The Stories that Made a Nation
Britain is a land steeped in legend, from the Scottish Highlands and Islands to the mountain fastnesses and valleys of Wales, from the coves and inlets of Cornwall to the ancient metropolis of London, from Dartmoor to the Yorkshire Moors, scarcely a hillock, spring or churchyard is without its own story, of mythical creatures, magical adventures or glimpses into another world.
Of course, Britain is not alone in this – the island of Ireland has its own legendary traditions, as does almost every country in Europe and beyond – but the corpus of British myths and folktales, if not some individual stories or characters, is unique to it. They are deeply embedded in the landscape, with stories of ghosts, fairy changelings and demon dogs seeming to come from a time almost before history, while those of heroes such as King Arthur and Beowulf lie at its very threshold. Between them they form a kind of internalised mental landscape of Britain, the contours of a deep sense of nation and a yearning for something almost unrecoverable in the past.
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