← New Books Network
New Books Network
Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux, "The Three Ravens Folk Tales: New Tellings of Half-forgotten Stories from England's 39 Historic Counties" (The History Press, 2025)
00:52:29
Loading summary
Transcript180 lines
- [00:00]
Popeyes Spokesperson
The new Popeyes and Hot Ones menu is the definition of fire flavor. We've got the sizzling Sriracha dippers. 10 out of 10. Time to take it up a notch with the smoking Rojo chicken sandwich. Mm, that's so hot, but it's so good. Now onto the daring dab Ghost wings. Yep, there it is. I love the spice level. Attempt the Popeyes and Hot Ones menu in stores. Our hottest collaboration yet. Love that chicken from Popeyes. Limited time and participating US restaurants.
- [00:33]
Ford BlueCruise Advertiser
Ford BlueCruise Hands Free highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel, allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control. Enjoy the drive in Bluecruise enabled vehicles like the F150 Explorer and Mustang Mach E. Available feature on equipped vehicles. Terms apply. Does not replace safe driving. See Ford.com BlueCruise for more details.
- [01:01]
LinkedIn Ads Narrator
Race the rudders. Raise the sails. Raise the sails.
- [01:04]
Eleanor Conlon
Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over.
- [01:07]
LinkedIn Ads Narrator
Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sales solution?
- [01:10]
Eleanor Conlon
Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend $250 on your first campaign and.
- [01:23]
LinkedIn Ads Narrator
Get a free $250 credit for the next one.
- [01:25]
Eleanor Conlon
Get started today@LinkedIn.com campaign terms and conditions.
- [01:31]
LinkedIn Ads Narrator
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another interview on the New Books Network podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because I get to talk to both of the authors of a book that I think is going to lead to quite a fun conversation, titled The Three Ravens Folk New Telling of Half Forgotten Stories from England's 39 Historic Counties, but published by the History Press in 2025. As the title suggests, we're going to be going all over England, all over space, all over time, to examine lots of different folklore stories, some of which are being told in, well, particular ways. I don't want to give too much away. We've got different genres going on here, different times, different intertwinings of tales, many of which might seem familiar to begin with, but actually turn out to be quite surprising as we go through. So I'm very pleased to have both of the authors of the book, Eleanor Conlon, Martin Vaux, with me here to tell us about the book. Thank you both for being here and.
- [02:34]
Martin Vaux
Thank you very much for having us.
- [02:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Miranda, could you please start us off by introducing yourselves a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [02:42]
Eleanor Conlon
So my name's Eleanor Conlon, and my name's Martin Vaux. And the writing of this book came about. I mean, it was. It would be wrong to say it wasn't intentional. It's not like it's an accidental book. We'd always hoped that it would end up becoming a book, but really and truly, the honest answer is. We started Three Ravens as a podcast, and the podcast proved to be sufficiently successful that the History Press, wonderful publisher, invited us to put the book together containing the 39 stories it does, one for each of the 39 historic counties in England, basically. So we journeyed around in our first three series of the podcast around each of the 39 counties, and history Press said simply, yeah, we'd like that, please.
- [03:31]
Martin Vaux
Yes. We're never sure whether we took the short way round or the really, really long way round.
- [03:38]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah. To get a book published.
- [03:40]
Martin Vaux
I mean, certainly we are very fortunate in that we didn't go through the process many people have to go through in querying agents in order to approach publisher. We sort of managed to cut that out, but certainly not without doing all of the legwork first.
- [03:56]
Eleanor Conlon
And that's not to say, dear listener to this podcast, that we haven't tried in the past for years and years and years to get books published, because we have. We've written novels and, you know, hello, Chi. Yeah, we've both won awards for our writing, but never quite got over the line of having a thing published. So we got there eventually in this very indirect sort of way.
- [04:21]
Martin Vaux
Yeah, it's a very long walk to the. The back door.
- [04:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I have to say, in my position interviewing authors on all sorts of different kinds of books, that sort of long history is actually more common than you might think, which goodness knows what that tells us about the publishing industry, but does always make it, I think, an exciting way to start an interview, to kind of acknowledge how much work and time and thought went into getting to this point. And it is, in fact, that thought and effort that I'd like to talk a little bit more about, because stories from 39 counties, I mean, that's a lot of different places. That's a lot of historical material of stories to draw on. So can you tell us more about how you went about researching, collecting, writing these stories?
- [05:07]
Eleanor Conlon
Okay, well, our original thought was to, week by week, take it in turns completely randomly in terms of order for the counties to venture around England's historic counties, which are not the same as the modern counties. So we're looking back into history as, you know, just our basic starting points. There are certain counties in the book that we've written stories for that no longer technically exist.
- [05:34]
Martin Vaux
Huntingtonshire, looking at you.
- [05:36]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah, there's some that have been sort of added to or gobbled up by larger counties and other counties that have been split up. So that was sort of our initial starting position. And because there was 39 of them, that worked quite handily for our purposes because they broke down to 13 episode series. And we really did just put the names all into a hat and drew them out. And so Eleanor had half of them, I had half of them, or you had one more because there's 39 counties. But. But. Yeah. And. And so off the back of that, we then started to research the counties and from that, started to try and draw out which of the tales we were most interested in telling from each county, while also trying to be sure that we didn't overdo things, because we could have easily written a ghost story for every county, couldn't we?
- [06:27]
Martin Vaux
Oh, absolutely. And it's worth saying that before we started the original Three Ravens project, Martin and I had a very poor grasp of English geography.
