1 litre bottle gin (you could also use rum, vodka, whiskey or even tequila!)

1) Pick your sloes – you can tell if they’re ripe enough by seeing if you can easily pop the berries between finger and thumb.

2) There’s a debate over what to do next. Some prick each sloe before placing in their two litre Kilner Jar, others prefer the lazier option of freezing the sloes overnight. Both practices emulate the first frost and split the skin on the berries. At this stage you can add a vanilla pod if you’d like sloe and vanilla gin.

3) There’s also debate about how much sugar to use. I’d cover the berries but Jamie Oliver only says you need “two big spoonful’s”. Hmm.

4) Add the gin to the top of the jar and seal. Shake. Every day for a week, shake the jar again and keep going until the sugar has fully dissolved. Then place in a cool, dark place and leave Christmas, although the longer you can leave it, the better. I’ve still got some of my 2015 vintage…

5) When you bottle, line a plastic sieve with muslin, set over a bowl and strain.

Sloe Port

When you’ve drained your sloe gin, don’t discard the berries, re-use them and make your own port! Technically it’s fortified wine, but let’s not split hairs. You’ll need the same jar you made your sloe gin in.

Ingredients:

About 500g sloes left over from sloe gin

750ml of red wine

About 100g sugar

200ml brandy

1) Add the sloes, sugar and wine to your container. Seal and shake daily for six to eight weeks, keeping it in a cool, dark place. Taste and adjust sugar if you think necessary.

2) Strain as above with sloe gin. Add the brandy and mix well.

The Spirit of the Well in Coxford

In quiet fields close to the wonderfully named River Tat in West Norfolk it is hard to imagine that a terrible murder once took place, a woman left to drown in a deep well. It is said that Lady Bone Well, also known as Mary Bone’s Well and Marie le Bonne Well, is named for the woman who tragically died there: at the hands of a local priest.

This ancient well can be found – or could be found, it may now be lost to the marshes and to time – close to the remains of the St Augustinian St Mary’s Priory, between Coxford and Broomsthorpe. St Mary’s was founded in the 12th century and became one of the wealthiest Augustinian houses in Norfolk before the Reformation in the 1530s.

Ruins of the priory remain, including sections of the priory church and earthworks of the rest of the buildings, while the precinct and fish ponds can be seen from the air.

At this site a Roman coin hoard was discovered in the 18th century and a gold medieval finger ring thought to have belonged to lawyer Thomas Gawdy, a well-known member of the Norfolk gentry in the 16th century. Three-day annual fairs were held here in honour of St Thomas of Canterbury and another annual fair marked the feast of St Barnabus. The priory was dogged by scandal.

When Archbishop Peckham visited the priory in January 1281, he found – according to British History Online – “…so lax a state of discipline that he subsequently sent the prior a long letter, in which he says that he had found him lacking in religious zeal, not attending divine service regularly, and failing to control his subordinates, so that by his negligence the canons go out coursing with hounds, attend banquets, chat with girls, and bring the house into contempt, causing it to be a scandal and a jest to the neighbourhood.

“Those who were suspected of incontinency were not to be allowed outside the priory except in cases of necessity, and then only when accompanied by others of good fame, and if they spoke to women or went into their houses they were to be severely punished; nor were women to be admitted to the priory on any account, save in the case of great and noble ladies accompanied by their trains who could not be refused.”

In 1514, Bishop Nicke paid a visit and found that “…the brethren were disobedient, quarrelsome, and incorrigible…” and that the Canon had run away four times before being imprisoned.

As the lady of the well’s legend says that she was “a woman of the priory” it could possibly mean that she was associated to the Augustinian house before 1281, when women were banned.

But it appears those who worshipped – or at least should have worshipped – at the priory held little regard for rules from on high, leading to speculation as to what happened to the poor woman in question.

One thing, however, is for certain: the water from the well in question was the main supply to the priory, meaning that if it was the site of a murder, it was one that literally tainted all who drank from its depths.

