Tales that grew out of the ground

British folklore is rarely national. It is almost always local. A story that makes perfect sense beside a Yorkshire clough or a Norfolk fen can sound baffling twenty miles away, because it was never really about the plot. It was about the place: a deep pool, a lonely crossroads, a hill that catches the last light. When you read a legend closely, you are often reading a community's account of its own landscape, and of the things it feared and hoped for within it.

The good news for anyone curious about local history is that this material is not locked away. It survives in three very reachable places: in place names, in seasonal customs, and in the printed collections made by Victorian and Edwardian antiquarians, many of which sit on the open shelves of county reference libraries.

Boggarts, brownies and the kitchen hearth

The household spirit is one of the oldest strands of British folklore. In Scotland and the Borders he is usually a brownie: a small, shaggy, helpful creature who threshes the corn or churns the butter overnight, and who expects a bowl of cream or a jug of milk in return. Thank him, or leave him clothes, and he may take offence and leave for good.

In Lancashire and Yorkshire the same figure hardens into the boggart: noisier, messier, and far less obliging. Boggarts clatter pans, sour the milk and follow families from house to house. A boggart is best handled by naming it, or by moving house and hoping it stays behind, which, in most versions, it does not.

• Boggart is a dialect word for a spectre or frightening apparition, not a species of monster.
• Brownies are usually solitary and attached to one farm or family.
• Hobs and hobgoblins sit in the same family, and turn up in names such as Hob Hurst's House in Derbyshire.

The Green Man and the wilder edges

Step into almost any medieval parish church and look up. Among the corbels and roof bosses you will often find a face made entirely of leaves, sprouting foliage from mouth, eyes and ears. These are the carvings usually called Green Men, and they are remarkably common, from Kilpeck in Herefordshire to Southwell in Nottinghamshire and dozens of parish churches in between.

What they mean is genuinely disputed. Some see a survival of older vegetation spirits; others read them as a medieval moral lesson about wildness tamed. Both readings can be true at once, which is part of the pleasure. The same impulse runs through May Day processions, Jack in the Green figures and the leafy costumes still worn in a handful of English towns each spring.

Reading the map: place names as fossils

If you want to find your local folklore quickly, buy the largest-scale Ordnance Survey map of your parish, ideally the 1:25,000 Explorer, and start hunting for telltale words. Names preserve stories long after the story has been forgotten.

• Boggart, hob, puck, boggle — spirit names attached to woods, cloughs, wells and fields.
• Worm — usually a dragon rather than an earthworm, as at Wormhill in Derbyshire and the Lambton Worm country in County Durham.
• Wayland — the smith of Germanic legend, remembered at Wayland's Smithy in Oxfordshire.
• Dragon, giant, fairy, devil — common in the names of hills, barrows and prehistoric earthworks, where later generations explained older monuments with newer stories.

Customs you can still stand in the middle of

Folklore is not only a thing of the past. Several customs are robustly alive, and turning up to watch one is the fastest way to understand how a legend attaches itself to a calendar date.

• Wassailing — orchards are blessed with song, cider and toast in Somerset, Herefordshire and Kent, usually around Twelfth Night or old Twelfth Night on 17 January.
• Well dressing — Derbyshire villages press elaborate pictures into clay-lined trays of flowers, mostly from late May through the summer.
• Padstow Obby Oss — two hobby horses parading the Cornish town on 1 May, one of the oldest continuous May customs in Britain.
• Abbots Bromley Horn Dance — Staffordshire, on the Monday after 4 September, with reindeer antlers that have been carbon-dated to the eleventh century.
• Up Helly Aa — Lerwick, Shetland, on the last Tuesday in January, ending with a burning galley.

Check parish noticeboards and local newspapers rather than assuming, as dates shift with the church calendar.

Tracing your own local tale

Start with your county record office and local studies library. Ask for nineteenth-century county histories, old parish magazines and any published folklore collections for your area. These are usually indexed by place, so a single afternoon can turn up three or four stories attached to features you can walk to.

Then go and look at the feature itself. Note what it is — a spring, a boundary bank, a ruined chapel, a hollow way — and how the story explains it. Finally, talk to people: the farmer, the churchwarden, the person who has lived on the lane longest. Write down what they say, with the date and their name. Folk memory is a fragile archive, and the version you record this year may be the last one anyone hears. That, in the end, is how all of this began: someone told a story about a place, and someone else thought it worth writing down.