- [06:38]
Eleanor Conlon
Oh, yeah.
- [06:39]
Martin Vaux
So when he says we chose counties at random, we really did choose them at random. Having no idea where half of them were in some instances, especially those further away from our home county of Sussex.
- [06:51]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah, definitely. And so part of the challenge was to try and find tales where we felt like there was an angle that we could exploit. And then it was, as you mentioned in the introduction, thinking about, okay, how do we ensure that we have a variety of forms in these stories? What about the style of them, the tone of them, the era in which they're set? You know, each one was a different challenge to research and hopefully put into an interesting short story format, because I think it would be deadening to listen to, let alone read, if every story were, you know, sort of third person past tense, omniscient, you know.
- [07:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely an extra dimension that you have added to this project, and I'm glad you highlighted that to listeners or readers, because each of the short stories is quite short, but in some ways feels longer because they're so different from each other and they're quite immersive in that sense.
- [07:49]
Eleanor Conlon
Well, thank you. And in the alphabetical order, they appear in the book. Well, that isn't how they appeared on the podcast. So if you were to listen to the podcast through from, you know, episode one, you'd find that our, I think our ability or our confidence as writers changed and developed as we went on. So some of the Earliest stories, I think, are a little more spare. It's not that they lack charm. Some of them are still. I think they're all lovely stories, but some of the later ones, particularly when we sort of found our groove and felt a bit more confident, we took more chances, didn't we?
- [08:26]
Martin Vaux
Well, I think we started to realize what we could get away with, pushing the boundaries a little bit more.
- [08:32]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah.
- [08:33]
Martin Vaux
I think I remember the. The point on the podcast where I wrote the first story I was really, really pleased with. And I thought, people are going to absolutely, absolutely hate this.
- [08:43]
Eleanor Conlon
Yes. Week by week we thought, okay, we've done it. Now they're all going to stop listening.
- [08:48]
Martin Vaux
Fortunately, they didn't hate it. They didn't stop listening.
- [08:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
What did you think would be dislike?
- [08:54]
Martin Vaux
It was the Lantern Men, my Huntington ditch story. I was certain that that one was a bit too grotesque. Yeah. For the average listener, it is a macabre tale.
- [09:05]
Eleanor Conlon
You know, if listeners are unfamiliar with the idea of the Lantern Men, they probably heard of will o the wisps or ignis fatuous false fires that you burning over marshlands and things. In England, there's an awful lot of sort of fairy mythology attached to those, you know, strange fires you'd see burning out in the night. And the Lantern Men are one of the iterations of the kind of horror stories that are associated with things.
- [09:34]
Martin Vaux
They're certainly not very pretty little furries digging around on rainbow wings. They're these rather unpleasant, often murderous, tricksy creatures whose main MO is to misguide people into drowning in the fence.
- [09:51]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah, that's right. They basically want to eat you. They do. But by putting out these. These lanterns that lure people and then once you're suckered in, then they gobble you up. But then, you know, with. Even within that, you tried to find some ways to talk about some interesting historical storylines and strange things that would happen on the marshes during the period of time where people were collecting stories of lantern men.
- [10:15]
Martin Vaux
Yes. And I think that's been one of the most interesting things about the research for these stories, because we've been immersed in the folklore and history of the individual counties. At the same time, we've been able to find all sorts of different threads to pull into the stories. So in most of them in the collection, what you're getting is not actually one story, but several masquerading as one.
- [10:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think that's definitely common in many of them, the kind of threads that all come together. And I can imagine that was both really intriguing to kind of come across. Oh, Wait, did you hear about this one? Right. But then also probably challenging to kind of go, wait a second, how do I put them all together without it suddenly becoming, you know, 300 pages per story? Were there any in particular? That kind of. Now that you've come to the end of the book project, you look back on and go, yeah, okay, that one was really hard and took sort of multiple iterations to figure out when to place it or how to tell the story.
- [11:18]
Eleanor Conlon
Okay, well, in a way, we couldn't be too precious because we were on a set of deadlines, if you see what I mean. The podcast has to come out, therefore the story has to be written. And you can only do what you can do in the timescale you've got. So you've got a fortnight from the time you've just released an episode to the next time your next episode goes up.
- [11:37]
Martin Vaux
And we always have grand plans about getting ahead, more ahead than that, but we. We rarely follow through. So it really is. Okay. Well, no, I guess I'll publish the draft.
- [11:47]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah. And so for me, I'd say it was quite an early story, which is the Sockburn Worm, which is a story to do with County Durham in the north of England. It's quite a small county. Most people don't ever spare a thought for County Durham, if I'm absolutely honest with you. It's famous for its cathedral as an early and important site of Christianity. But I think that was only episode four of the podcast in total. And by that point, it was going to be my second story. And I thought, well, I've written one. Let's try and take a bit of a big swing and go back in time to, effectively, the Dark Ages, where famously, they're called the Dark Ages because we don't have written records very much about what was going on. And to try and tell a story rooted in the mythology of not just dragons, but these strange kinds of flying wyrm, so W Y R M that are written about, particularly in the north of England. So across all of the northern counties, really, you find them different variations. Sometimes they live in trees, sometimes they hatch out of wells or rivers. And so I wanted to take some of that mythology and then fold it together with what was happening to life at the time. And knowing that Sockburn, which is this real place where you can still go, it's now an abandoned village. Nobody lives there anymore, but there's still a church. And outside of the church, there is still the grave of the fellow who is believed to have slain this Dragon, this Sockburn well, and also the stone under which it is said the dragon's body was buried, on top of which in Durham Cathedral, this famous cathedral to this day. Hanging up in the cathedral is the sword is called the Conies Falchion. That was said to be the blade with which this guy actually killed this dragon, which is. It's got a corroded edge, believed from the hard scales and the acidic blood of this dragon. So there's loads of different threads to kind of draw together and. And one of the wildest things about the Conyers Falchion is it still has a ceremonial purpose. So every time there's a new bishop appointed at Durham, they. They have to be gifted this sword on their entry into the county, basically as a symbol from the people of Durham to say, you are now our protector against these kind of monstrous things that dwell in the dark. So, you know, that was kind of episode four of the podcast and I felt like I took some, some big swings with that one. But once I'd done that, I thought, o people are still with me. I can now be a bit weirder in the stories I tell.