In 1619 Sir Roger Townshend and his master mason, William Edge, used materials from the old priory to build Raynham Hall and it was said by Spelman in his History of Sacrilege that this was the reason why that building collapsed! The present Hall was started in 1622.

Norfolk has a wealth of ancient wells, many of which are said to have magical powers. At Ashill, two timber-lined well shafts were found in 1874 during railway excavations thought to be more than 2,000 years old.

There were signs that the Ashill wells had been used for magical rituals as pottery and toad bones – a well-known ingredient of Norfolk spells – were found within them.

In Dereham, the foundation for the town’s church and convent were laid in 654 by St Withburga with a later Norman church built on the site in 1120. The mortal remains of St Withburga were disinterred and moved to Ely Cathedral – her body perfectly preserved after hundreds of years – and a spring appeared in her emptied tomb, the site of a present-day well in the churchyard.

There are holy wells said to grant wishes at Walsingham and in the village of Bawburgh outside Norwich, St Walstan’s well is said to offer miraculous healing power – as late as 1913, the Eastern Daily Press called it ‘the Lourdes of Norfolk’ and reported the cure of a London Catholic who had suffered eye problems.

During the pre-Christian era, many people believed that certain bodies of water had spiritual qualities and as such, springs and the wells that fed from them were associated with wisdom, healing and fertility.

Wells were believed to be the Eye of God and many holy wells were given the name ‘Ladywells’ when wells which were once dedicated to pagan goddesses were re-designated to the Virgin Mary.

Such wells were often sites where sightings of a White Lady were reported, a ghostly figure thought to be the well’s spirit. Could this be the origin of Coxford’s grisly story?

Somewhere strange to visit in Norfolk this month: The Devil’s Dish at Mossymere Woods

In this gently rolling Norfolk landscape which peacefully slopes towards the river Bure, it’s hard to believe that the Devil has a foothold.

But here, in Mossymere Wood, near Corpusty, it is said that the dark one took his chance to seize a patch of ground after a crime against God was committed in this quiet corner of the county.

The Devil’s Dish is a depression within in the wood which came into being when, in 1717, several oak trees sunk into the ground and water rose up to create a small sinkhole, or solution hole.

A solution hole appears when chalk underground dissolves, creating holes which then collapse and create depressions in the ground: or that’s the scientific answer, folklore, of course, has created something far more poetic.

It is said that shortly before the Devil’s Dish was created, human remains and ‘relics’ had been discovered in the area and, instead of taking the bones to a consecrated site for a Christian burial, those that found them swiftly covered them at the site and walked away.

Local folklore dictates that God did not look kindly upon such a blasphemous act. On July 23 1717, there was a thunderous crack as the earth appeared to open and the trees that stood on the spot where the illegal burial had taken place were swallowed by the ground and what appeared to be boiling water replaced them.

The bubbling water that sprung up where the mighty oaks had once stood proudly was seen as a sign of God’s displeasure and the Devil’s tenure at this quiet spot.

This tale of the Devil’s Dish was being told in the area as late as 1993, the story having been revisited when part of an early medieval cooking pot was discovered at the bottom of the 60ft depression in August 1987.

Norfolk Heritage Explorer (www.heritage.norfolk.gov.uk) notes that the story of the trees that disappeared into the ground and the water that replaced them was still being told until relatively recently.

“In September 1993, a groom at Elmerdale Farm told E Rose that this story was still being told locally, but with the addition that human burials has been found in the wood not long before, which were covered up again rather than being removed to the churchyard, so this was taken as a sign of Divine displeasure.”

Edwin Rose added that ‘relics’ were also said to have been found and were investigated by The Philosophical Society.

