The Fabled Coast: Legends & traditions from around the shores of Britain & IrelandRandom House, 2012 M06 28 - 528 pages Pirates and smugglers, ghost ships and sea-serpents, fishermen’s prayers and sailors’ rituals – the coastline of the British Isles plays host to an astonishingly rich variety of local legends, customs, and superstitions. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 90
... FISH. As scientific knowledge advanced, people stopped taking the word of classical authors as the undoubted voice of authority, and started really looking at the world around them. Authentic wonders began to replace fables in popular ...
... fish, and sounds heard at sea and on shore (see for example PATERNOSTERS, SouthWest England & Channel Islands, and SALTBURNBYTHESEA, NorthEast England), and to assert some notional control they developed a remarkable range of taboos ...
... fish fromthe waters. Most such rituals lapsed, often from clerical disapproval of their pagan implications, but in Abbotsbury near Chesil Beach they continue, in a modified form, to this day, despite (or perhaps because of) interference ...
... fish said to have great powers. The Roman writer Pliny maintained that this fish, commanding the fury ofthe winds, could hold a ship fast against a tempest strong enough to wrench up anchors and part cables. The emperor Caligula was ...
... fish' wriggled upright in the water, showing the upper half of a mermaid, and broke free, angrily telling the culprit that 'very few of his descendants would die in theirbeds'. This was said to have happened in the early twentieth ...
Contents
SOUTHEAST ENGLAND | |
EAST ANGLIA | |
NORTHEAST ENGLAND | |
Cheshire Cumbria Lancashire Isle of Man Merseyside | |
WALES | |
SCOTTISH LOWLANDS | |
Highland Orkney Shetland Western Isles | |
NORTHERN EIRE NORTHERN IRELAND | |
Counties Clare Cork Dublin Kerry Waterford Wexford | |
Bibliography | |
References | |
Index | |