The Hawthorn Archive
Stories, customs and beliefs preserved as individual records, with place and context kept attached wherever the evidence allows.
West Country tradition used the idea of being “pixy-led” to describe a traveller becoming bewildered, circling or losing direction, sometimes on ground they expected to know. The motif is particularly associated with Devon and…
Open archive record →Tintagel in Cornwall became strongly associated with the Arthurian story through Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae, which placed the conception of Arthur at Tintagel. The tradition belongs to the site’s literary and…
Open archive record →A widely repeated strand of British plant folklore warned against bringing fresh hawthorn, or “may”, blossom into the home. Recorded versions associate the act with bad luck, illness or death, although the warning varied…
Open archive record →