- [14:31]
Martin Vaux
For me, I. I think one of the ones that was the most sort of challenging to put together was my Dorset story, William Doggett the Vampire Ghost. I mean, not only just because what on earth is that? As a topic, but because I quite self consciously tried to adopt a slightly hardayan tone. I am a massive fan of Thomas Hardy. I completely adore his books and can always find some inspiration there. And I really wanted to try and capture that little bit of a hint of Hardy's Wessex in that story. So that was a little bit harder, I suppose, trying to kind of adopt that style and dig into that a little bit. And I'm almost amazed that Hardy didn't write a story about that particular myth.
- [15:20]
Eleanor Conlon
Because it was happening right down the road from.
- [15:22]
Martin Vaux
It would have been so up a street. And he was, he was not a stranger to writing about folkloric subjects?
- [15:27]
Eleanor Conlon
Oh, no. I mean, he's one of the most important, I'd say, writers, particularly of the 19th and early 20th century, in reviving interest in rustic lives and folkloric subjects. You know, quite a lot of ghosts. And yet the Withered Arm being a classic example of a Hardy story. Such a brilliant writer.
- [15:46]
Martin Vaux
And all of the folklore stuff that pops up in Return of the Native, for instance.
- [15:50]
Eleanor Conlon
What Miranda was talking about before, though, the sort of idea of, you know, how do you pick and what you cover. I mean, the idea of people being Pinned through the heart at a crossroads is something that happens in almost every English county, doesn't it?
- [16:07]
Martin Vaux
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
- [16:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
This was one of my questions. When something pops up in more than one place, how did you decide which county would get it?
- [16:16]
Martin Vaux
Well, because we were taking that week by week approach. It was. It was more or less. Have we seen it already? And so if we approached Northamptonshire, for example, so, oh, look, there's another story about that blooming dragon that does that thing. Oh, we've already had that one in Cambridgeshire. Well, we won't do that one, but it did. But by number 38 or 39, it does get to the point where we get. There is really one of those in every single county.
- [16:44]
Eleanor Conlon
So, like black dog legends, they exist everywhere. So then you've got to pick the biggest and most famous one and just kind of do it once, really. Or maybe have a couple of black dogs as background characters, but, you know, major on them once. But I'd also say in some counties, certain folktales carry more weight. And this is linked to 18th and 19th century folklore Collectors and where they operated. So, you know, some counties have more folklore in the record than others do. So, you know, there has been work in the 20th and 21st centuries that's expanded what we know about the stories of areas.
- [17:23]
Martin Vaux
Yeah, but there are places that this 19th and early 20th century collectors didn't get to.
- [17:29]
Eleanor Conlon
No, they weren't interested. And so a county like Bedfordshire, which actually has loads of really interesting stories attached to it, if you go looking for old books about the folklore of Bedfordshire, you will find none, because people did not consider it to be sufficiently interesting to focus on compared to wilder countries that were a bit more, I'd say, further away from the cultural center, because very often folklore research is into how the kind of savage peoples as far away from the cities are behaving.
- [18:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So in addition to themes coming up across counties, definitely in a way where I could see you had to kind of go, no, no, that one's already been done. You don't get to do. There were also some stories where a really specific place was kind of the center of it, like a particular tree, that level of specificity. Why was this such a thing?
- [18:25]
Eleanor Conlon
I mean, folk tales are almost always linked to some aspect of landscape. That's one of the things that we've learned and learned from a number of real experts in folklore, because, I mean, we were amateur enthusiasts when we started this, but we've interviewed loads and loads of people and they have affirmed some of the things that we Came to suspect over time. But often folktales are also linked to traumas, aren't they?
- [18:49]
Martin Vaux
Yeah. So either local or national traumas. There's a reason that there are so many ghosts of monks and nuns reported in this country. And because of the dissolution of the monasteries, you know, that was a mass trauma around that. So of course there are going to be these echoes, these memories, these stories about these hauntings.
- [19:12]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah, for sure. But then in each county, we tried to find the kind of tale, as it were, the original story, you know, where did this thing originate? And in some instances, that wasn't terribly difficult actually to find the tale. So one example of that is the Blind Fiddler of Anstey, which is a great little story from Hertfordshire, which is about. Yeah, it's what it sounds like, in a sense. You've got a blind fiddler who plays in the local church band, who agrees to go through this cursed tunnel in which it's thought that the devil resides. Now, that story is linked to that place before anywhere else, and it has now spread all over the world. So there are lots and lots of stories about tunnels that contain devils and demons. But that's. That's the one where it started. Likewise the Hairy Hands of Dartmoor, which is a very strange story. And that one's quite late. That's a 20th century story. Whereas you were talking about tales that recur. Long Meg and her Daughters as a tale, for example, or your story, the Mermaid of Zena Eleanor. Like there are mermaid stories everywhere, but there's only one Mermaid of Xena tale.
