Explore Britain · Old places & old stories
Ancient Places & Folklore
Standing stones, witch trials, spectral dogs and stories that have survived because somebody, somewhere, decided the sensible explanation was not nearly interesting enough.
Begin with the landscape
Places where the story is part of the view
Rambl treats history, folklore and legend differently: documented fact where we have it, tradition where we do not, and no need to pretend the two are the same thing.
Long Meg and Her Daughters
A prehistoric stone circle with centuries of stories about witches, giants and stones that refuse to be counted.
The Pendle Witches
The 1612 trials are documented history; much of what grew around them afterwards belongs to legend.
Blythburgh and Black Shuck
A magnificent church, a violent 1577 storm and one of East Anglia’s best-known supernatural traditions.
Ancient Britain
Stone circles in Northern England
Before castles, abbeys and parish churches, people were already marking the landscape. What survives is often beautiful, occasionally baffling and considerably older than almost everything around it.
Explore the stone circlesStories worth following
Folklore from the British countryside
Some tales explain a place. Others simply make the walk home after dark a little less relaxing.
Black Shuck
The spectral black dog of East Anglian folklore.
The Green Children of Woolpit
A strange medieval account from Suffolk that has resisted tidy explanation for centuries.
Pendle Hill and witch country
Turn the history into a countryside day: villages, walks and the landscape behind the trials.
Churches & Abbeys
Old buildings where local history, memorials and folklore often meet.
More to explore
More ancient places & folklore
This is now one of Rambl’s strongest collections, so it should not stop after three cards.
21 British folklore creatures
Black dogs, boggarts, kelpies, selkies and more.
Haunted places in England
Historic places and the supernatural stories attached to them.
Ancient sites beyond Stonehenge
Henges, long barrows, hillforts and prehistoric mines.
Ancient stone circles in Northern England
Prehistoric monuments from Cumbria to Yorkshire.
The Green Children of Woolpit
One of medieval England’s strangest stories.
Black Shuck
East Anglia’s spectral black dog and the stories behind it.
Long Meg and Her Daughters
Stone circle, archaeology and later legend in Cumbria.
The Pendle Witches
The 1612 trials, their people and the landscape around them.
Follow the older paths
Explore Britain’s ruins, villages, churches, ancient places and the stories that make the landscape feel inhabited by more than the present.
Explore Britain