Shortly after the Devil’s Dish appeared, Mossymere Woods was bought in 1736 from the impoverished Potts family by Horatio, the first Lord Walpole (the brother of Sir Robert Walpole, who became Britain’s first prime minister). Horatio had also bought nearby Wolterton Hall in 1722 and was keen to increase his estate by buying piecemeal packages of land.

Another story is associated with the woods here, the sad story of two woodmen who were trapped in the forest in deep snow and forced to shelter at the keeper’s cottage in Mossymere Wood.

The gamekeeper, keen to be a good host, washed the sheets before making up the beds and as a result the poor men caught pneumonia and died. One hopes their funeral did take place on consecrated ground, or history could well repeat itself…

The wood is situated on the road between Saxthorpe and Little Barningham, and you can park at Mannington Hall (just over one mile from the woods) or find a lay-by on this road.

My Most Esteemed and Curious Readers,

It is with a bemused heart and a suitably raised eyebrow that I address you during the month of that most peculiar of festivals, Halloween—an event where the living, in their boundless naivety, actively seek to be frightened. How utterly preposterous, don’t you think? The notion that any mortal, with flesh still warming their bones, would desire to flirt with fear is one that leaves me smirking in my shadowed repose.

Oh, they dress in costumes of ghouls and goblins, convincing themselves they are brave, wishing to catch a glimpse of the macabre. And yet, let them but hear the creak of a floorboard in the dead of night, or spy the flicker of a candle’s flame when there should be none, and you shall see how swiftly their foolish bravado fades. They may claim to want fear, but I assure you, dearest reader, true fear is a companion none would willingly court. For it does not knock politely—it bursts through the door, uninvited, with a cold hand at your throat.

In this issue of Shuckstack, we turn our attention to the delights of the strange and wonderful tales that abound here in our beloved Norfolk. Ah, Norfolk, that curious county where folklore grows as thick as the marsh fog. One need not search far to find a tale that will send shivers down your spine, even on the mildest of autumn evenings. Today’s concerns a haunted hall in Outwell in the Fens, an other-worldly, liminal place with enough ghosts to populate an entire ballroom of the damned, waltzing eternally beneath the flickering glow of spectral chandeliers. 

I must away, lest I be accosted by the vulgarity of modern custom, and my handbag be filled with cheap confections as I wander past the garishly adorned houses of the living. Enjoy your Halloween if you must, but remember: the thrill of a spooky costume or a jack-o'-lantern is fleeting. Real fear is not found in the artificial frights of your modern-day entertainments, but in the tales that linger on the edges of your consciousness, in the unexplained creaks of an empty room, and in the ancient legends whispered by those who know better than to laugh at them.

Beware the hedgerows and dark places, friends.

Ever yours,

Ada

The ghosts of Beaupré Hall in Outwell

Allow me to regale you with a tale most curious and chilling, hailing from the forgotten corners of our fair Norfolk—Beaupré Hall, a grand manor now lost to the ravages of time, yet its spectral stories remain as vivid as ever.

Picture, if you will, a bloodstain that refuses to be washed away, a bed slept in by unseen inhabitants, and a phantom carriage pulled by headless coachmen! Such things would send even the steeliest of hearts into a frenzy of dread. Yet fear not, dear readers, for these spirits—though restless—are not the fiends that dwell in your darkest nightmares. No, they are but the lingering memories of a once-glorious hall, named after the lush meadows that surrounded it.

Beaupré Hall, its origins traced back to the days of William the Conqueror himself, stood tall and proud through the centuries. Established by Sir Thomas de Beaupré, a knight who marched alongside William in his invasion of England, it became a 16th-century masterpiece of architecture. Expanded over the years by the Bell family, it bore witness to many a century, until, alas, the 20th century brought with it an onslaught of misfortune.

First came a gale in 1915, tearing through the once-sturdy manor, stripping its chapel of its roof, and leaving it vulnerable to the whims of nature. By 1923, the esteemed architectural chronicler Christopher Hussey spoke in hushed tones of the hall's impending ruin. The hall's requisition by the RAF during the Second World War was the final blow, and despite a noble attempt to offer it to the National Trust in 1953, it was too late. A fire sealed its fate, and Beaupré Hall was reduced to a ruin, a sad echo of its former grandeur.