- [20:29]
Martin Vaux
Yeah. So there are some which are quite unique. And then you've got the ones linked to actual landscape features like ditches, dikes, valleys, hills, etc. Our Sussex Story about Cuthbert of Stanning and the making of Devil's Dyke. Stories like that within that trope kind of pop up everywhere. Somebody tricks the devil and the devil drops a bunch of rocks and then you have a landscape feature.
- [20:59]
Eleanor Conlon
Whereas I'd say that with something like Long Meg and her Daughters, which is a story in Cumbria about this group of witches, effectively, who are cursed to stone, making a stone circle. It's the, I think the second largest stone circle and one of the oldest surviving stone circles in England. Long Meg and her Daughters. But if you go to just about any county, particularly down in Cornwall, but you'll find them anywhere, there are recurring.
- [21:26]
Martin Vaux
Tales of the dancing maiden.
- [21:29]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah, dancing maidens, the wedding party.
- [21:31]
Martin Vaux
People who enjoyed themselves a little bit past when they should and were turned to stone.
- [21:36]
Eleanor Conlon
So in that case, Long Meg and her daughters are known as Long Meg and her daughters. It would have been a shame to talk about another set of stones of dancers when you've got that one. Especially there.
- [21:50]
Ford BlueCruise Advertiser
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more at WhatsApp.com.
- [22:18]
LinkedIn Ads Narrator
It's Pro Savings Days at Lowes. Get up to 35% off select major appliances and save an additional $1,000 when you buy four select LG major appliances. Plus get a free Dewalt 20 volt max 5amp hour battery when you buy a select Dewalt 20 volt max tool. Get the job done for less. It like looks Lowe's we help you Save valid through 926. Selection varies by location while supplies last. See associate or lowe's.com for more details and qualifying items.
- [22:47]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that makes sense. And being able to trace as well, kind of being able to say, oh yeah, this story is particularly unique or here's where it starts from is of course really interesting as well as the story itself. You mentioned though, places of trauma as being one reason that particular landscapes are remembered. And the example you gave of the dissolution of the monasteries and is of course one that we still get taught about in school. Right. Is still something that is remembered. What about stories that perhaps the trauma they're remembering are less remembered today in English history? Like resistance to the Norman Conquest.
- [23:20]
Eleanor Conlon
Oh, I mean the resistance to the Norman Conquest story. I presume you are alluding specifically to the Herald the wake tale.
- [23:28]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I am, yes.
- [23:31]
Eleanor Conlon
Okay. Well, I mean doing a lot of reading about this stuff, we found lots of examples of societal change being captured in metaphor in folktales. And when it comes to the Normans, normally what recurs is basically pro Norman propaganda.
- [23:49]
Martin Vaux
Yeah.
- [23:50]
Eleanor Conlon
So you get, you know, tales about noble knights with Norman family names who come in and they'll slay savage giants or dragons or ogres or other quote unquote monsters, all of which, when you dig into them, have their own kind of pagan symbolism. Really. So it's effectively a culture that's coming in and conquering the old ways to bring sophistication. Hero with the wake is an unusual tale is not that often talked about nowadays. Robin Hood is much more talked about than heroic. The wake, despite the fact that, you know, Hereward is another example of a kind of rebel outlaw type of character who's fighting a kind of insurgency. But we likewise have loads of marsh dwelling rebels in English folklore and history. You know, Alfred of Wessex, the king who's generally agreed to sort of found England, I suppose, you know, he's one of them. And we have plenty of kings under the mountain as well. You know, people who are going to return like King Arthur and save this part of the country or save that part of the country. So it was really fun to dig into the mythology of hero with the wake and to go back to the kind of Saxon and early Norman sources that we have about him and his family, because some of it's absolutely bonkers. You know, Lady Godiva, who I hope would be a name people would be familiar with, but Lady Godiva, famous story about her, she rode naked through the streets of the town where her husband was the ruling lord. And there was famously one. It was a challenge that she accepted on behalf of the people. And all the people in the town agreed that nobody would look at her naked on her horse as she rode through the town. Apart from one person. His name was Peeping Tom, which is where we get that term from. And he was turned to stone as a curse. And in some of the accounts, the early accounts of Hereward, it said that Hereward is the son of Lady Godiva.
- [25:54]
Martin Vaux
Yeah, wonderful. It also has something to do with Guy of Warwick. Yeah. Who was one of these kind of mythic heroes of Britain. He was listed among the worthies of whatever number.
- [26:06]
Eleanor Conlon
Yes, there was nine.
- [26:07]
Martin Vaux
You ask if you are Shakespeare, there was nine. If you ask others, there are any number up to about 24 worthy.
- [26:14]
Eleanor Conlon
Yes, that's right. Early historians, their grasp on mathematics is loose, I'd say. Pretty loose.
- [26:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And that's obviously going pretty far back in time to come up with all of those details and obviously with the Shakespeare mentioned.
- [26:28]
Martin Vaux
Right.
- [26:28]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
This story has kind of recurred in different times and places since then. Was that the furthest back that you went? And sort of conversely, what's the most useful story the book includes?
