Do Fairies Hate Lawnmowers? June 18, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite, Contemporary, Modern , trackback
Boggart Hole Clough is a nook, a small valley within the Manchester connurbation that has miraculously remained without housing development or industry. Its name should immediately excite those interested in fairylore as the boggart is a northern solitary fairy: note that there have been several boggart posts on strangehistory including boggart catching, a misplaced Calderdale boggart, the boggart of Shatton and Thornber and the boggarts (our earliest extensive text on Lancashire boggart-lore).
There has been too much general writing on BHC over the years, most of it recycling, in a rather tedious and uncritical way, the same fragments of nineteenth-century legend (and invention). However, the wonders of the internet have recently brought an original and worthwhile work up. In 2011 Ceri Houlbrook wrote an undergraduate thesis, The Suburban Boggart, on the park and its legends: follow the link for a read, though frustratingly the author and the bibliography is missing from the pdf! Ceri did a brilliant job and I was happy to learn she’s gone on to do a doctorate since then.
Strangehistory is signalling Ceri’s thesis partly because it deserves a wider audience, but also because of an unusual fairy theory therein. As part of her project Ceri interviewed twenty-four locals, asking them about their knowledge of the BHC boggart legend. She found that there was a clear generational difference: and that the results were, at least for me, counter-intuitive. The younger members of her sample knew many legends, some regurgitated, some recent inventions. The older members, apparently, did not. Why would it be that there was this imbalance, when usually it was the old that have or that are supposed to have more lore? Ceri came up with an ingenious solution. BHC was before the Second World War a carefully manicured late Edwardian park. Since the war it has been allowed, to a very great extent, to return to the wild. Ceri has found several before and after photos that back her contention here up. And Ceri suggests that boggart legends are going to be a lot easier to find among the generation who has seen the park with long grass and shaggy bushes: alteratively a park with grass shawn to 3.2 centimetres is anathema to the troll-like boggart. Here is an example of Ceri’s before (ordered) and after (wild) shots: we hope Ceri doesn’t mind us borrowing this one instance but again would encourage readers to get stuck into the thesis following the link above.
Other thoughts on Ceri’s lawn-mower theory? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