Ah, but let us not mourn the loss without revisiting the strange and ghostly tales that have clung to the ruins like ivy on crumbling stone. In his "History of Wisbech and Neighbourhood," Frederic John Gardiner described the house’s eerie corridors, a labyrinth of panelled rooms, one of which had a bed that, though never occupied by mortal guests, was always found in disarray—rumoured to have been disturbed nightly by a spectral guest. Servants, in a mix of terror and duty, dared not neglect their task of remaking the bed each day, lest the ghostly occupant take to wandering the halls in a fit of dissatisfaction.

As for the grounds? Headless coachmen, they say, stood ready to whisk the unwary away into the depths of the night, while stone eagles, perched upon the gates, were said to descend from their lofty posts on the last night of the year, only to bathe in the nearby river under the light of the full moon. Such strange customs, indeed, for mere statues!

And yet, Beaupré Hall was not without its softer hauntings. Ingrid Pitt, in her "Bedside Companion for Ghosthunters," recounts the tale of two students from the 1950s, who, during a romantic midnight tryst, encountered the White Lady—a sorrowful figure, shimmering in the moonlight, who brought with her an overwhelming aura of sadness. The tragic tale of this White Lady, they later learned, was one of heartbreak—a young woman whose lover perished after her father sent him off to war, never to return. To this day, she roams the ruins, mourning her lost love.

And so, by 1963, Beaupré Hall's magnificent ruins gave way to a housing estate, its former grandeur now reflected only in the name of Beaupré Avenue. The halls and ghosts, once so lively and ethereal, now leave but the faintest trace on the landscape of Outwell.

Whether those ghosts still linger, awaiting the stroke of midnight to reveal themselves to those brave enough to look—well, that is a tale for you to discover, dear reader. Are you bold enough to venture there and seek the answers?

A new edition of Shuck

From the whispers of history and the shadows of time, we bring you Shuck 7: Witches. And what a magnificent collection of treasures it is – learn about witch bottles and witch stones, the very last witch trial in Norfolk (held during World War 2), the Kittywitches of Great Yarmouth and how to make your own witch cake. A warning: the witch cake will require the collection of urine. There are stories of farmers and witches, a witch’s curse that cast a shadow over a Norfolk village for centuries and see the Witch of East Somerton (we know her name but will not share).

Then we have a map of Norfolk witches, a spell to bring magic to you and your home, we learn of Norfolk’s male witches and follow the county’s first witch trial where two ‘hill hunters’ were accused of enchantment. Then there are familiars, Toadmen, your own paper doll witch and our cover story, that of Monica English, Norfolk’s High Priestess of the Grey Goose Feather Coven who practised until only a few decades ago. Let us welcome you in: Shuck’s latest creation awaits you here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/SHUCKzine

A recipe for Samhain with a black heart

For those of you preferring the comforts of home to eerie expeditions, allow me to share with you a recipe most fitting for this time of year: a Treacle Tart, as black and rich as the night itself. The perfect antidote to any ghostly chills that may visit you this season.

Treacle Tart

Ingredients:

200g plain flour

100g butter

2 tablespoons cold water

400g golden syrup

150g fresh breadcrumbs

Juice and zest of 1 lemon

Begin by making your pastry: rub the butter into the flour until it resembles fine breadcrumbs, then add the cold water and mix until it forms a dough. Roll out and press into a tart tin.

Warm the golden syrup in a pan, stir in the breadcrumbs, lemon juice, and zest.

Pour the mixture into the pastry case and bake at 180°C for 25–30 minutes, or until the top is golden and set.

Serve warm with a thick, unctuous custard or a dollop of clotted cream for those with a truly decadent palate.

