That's amazing, great news. OK, so hello, everyone. As Oliver has said, my name is Mary.
I was involved in a placement English heritage as part of my APHC at the University of Bristol and because my P HD
was looking at the ways in which people interacted with an imagined local theory in places in the late Middle Ages,
early modern period. This project really appealed to me and I was very lucky to be able to help work on themes and legends,
my English heritage, and I'll tell you a bit about that just now.
So first of all, what is this map that would help if you all knew what I was talking about?
So I'd better explain essentially English heritage as a theme of the year when I was working with them was myths and legends.
And there were many components to this theme, including several a book of short stories and the Telling Tales project.
I think that Hunter and I'm going to speak shortly and the map was part of this.
It's essentially a project to crowdsource a map. Englands myths, legends and folklore according to place and the way it looks as.
It's an online map of England. That's preloaded with some myths, legends and folklore connected with English heritage sites.
And then once it went life, anyone was able to submit a myth legend folktale connected to a particular place which would then show up on the map.
So that's essentially how it works. What are the benefits of a project like this for heritage people?
For academics, public? All the different people?
What are the benefits for everyone? Firstly, it's a way to obviously crowdsource myths and legends from the public because people are,
of course, more likely to be familiar with stories from the very local area.
And it's a way of gathering with that knowledge together into one place. Of course, for us,
famous heritage is an excellent way of building engagement with myths and
legends connected with English heritage sites as well as we've already had say.
We've got lots and lots of very old sites, no idea.
And many of them have really interesting mix legends and certainly connected with them.
So it's a great way of building engagement with those. And collecting stories in manful like this for the purposes of researchers is
really interesting because it allows certain patents to emerge officially.
And I think that it also helped us to gain a really interesting understanding of the heritage value of myths, legends and folklore,
which is something I think that organisations like English Heritage was starting to think more about sort of these other kinds of heritage objects,
not necessarily physical when it came to making them out.
We worked together with an artist with Clyde Jenkins to come up with the illustrations in the map.
And this includes pictures of English heritage sites, event flags, the story Cuil at the beginning, which you'll see in a second in the video,
and also a little animated happenings on the map here that move sea monsters, the pool ship, some would say, to really make them come to life.
And then we also teamed up with a Bristol based digital agency called Gravity.
Well, and they helped us to actually build the map, put it together. So it was ready to go online and be used by people and bringing together a
very traditional analogue artists like Clive with a group of kind of younger,
basically a very tech focussed designers.
It was a kind of gives the markets charm, I think, because you're bringing together those two worlds and you'll see when I show you the video.
In terms of my role, I came quite late in the process and I was involved with researching and writing
a cross-section of some stories to be preloaded onto the site of the public.
What's it like? Well, just faced with this very beautiful but very blank looking map and I actually had some stories that they could read,
as well as adding that great contributions and a little video clip.
Now, hopefully the sound should what? The old maps are full of these same monsters.
One of my references, which is this fantastic, can see monsters on mediaeval and renaissance maps and that's been really useful to look at.
So although I'm working in my own style and using historic references,
one of the things that will happen on the map, the first thing that we see is what we're calling a cartouche.
What you have is this like shape over a dark background and there will be writing in the middle of it.
And then the digital eye comes through this and descends from clouds and onto the map.
English heritage, presenting a map heritage, presenting a map about myths and legends.
So we have references to buildings in Kenya.
And we've used George and the Dragon as the crowning glory of this particular cartouche,
because so George is one of the characters that we'll be investigating.
And they just add a little sweetness to the feel of going into an environment that we're going to be drawn into because it's a living,
breathing environment. I think one of the things about animation is that puppetry is that you need to
get the feeling that the characters are breathing as there's life going on.
Stillness is kind of death. Movement is life.
So just having a little bit of animation on top of this, you be quite charming and would lead us through.
And then as we go through the flights of birds for past, as you go down, descend through the clouds, and then all of a sudden, here we are.
You see the map. Oh.
Okay. So there you go. That gives you a taste of what the maps like and plates experience and get together building.
And before I get into some of the things that we learnt about the map after my life,
I want to share three examples of kind of a cross-section of different entries that we attracted.
And I've partly selected these to complement some of the papers that we've heard during this symposium by Diane and I and Lisa and other people.
And also because I think that they are quite different and they showcase some of the interesting that's acknowledged that we end up with.
The first one is the tale of Nancy Campbell and the Devil. So indulge me a little bit of storytelling.
This is a piece of which finical friendship to my hamlet in Somerset where I live, and Nazi come a lift in Shepton.
She was quite a strange lady. By all accounts. She was often seen drunk, in shambles in the centre of town,
and she paid her rent by knitting and selling wool stockings because Chaton was a thriving hub of the world trade at the time.
Now, being a self-sufficient spinster was something seen in some circles as rather suspicious, apparently, according to the story in the 18th century.
