The folklore of Britain and Ireland is darker than its reputation suggests
Most people know the surface version. The rolling Scottish Highlands, the ancient Irish castles, the green English countryside. What the tourist trail does not mention is what lives in the water, what waits in the trees after dark, and what the people who built those landscapes actually believed.
The British and Irish tradition is one of the richest bodies of supernatural folklore in the world. It is also one of the most underestimated. The creatures here are older than Christianity, stranger than anything popular culture has borrowed from them, and grounded in a relationship between human communities and their landscape that stretches back thousands of years. This site is an attempt to cover that tradition properly — not as a collection of charming rural stories, but as the serious and sometimes disturbing body of belief that it actually is.
Use the map below to explore by region, or browse the categories underneath it. The documentary series on YouTube covers many of the same creatures in depth, with location footage from across Scotland, Ireland, and beyond.
Tales of Myth and Magic began as a YouTube documentary series, producing in-depth explorations of the creatures and folk traditions of Britain and Ireland with location footage shot across Scotland and beyond. Each video goes deeper into the same material covered in the articles on this site — the history, the landscape, the primary sources, and the questions the tradition leaves unanswered.
The series has covered everything from the water horses of the Scottish Highlands to the vampire panics of 20th century Glasgow, the fairy courts of Irish mythology to the phantom black dogs of East Anglia. If you are new to the site, the video below is a good place to start.
59 videos and counting. Subscribe on YouTube to follow along.
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