- [26:40]
Martin Vaux
The oldest story source is probably one of the silliest ones, actually. It's the. The Brutus of Troy and the giant Gogmagog story, which is. Is really the origin of Britain, is how we're all here today. And that one, the. The source is Geoffrey of Monmouth in his chronicle history, the history of the English kings, which it's widely agreed now is largely A work of high creativity.
- [27:13]
Eleanor Conlon
Yes.
- [27:14]
Martin Vaux
Presented as beautifully researched history.
- [27:17]
Eleanor Conlon
And we have a few of these early historians, Nennius and Gildas and.
- [27:24]
Martin Vaux
All of these people, and a little bit later on, Rafe of Coggeshall.
- [27:27]
Eleanor Conlon
But what's so interesting about this belief that, you know, Great Britain was founded by 50.
- [27:34]
Martin Vaux
50 daughters who were escaping execution in their home country of Syria.
- [27:40]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah.
- [27:40]
Martin Vaux
And arrived here in a small boat. Arrived here in a boat, realized that there weren't any men. In fact, there weren't anyone here at all. So managed to summon themselves up some. Some dark creatures of the abyss.
- [27:52]
Eleanor Conlon
The demons.
- [27:53]
Martin Vaux
Demons. In order to make some babies, you had some giants. So Albion was then populated with giants.
- [28:00]
Eleanor Conlon
Yes.
- [28:01]
Martin Vaux
And that's all before you get to the great hero Brutus, who founded London and was the father of us all. And he came from Troy.
- [28:09]
Eleanor Conlon
And so that story, as much as it might sound absolutely bonkers and is probably not one that people often hear when they're at school nowadays, it was believed by all people well up through the early modern era.
- [28:25]
Martin Vaux
Oh, yeah. And you get all kinds of references in early modern dramatic text to. In Brutus's time.
- [28:31]
Eleanor Conlon
Yes.
- [28:31]
Martin Vaux
Or when Brutus was. And actually brute, so short for Brutus became a byword for story. So it was sort of not only the original Englishman, but the original tale.
- [28:46]
Eleanor Conlon
And, you know, in terms of the earliest English writing that we have, I mean, you know, really, you're struggling much before the kind of 8th century, really, to find anything that survives and endures. So, you know, Bruce Lev Troy and the giant Gog Magog is an amalgamation of a few different stories as Eleanor tells it.
- [29:03]
Martin Vaux
Yes.
- [29:04]
Eleanor Conlon
I have a tale in the book called the Fish in the Ring. While this is a very, very old story, you'll find it in the Apocrypha in reference, King Solomon. Even.
- [29:16]
Martin Vaux
So versions of it pop up across Grimm's fairy tales, the Lang Fairy books, don't they? For the Fish in the Ring is a very kind of popular fairy tale.
- [29:26]
Eleanor Conlon
It's a classic. And the idea of that story, in case people are unfamiliar, is person throws away ring trying to get rid of it, and then eventually a fish is served up to them at dinner. They cut into their fish and the ring has returned to them. So there's a natural cycle within the story, and sometimes it's a crack curse, sometimes it's a blessing. But in this version, I wanted to talk about, again, some Renaissance characters, actually, primarily Jacobean characters. The wizard Earl Henry Percy, who was a fascinating man who had a terrible relationship with his son Northumberland was for a very long time pretty much the most powerful kingdom outside of the sort of southern, like I guess you'd say the King and the Queen. Beyond the King and the Queen, the earls of Northumberland were pretty much the most powerful nobles in England for a very, very long time. And so I was interested in the story of the downfall really of this house, this famous house. Where did it go wrong? And the more I dug into this man and the real events of his life and the real events of his son's life, the more I realized, oh my goodness, this works so well with this story because there was a ring and there's all these strange other bits of magic that were involved in their lives. So yeah, it's a very, very old story frame though. They basically stole and hung a load of fairly old stuff off. In terms of modern though, that one's an easy question to answer. Which is the newest story?
- [31:03]
Martin Vaux
I think it's the Children of Kamek Chase, the Staffordshire story.
- [31:07]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah.
- [31:07]
Martin Vaux
And I think, I think when I got to that point I'd done quite a few with courtly knights and dragons and things and I was sort of craving something a little bit more contemporary, so decided to go for a kind of police procedural investigation.
- [31:24]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah.
- [31:24]
Martin Vaux
Of murder cases and supernatural elements all set around this incredible place in Staffordshire, Cannock Chase, which is like this hotspot of supernatural activity.
- [31:35]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah. People say that there are, you know, portals to other worlds, werewolves have been seen, their devil worshiping cults during the Satanic panic famously went to Cannock Chase. But really that story has only kind of erupted since the Satanic panic. The, the black eyed children of Cannock Chase.
- [31:54]
Martin Vaux
Yeah. And I mean a series of real life murders which to place in the 1960s has really put fuel on the fire, I think, to some of those legends.
- [32:05]
Eleanor Conlon
And the basic idea with them is some people when they are traveling through, normally driving through or around this huge woodland, Cannock Chase, they encounter these children with pure black eyes that make them feel physically ill. People, you know, vomit, they have headaches, sometimes lose consciousness. And so Eleanor took that idea of, okay, well why do we have these black eyed children there? What's their purpose and what are they trying to say to us? So yeah, like you say, you turned it into a police procedural.
- [32:39]
Martin Vaux
I also tried to think of what really scares me. I mean, I'm a frequent driver and that the idea of encountering a ghostly child with black eyes. He shakes my car door. Yeah, it's a no.
