Popular tales, Harte suggests, might imply something off about the conjurer-parson, but certainly there are tales of these same individuals advising and aiding Cornish wrestlers in their very physical confrontations with the Devil – providing prayers, papers and materials to enable victory over him. By chance, it’s actually the first landscape Harte refers to in this book, along with a third Devil's Bridge in the Dales.

Jeremy Harte is curator of the Bourne Hall Museum at Epsom and Ewell. He is secretary of the Romany and Traveller Family History Society and created the Surrey Gypsy Archive. He is the author of Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape (Reaktion, 2022). The point is well made that “magic in folk stories is always something physical and local, a lore of crossroads and thresholds, rings and staffs and bottles.” (p. 155) However, while he is correct that the grimoires are often in love with language and literacy, the reality is that this so-called high magic contained just as many rings, staffs, bottles, crossroads, and thresholds, even in England. One only has to look at John Dee’s shewstone or his alchemical obsessions and productions of minerals whilst seeking the Philosopher’s stone, or the continuance of particular virtues in certain materials as part and parcel of a whole worldview. Perhaps it is no coincidence, on multiple levels, that this occurred at the same time as the exercise of Tudor authority and the codification of sovereignty. Henry VIII’s insistence that ”this realm of England is an empire” (see my review of Magic in Merlin’s Realm, by Dr. Francis Young) was an almost unprecedented step, stating that there was none higher than God who might command the monarch. Further, as the dynasty continued, the Elizabethan age was one in which universality came by recognition and exercise of that same sovereign, unequalled power – since the monarch was supposedly divinely ordained. Perhaps the most unnerving tales are not those of Hell's Hounds chasing men across Bodmin Moor (bad and selfish gentry are also targets of devil tales which, like fairy tales, can have 'moral purpose) but the use of the Devil to re-envision those lightning strikes on churches that kill the faithful. Thematically he moves us from tales of a stupid and outwitted Devil which are just recastings of much older giant or fairy lore through increasing fear and anxiety to culminate in the sinister Hounds of Hell motif which appears to be drawn from German romanticism.It's a wide spectrum, and thus the Devil takes many forms, not always hideous. He's useful, too, in all his guises, for us humans. He's a default explanation for the inexplicable, as well as a convenient excuse. The Devil made me do it.

I would argue that most of our contemporary media is, in fact, folklore on these terms - a similar soup of interconnecting memes disconnected from 'scientific' reality, serving some social purpose that no part of it truly understands or can control, and creating its own 'felt' reality. The Devil’s craftsmanship, so horribly casual in its immensity, of such enormity that it breaks open the mundane, is also bested, diverted, and limited in mirthful ways – and for all that his power is immense, he can be undermined by ordinary, salt-of-the-earth folks. This is what popular folklore studies should be - learned and yet readable. Jeremy Harte takes all the topographical references to the devil in England (with an occasional nod to Wales) and creates a narrative that gives us profound insight into traditional English culture and history.

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That was Jeremy Harte just then speaking in italics. He's written this wonderful book, a collective of folklore about how the Devil is responsible for things we see in the English landscape. You can tell these places by their names: The Devil's Chapel, The Devil's Elbow, The Devil's Arrow, The Devil's Dyke, The Devil's Jumps, The Devil's Chair. But folklore does not stand still, early modern rural and socially controlling obscurantism gets vectored through literary accounts and, of course, whoever writes the story tends to own the story. Literary types are not averse to a bit of creative invention. They are, by nature, noble liars. What’s more, far from romantic visions of the Devil as a horned pagan figure, for all that he was the embodiment of the bestial and the antinomian wilderness of the outlaw and the uncivilised, he was no rustic. Indeed, it must be remembered that for the lion’s-share of the time these stories were developing, the majority of people were rustics. There's a spectrum to the stories, though. While most have a relatively happy ending, some are chilling, even as we know better.

He rejects the traditional notion that folklore grows like a tree, branching out from a single pagan trunk. There is usually no ancient “master clue” – such as the devil originally being Odin – which can be used to explain a story’s meaning. Instead, he emphasises the idea that local myth is a complex “lattice”, a collective work of the imagination that, like a palimpsest, is constantly being reworked to introduce new motifs and heroes. Stories also get transmuted constantly according to who is telling the tale and to whom. The same story told against one village may get garbled by that village to be told against the village that told it first. Garbling and multiple versions are normal.

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Folklore would appear to be a sea of interconnecting memes that construct popular culture with its own distinguishing mark being that there is no individual 'auteur' (even if some middle class folklorists briefly threatened to take that role) but only a socially created soup of linked conceptions. The most significant for me, is Hell Gill and Devil’s Bridge in the Dales, leading into Wensleydale - and the Devil's Bridge in Kirby Lonsdale.