Shuck on the Magic Lantern

Before I take my leave of you, dear reader, I must speak of the curious adventures of my two most esteemed friends, none other than Mr Matthew Willis and Mrs Siofra Connor, the ingenious creators of Shuck Zine. They have recently been seen upon the magic lantern screen of our modern age—featured in none other than Charlie Cooper’s Myth Country on BBC3, a broadcast that delves into the darkest of folklore, where the shadow of the great Black Shuck himself looms large. The show, should you be brave enough to seek it, is now available on that most mystical of devices known as the iPlayer. You may watch it here, if you dare: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002384q/charlie-coopers-myth-country-series-1-1-black-shuck

And while Mr Willis and Mrs Connor, with admirable pluck, appeared on this eerie programme, addressing the grim legend with aplomb, I must confess, dear friends, that you shall find no apparition of Ada there. For though I am already quite dead, I would rather perish a second time than appear on such a broadcast, which, as I am already entombed, says more than you can possibly imagine. The audacity of it! To be called upon to speak of such matters before the living—truly, I would shudder, were I capable of such a thing. Now, steel yourselves, and do watch, if only to glimpse those two brave souls entwined with the legend of Shuck, while I remain, as ever, your faithful ghostly guide from beyond the grave.

Somewhere strange to visit in Norfolk this month: The Merton Stone

On the boundary of Merton with Threxton, just off Peddar’s Way is a stone with its own saucy folklore – for if it is moved, legend has it so are those that move it: into a wild, lusty frenzy.

The Merton Stone boasts two stories, one of which brings about the destruction of the village, the other that brings about a possible population explosion.

It has been said for many years that if the boulder is ever moved, it would – according to a tale recounted in Lantern (those marvellous men from the Borderline Science Investigation Group in Lowestoft) in 1976 – “cause the waters to rise and cover the whole Earth”.

When the BSIG wrote to the vicar of the parish, they received a reply from the Hon Richard de Grey, seventh Lord of Walsingham, who lived in the village and confirmed the stone was still in situ.

He recounted a tale in which his grandfather decided to test the end-of-the-world theory by moving the stone: he assembled lots of men and women, gave them plentiful beer and many ropes and tried to move the stone.

Although the operation was ultimately a failure, it did lead to what he called “an erotic debauch”: we will spare you the more intimate details.

There is another saucy stone over in Hartest in Suffolk.

According to legend, the Hartest Stone was dragged from nearby Somerton Hill on July 7 1713 by 20 gentlemen and 20 farmers as a somewhat bizarre way to celebrate the Peace of Utrecht and Marlborough’s victories in the War of the Spanish Succession.

Stone-dragging, it appears, had a somewhat amorous effect on the villagers of Hartest and – according to the tale – when the stone found its new home, the people of the village fell under a spell which led to a similar “erotic debauch” by the stone.

As Mike Burgess from the BSIG wrote: “I am beginning to wonder whether these stones were once part of pagan fertility rituals, and perhaps they still hold some mysterious power that affects people in this way?...One of these days I think I may try moving one, and see what happens!”

Well, quite.

On the Hidden East Anglia website (www.hiddenea.com) offers an addition to Lord Walsingham’s tale: “…even in my own boyhood, someone would say of some elderly love-child 'Ah, he's wun o' them wot cum the toime o' the ould stoon'.”

Of course, large stones in Norfolk are generally leftovers from the Ice Age, swept into position by glaciers and left as reminders of a different era: the Merton Stone is the biggest of its kind in Norfolk and possibly the biggest in England, weighing around 20 tonnes.

On geulogy.com, the alleged mystical powers of the Merton stone are explored further: “I have been told by many people, personal experiences, some with handed-down stories that when standing on the stone one feels ice cold together with a feeling of some kind of unexplainable spiritual presence.”

Whether the Merton Stone makes you feel cold or hot beneath the collar, one thing is for sure: move it at your own risk.