- [32:52]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, fair enough. Inspiration can come from many places, including obviously self and especially with the kind of more recent ones. But I mean, as you said, some of these stories have lasted for a really long time. In collecting all of this, did you find any of these stories still being remembered or commemorated in local places today?
- [33:13]
Eleanor Conlon
Oh, yes, loads of them. Absolutely.
- [33:17]
Martin Vaux
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think probably the most well known story in the book is Black Shack maybe, possibly, or Dick Whittington. Both. Both of those are kind of the big hitters. And we didn't necessarily always want to go for the most famous folktale from a place we were very much led by. What appealed to us. What did we find interesting, where could we come into a story? But certainly both of those are commemorated around the world. I mean, we've just got back from Black Shuck Festival. There's an entire festival in East Anglia devoted to this demon dog.
- [34:00]
Eleanor Conlon
And we've been doing things with them for a few years now. Absolutely brilliant festival. And, you know, I mean, we had three Ravens listeners who. There's one. One listener who came from Chicago to come and see us at Black Shark Festival, which is pretty incredible. Like I said, the Conyers Falchion, the Sockburn Worm sword, you know, that's still used in a ceremonial way, but Dick Whittington. I'm not sure if this is a name that's familiar with international listeners, but in Great Britain, no matter what time of year, there will be a pantomime, some kind of comedic play starring Dick Whittington, this kind of folk hero, sort.
- [34:40]
Martin Vaux
Of rags to riches, jolly fellow who becomes Lord Mayor of London.
- [34:44]
Eleanor Conlon
And there was a real life Dick Whittington, who did become Lord Mayor of London three times, having come seemingly from nowhere. And famously, he had a cat with him, Dick Whittington's cat. And there's a lot of mythology around this cat, who in pantomimes is often presented as a kind of Puss in boots type of character who fixes all of Dick Whittington's problems and provides him with advice. And I thought, well, cats are also often thought of as quite satanic creatures. Particularly there was a papal bull that was released during the medieval era about cats being linked to Satan. And I thought, well, what if this cat was really the brains of the operation and he was the one who was effectively leading this silly human about by the nose. Because if people have cats, they will be familiar with this idea that you think, well, hold on, who's who's pet and who's who's master right now?
- [35:41]
Martin Vaux
But in terms of actual events, I mean, there is a vast number of regional fairs and festivals and local events, some on a really small village scale and some on a much grander scale, like the Lord Mayor's show in London. But the history of festivals and fairs and traditional saints days in England is just massive. And you have probably a hole at the top.
- [36:05]
Eleanor Conlon
Probably a hole at the top. But. But just on that one, the Lord Mayor's show, where of course we have the echo of Dick Hurtington rattling through that. But Eleanor was talking about the, the giant Gog Magog. Well, every year in the Lord Mayor's show, they carry these huge effigies that.
- [36:22]
Martin Vaux
Are really quite old of Gog and Magog.
- [36:24]
Eleanor Conlon
Of Gog and Magog, two giants, apparently, that are basically the protectors of London. And they are. They're kept for this ceremonial use and have been in use for centuries. So it's funny how a lot of the kind of characters or ideas in these stories do echo and recur. And you go to the Lord Mayor's show, you may not even notice these weird little effigies that are being carried. But why are they being carried? Well, because it's the story of the foundation of this city.
- [36:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So this idea of being able to see bits of these stories out in the wild, as it were, even if we don't fully know what they are, I mean, imagine that's really fun for you now to look at things like the Lord Mayor's show and be like, oh, I know what's happening there. And I'm sure there were loads of that kind of throughout this whole process of discovering the stories. And I know I asked you earlier about some of the challenges of figuring this all out, but is there a story we haven't mentioned yet, maybe that you had a special fun writing that you want to make sure we include?
- [37:25]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah, I mean, I had a little ponder about this and I think I would like to stand up for the Tidyman of Anchom Vale, which is a fairly obscure, obscure sounding story from Lincolnshire. And part of the reason I was so happy to tell that story in the fun way that I was able to, is that it was kind of, at the time, almost a forgotten legend. I mean, there was a folklorist, Marie Balfour, who was a doctor's wife during the 19th century, who collected a series of folklore tales from her husband's patients when they were in the waiting room. And these were collected as a group of legends known as the Tales of the Lincolnshire Cars. And because she was a woman, in a way, one of the big factors her work was kind of stolen by a lot of academic men and she was kind of a forgotten character who, without any academic pedigree, was sort of ignored. And people said that she made up her stories and so on and so forth. But I stumbled onto them, doing some research, found this story about the Tidyman. Who are these? I mean, we get somewhat similar stories from elsewhere, but the basic idea of the Tidyman is they are, again, marsh dwelling or fen dwelling, I should say, fairy creatures that live under the water and they control how high or low the water level gets. And people used to live out, leave out offerings for the titty men. And effectively they were like a kind of genius loci or, you know, local God that people would show reverence for to, you know, help protect their ways of life. And people in, in the Fens did have to navigate by, you know, flat bottom boat and so on for centuries and centuries and centuries. And so I had fun, you know, taking that story and then placing it in the time where a huge change was happening to the Fenlands, where effectively fenland drainage was taking place. So people came over from Holland to build canal networks and drainage ditches to make the land arable so that you could have sheep or farm on them, you know, farm cereal crops and things.
- [39:43]
Martin Vaux
And also to prevent massive floods.
