The Folklore of Berkshire
@starr-bugg, you like these posts and I like making them, so here's one on a county picked mostly at random (although it does have some importance to me as the county where Watership Down is set).
(Wayland's Smithy and White Horse Hill are in the Vale of White Horse, which, while it historically fell within Berkshire, is under present boundaries part of Oxfordshire).
The most famous bit of Berkshire folklore is, of course, Herne the Hunter, who haunts Windsor Great Park. He is a ghostly deer hunter with antlers on his head and a golden chain around his neck, riding on a black horse and accompanied by phantom hounds. His powers include shooting people (such as a teddy boy in 1964) with invisible arrows [1], afflicting trees, making cows' milk bloody and turning into a stag. There are two trees that claimed to be "Herne's Oak", on which the mortal Herne was hanged, both of which have now been uprooted - the one that currently bears the name was planted in 1906 [2].
Windsor Castle is home to a household of ghosts - Anne Boleyn running down a corridor screaming and clutching her severed head [3], Henry VIII's footsteps in the cloister and apparitions of Queen Elizabeth I, Charles I, the Duke of Buckingham, William of Wykeham (the architect of the Round Tower), a soldier on the grounds [4] and George III [5].
The Devil's Ditch along the northern edge of the Berkshire Downs gets its name from having been ploughed by the Devil in one night, until a ploughshare got stuck - the soil churned up in the process became two barrows, and a third was a clod Old Scratch threw at the imp steering the demonic oxen who thus caused it to get stuck. Another ditch in the county, in Aldworth, was variously said to have been dug by the Devil or by a figure called Grim [6] - Grim is a possible name for Odin [7].
Wayland's Smithy is a barrow, that, if a horse is left there with a coin overnight, it will be shod in the morning [8]. Wayland himself is an anglicised form of Völundr, a smith from Norse mythology who was crippled in order to force him to work for a wicked king, but used magic to kill the king’s family and escape [9]. Norse mythology, it seems, has left its mark on Berkshire.
Berkshire faerie lore followed the standard pattern of southeast England - tiny people dressed in green who rewarded the good and punished the idle, stole children and replaced them with changelings, made music well and surfaced from their underground homes to dance in circles under the moon, rendering anyone who spied on them blind in one eye [10]. A population of them lived in the barrow outside the village of Beedon, where they repaired a broken ploughshare placed there, but raised a massive storm when someone tried to dig up the barrow [11]. Derricks, a type of faerie found in here and Hampshire, additionally led lost travellers to safety [12].
Henry VI, the Lancastrian king of England deposed and later murdered by the Yorkists during the Wars of the Roses, became a folk saint, with his cult centred at Windsor - miracles attributed to his intercession include healing a paralysed three-year-old, bringing an accidentally-strangled girl called Joan Walran back to life, and saving a man from being unjustly hanged by appearing and putting his hand on the man's throat, preventing the noose being applied [13].
Bisham Abbey in the village of Bisham is haunted by the ghost of a woman called Dame Elizabeth Hoby, who appears out of her portrait clad in a bright white dress [14].
During the Middle Ages, the village of Finchampstead had a pool famous for bubbling with blood during times of trouble - it did so in 1098 (due to heavy rain and excessive taxes), in 1100 (due to the king's death), in 1103 (due to a combination of excessive taxes, harvest failure and cattle disease) and 1153 (due to a dispute between the king and his brother). Since these are recorded by three separate chronicles, it's clear that something was happening - the most likely explanation is red algae, but since the pool now has a road over it we will never know [15].
White Horse Hill, near Uffington Castle, is home to a large chalk image of a horse, which was historically seen as a picture of the dragon slain by Saint George - and, hence, the hill as the site of the dragon-slaying [16].
Cottington's Hill outside the village of Kingsclere was famous as a meeting-place for witches, with three witches being buried alive there with their heads poking out as late as the First World War [17].
Lisa Schneidau, 2020, Woodland Folktales of Britain and Ireland, The History Press, p.56-58
Dee Dee Chainey and Willow Winsham, 2021, Treasury of Folklore: Woodlands and Forests, Batsford, p.122-123
Dee Dee Chainey, 2018, A Treasury of British Folklore: Maypoles, Mandrakes and Mistletoe, National Trust Books, p.95
Marc Alexander and Paul Abrahams, 2012, In Search of Britain's Haunted Castles, The History Press, p.137-140
Marc Alexander, 2002, A Companion to the Folklore, Legends and Customs of Britain, Sutton Publishing Ltd., p.321
Jeremy Harte, 2022, Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape, Reaktion Books, p.45-47
Katherine Briggs, 1974, The Folklore of the Cotswolds, Batsford, p.12
Tabitha Stanmore, 2024, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, Penguin Random House Ltd., 140
Geoffrey Ashe, 1990, Mythology of the British Isles, Guild Publishing Ltd., p.41
Jeremy Harte, 2004, Explore Fairy Traditions, Heart of Albion Press, p.39-40
Janet Bord, 1997, Fairies: Real Encounters with the Little People, Michael O'Mara Books, p.153
Katherine Briggs, 1976, A Dictionary of Fairies, Penguin Books Ltd., p.97
Eamon Duffy, 2022, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580, Yale University Press, pp.183-189
Jo Bourne (editor), 2009, The Most Amazing Haunted and Mysterious Places in Britain, The Reader's Digest Association, p.53
Martyn Whittock, 2009, Life in the Middle Ages: Scenes from the Town and Country of Medieval England, Robinson, p.225-227
Rosalind Kerven, 2019, English Fairy Tales and Legends, Batsford, p.159