- [39:45]
Eleanor Conlon
And to prevent massive floods, absolutely. So the time we meet them in the story, the Tiddyman are in a bit of a crisis and what are they going to do? And I just found that really interesting thing to talk about because it's a. It's a part of our history as a nation, the English, that I think is underappreciated, wouldn't you say, when it comes to the Finland drainage in particular?
- [40:06]
Martin Vaux
Yeah, absolutely.
- [40:07]
Eleanor Conlon
It's sort of. It's sometimes called the greatest ecological crisis that this country's ever had, because it completely changed whole ways of life that have been like that for not just hundreds, but thousands of years, actually.
- [40:20]
Martin Vaux
Yeah. I mean, the people who gave it that description might revise that now, but when at that point, certainly.
- [40:25]
Eleanor Conlon
Well, but even now, you know, people, everybody knows Cambridge University, Cambridge itself, these places, they only exist now because they are constantly pumping water to stop them flooding. And that's been happening every single day, every single week, every single year for hundreds of years now. We've been pumping that water away. And I think that that's a really interesting idea to think, well, if those pumps just stopped, then all of a sudden the Tidyman theoretically might come back.
- [40:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Eleanor, do you have a favourite, fun one to write.
- [41:01]
Martin Vaux
I mean, I think I had a huge amount of fun writing my Wiltshire story, A Cuckoo in Winter, which is the only fairy themed story of mine in the book. Certainly. Yeah. I am. I'm not usually drawn to tales of fairies in the fae, so I. I had kind of avoided putting one in, I suppose, until I got to this point. I thought, I'm quite keen to do one now. And it was inspired. We visited a brew ring where the.
- [41:36]
Eleanor Conlon
Story is such is another megalithic stone circle, a vast one.
- [41:40]
Martin Vaux
Yeah.
- [41:41]
Eleanor Conlon
There's a village inside the ring. It is so large.
- [41:44]
Martin Vaux
Yeah. It's quite an incredible place. So we had actually been able to visit there, which was really special because we certainly haven't visited everywhere we talk about and write about. I only wish. But that one was interesting because the more research I did, the more fascinating details I started to uncover. For instance, the land and when there was an excavation going on, was owned by a man who was married to a lady who they think was the artist who sort of inspired. Doing reconstructive drawings.
- [42:23]
Eleanor Conlon
Yes.
- [42:23]
Martin Vaux
Of. Of skeletons.
- [42:25]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah.
- [42:26]
Martin Vaux
So she. From the skeletons which were unearthed that they. This excavation, she started doing drawings of what their faces might have looked like.
- [42:36]
Eleanor Conlon
So building up muscle.
- [42:38]
Martin Vaux
So she was sort of the first person to do this, which was then obviously later adopted for all sorts of purposes, including forensics. But I found her really interesting and then it sort of went down a bit like an archaeological dig, that story. There were just kind of layers to it and layers to it. And it's quite complicated, I suppose, because it's got her as a frame and then you go into. To the past and then you go into a sort of king under the hill, Rip Van Winkle style, passage of time. What happens when you go and have dinner with the fairies? 300 years pass in a blink.
- [43:12]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah, exactly. That's one of the key notions, is if you slip into the other world, the world of the fairies, the world of fate as we might call it, time operates in a different fashion there. So King Herla is a legend that is the first example of this, where a king rides into fairyland with his knights. They attend a wedding in a single afternoon and come out again and 300 years have passed.
- [43:38]
Martin Vaux
Yes. It's a similar idea. Time passes differently in the other world.
- [43:43]
Eleanor Conlon
That's right.
- [43:44]
Martin Vaux
And coupled that together with some superstitions about cuckoos and Wiltshire. So there's quite a lot going on there. So I had a lot of fun kind of building and constructing that story. It was also quite important to me to include a Couple queer love story in the book. And that one is. Yeah, I think that's. That's a. That's a favourite for. In terms of a lot of fun to write.
- [44:06]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah.
- [44:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, as the person in charge of asking the questions, I've decided to take dictatorial privilege and ask you both to talk about a story that I especially enjoyed that we haven't mentioned yet. What is a witch bottle?
- [44:21]
Martin Vaux
Ah, so the bottle curse. So a witch bottle is a piece of apotropaic. It's something you might create to protect your home either against witches in general or witches specifically, who might be looking to subject you to psychic attack or.
- [44:40]
Eleanor Conlon
Particular spells that are trying your chimney or whatever it might be.
- [44:44]
Martin Vaux
So you can create a witch bottle with various bits and bobs. Urine's a popular ingredient. Toenail and hair clippings. Bent pins are very good because if you bend a pin, you're sort of ritually killing them pin and sending it to the other world. So that's quite a good protective thing to include.
- [45:03]
Eleanor Conlon
And we find that kind of thing being done a lot in prehistory in relation to swords and weapons, where they'll be ritually broken to pass them often into a marsh or a body of water. So they might become useful in the afterlife by a given person who may well have also been buried in that same body of water.
- [45:22]
Martin Vaux
Yeah, super interesting. And which bottles, you can use them simply as protection, effective magic like that. But you can also use them to capture the spirit of a witch who might be troubling you. And that's. That was the idea that I was interested in in the. In the Bedfish's story you were talking about.
- [45:40]
Eleanor Conlon
But we did a. We have a bonus series on Three Ravens because on Mondays we released our county episodes. But on Thursdays we cover all sorts of different topics from sort of folk ways and folk culture. And we did a whole episode, a documentary kind of episode about the history of witch bottles.
- [45:55]
Martin Vaux
Yeah.
- [45:56]
Eleanor Conlon
And it was absolutely wonderful that after that a number of our listeners started to make their own witch bottles. We had a series of emails of photos and some even put them sort of under the concrete of their extension to protect their house from, you know, potential psychic attack or magical attack by modern day witches.
- [46:15]
Martin Vaux
We recommend making one. Oh yeah, definitely protect your home.
- [46:18]
Eleanor Conlon
It's a fun craft activity for anyone on the dull afternoon.
- [46:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, so that's obviously one thing readers can take away from. Any other things in particular you want to highlight, perhaps, as we come to the end of our conversation?
- [46:32]
Eleanor Conlon
Well, I'd say One of the things that I would highlight for people about the collection itself in that what we learned while we were putting it all together, because we've now done a second lap. Miranda. So We've written another 39 stories, one for each historic county. And the counties where Eleanor wrote before, I've now written, and the counties where I wrote Ellen has now written. So we have another whole set of these stories. But one of the things that we learned going about this journey is that almost all of these stories, if they haven't come, very few of them have come originally out of the earth of England. They're almost all found in other places. And then they bounce around to other places, to other countries and national traditions. And I think there is a. We're living in a slightly strange time of nationalism. I think it's sort of on the rise a little bit, where people going, oh, there's this national identity or that national identity. And while it is important to try and celebrate local identity and to make sure that people feel like they belong in the place where they live, one of the big things that we came away feeling was we are all so interconnected and our ideas as cultures are so interconnected. The things that scare us, that excite us, the things that we want, those prime drivers are really important.
- [47:48]
Martin Vaux
Yeah. And pretty much any story you can find in this book, it will be in Arabic at least four centuries before.
- [47:56]
Eleanor Conlon
Honestly.
- [47:57]
Martin Vaux
Yeah. You know, I think something that I guess also draws the whole collection together is both of us obviously love folktales and fairy tales and one liner throwaway bits in chronicles where they say, oh, yeah, and there was a merman. But something we've both always felt, I think, was that there was more to be got out of them.
- [48:22]
Eleanor Conlon
Oh, yeah.
- [48:23]
Martin Vaux
I found myself, certainly as a young female reader, very frustrated with the constant round of a princess who was the most beautiful princess ever. And that's. That's all you get from her. You have no idea what her thoughts and feelings are or any kind of sense of inner life. She's just the most beautiful princess ever.
- [48:45]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah.
- [48:45]
Martin Vaux
And we wanted to try and take these perhaps tropey folkloric characters and give them a bit more of a life, give them a bit more context.
- [48:57]
Eleanor Conlon
Well, dimensions, isn't it?
- [48:58]
Martin Vaux
Yeah, yeah.
- [48:59]
Eleanor Conlon
Human dimensions and a kind of human scale of problems, emotional lives, things you're afraid of. Because often these characters are very flat when you encounter them in folktales or mythology. And to just deepen them and to go, well, what would it feel like to not to say that We've done this. But what would it feel like to be Hercules if you've been set these tasks?
- [49:22]
Martin Vaux
How does that feel?
- [49:23]
Eleanor Conlon
How does that feel? We often focus on the act itself. It's an action movie. But what about the inner life of these people? How can we bring that out and hopefully make that feel recognizable and like it connects to the life of every human being who happens to listen to our podcast or ideally pick up our book.
- [49:43]
Martin Vaux
Because when I read or listen to a story, and I think this is true of any reader or listener, I am looking to find myself whether or it's going to teach me some great profound lesson about myself. That's by the by. But I'm looking for a point of identification so I can enter the story too. And that's what I felt that I was lacking with a lot of these fairy stories.
- [50:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds like some lovely goals in the book. And obviously the book is just one part of what it is that you both do. So before I let you go anything further, you want people to know about the podcast or any other, even if it's unrelated to this. Any other upcoming projects you want to flag or highlight?
- [50:26]
Martin Vaux
Well, we have just embarked on series seven of the Three Ravens Podcast and we have left England. We are going to be exploring the history and folklore of the 13 historic counties of Wales and retelling a story for each of those.
- [50:42]
Eleanor Conlon
Yeah. And once that's done, we'll be moving to the original 13 states of the union across the Atlantic. So that's going to be really fun. We're also touring the book. So we're planning to do live three Ravens shows at all 39 historic counties, which we're really excited about. We've done a few, we've got more coming. And then outside of that, October is our annual haunting season. So that's back to back original ghost stories and spooky content which once is finished, should leave us in a place where we can collect all of the ghost stories that we've told that aren't in the book already and not linked to the counties across the across the last three years and put them into a new collection about the size of Three Ravens folktales. So. So if you're after spine tingling stories or you know, anything else, Three Ravens, check out our website@3ravenspodcast.com because we'll be doing something, won't we? We're always doing something.
- [51:38]
Martin Vaux
Oh, we're always up to something.
- [51:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, any listeners who want to get involved in the particular something that we've been discussing. The book is titled the Three Ravens Folk Tales New Tellings of Half forgotten stories from England's 39 historic counties, published by the History Press in 2025. Eleanor and Martin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [51:58]
Eleanor Conlon
Thank you so much, Miranda. It's been loads of fun.
- [52:01]
Martin Vaux
Thank you for having us.
- [52:14]
Eleanor Conlon
Trip Planner by Expedia. You were made to outdo your holiday, your hammocking and your pooling. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.