So Nancy was rumoured to also be a profession which in the earliest version of the story,
Nancy, moved to a cave in Dosso Woods just above Shepton to escape from her snaring neighbours.
Interestingly, later, renditions of the story say that the Industrial Revolution was responsible for destroying Nancy's career,
knitting and selling stockings for a fact. And that's what forced her to say, Kate.
Once she was in the cave, Nancy continued knitting. Even on Sundays, God forbid, and sold potions and teals one evening.
That was a terrible storm, which we think perhaps might be the storm of 17 or 23 when local minded residents thought the world was ending.
And Bishop Kidder, far from Wells, along with his wife, were killed by the chimney in the middle of the storm.
A piercing shriek was heard, a whip crack and creaking wheels.
Shepton residents wondered how Nancy was faring in the cave, and they walked up the following morning only to find that Nancy had disappeared.
And wheel tracks and horses with friends were impressed on the stone at the caves entrance.
The people said that the devil had come on his horse and cart to drag Nancy Campbell to [INAUDIBLE].
The marks remained to the stay as a reminder of the events. I find this tale interesting for a few reasons,
and partly because I know the area and I've walked up to the cave myself and do much to see which is which is.
Which is Orchard Cottage that Lisa spoke about in her presentation on Friday.
The cave is very much not managed and off the beaten track. You'll only find it and you'll only get the story if you know where to look.
But secondly, I think that this is an interesting example of how the historical context of the time.
So in this example, the Industrial Revolution can become incorporated into a story in later tellings.
And this is what we found to be that sources. A second example.
So this is for everyone interested in sort of dark folklore, dark tourism, and also the magical properties, supernatural properties of mountains.
This kind of chimes with Diane's paper from Friday. This is Michael Murase Hump on the Isle of Wight.
It's a Bronze Age burrow with a dog story attached. This said, according to the story, that in the 18th century,
a local man murdered his orphaned grandson in a nearby cottage, setting fire to the building to hide the evidence.
He was captured in a nearby cave and was hanged for his crime on the downs.
The gibbet being constructed on top of the burial mound in which he was then buried.
It is said that those who walk around at midnight 12 times, calling Michael his name three times, will summon his ghost.
Now, this is an interesting thing because there is actual real events that we can we can look to for the origins of this legend.
And the real story is justice to. Murray was a woodcutter and he really did kill his 14 year old grandson in 1736 after murdering a poor boy.
Murray was then taken to Winchester for his trial and hanged until in Winchester before his body was
brought back and left to hang on the Isle of Wight in the race hometown to deter other criminals.
And in fact, the gibbet rally was erected on top of this hump.
The local pub, The Hare and Hounds at Downer and has the gibbet post on display, along with a skull set for years to belong to Moray.
Although recent testing has actually found that it is the skull of a Bronze Age teenage woman which may have come from one of the nearby mountains.
The place where Mouret is said to have burned down the cottage is now called Burn House Lane, and the nearby word is called Birdhouse Watts.
I like this admittedly rob dog story because we know exactly the point of origin.
Although some elements have been fabricated or exaggerated, such as the skull and the fact that he was actually killed and buried on the mound.
Nevertheless, I do find it interesting that the body was bought to be displayed at the mound,
and this along with the folklore about circling the mound, as I say, has some nice resonances, I think, by anspach on Friday.
I also find it interesting to see a pub benefiting from an engaging in this kind of dark tourism.
And I suspect there are many, many pubs across England that tap into local folklore in this way for the benefit of guests.
My last example, something a little different, more of an urban folktale and something that I really like.
So we know that folklore centres on prominent topographical features, hills, Baros,
Lakes, caves, etc. But in cities, permanent architecture often takes on this role,
takes the place of landscape features in this respect above the ornate rear door to New Castle cathedrals,
buildings just opposite St. Nicholas churchyard.
You will find the frightening effigy of a black rabbit with sharp bloody fangs protruding from its jaws.
Originally, it was a normal sandy colour before it was repainted in its current spooky form, according to local tradition.
The famed rabbit used to come to life and leap down from the doorway to attack grave robbers.
Excuse me, I have jumped slides. To attack grave robbers sucking the blood.
Others have suggested that it might be a hair whose ears were put on backwards rather than a rabbit.
Because, of course, has a wide spread and folklore may appear elsewhere on the whole map.
I do wonder whether that is kind of an attempt to explain an origin or invent an
origin for this legend to make it sound even old and more magical than it is.
What challenges? Aside from the obvious technical ones, did we have in building a map like this?
Well, we had to deal with the issue of managing incoming submissions.
And this did include some screening because we didn't want to the map to become overloaded with offensive or inappropriate content,
particularly given some of the concerns that Sue Heeney, for example, raised on Friday and her question and answer session about, you know,
people with extreme political views trying to hijack heritage in some respects.
And actually, in the end, this was not a huge issue. What was more of a problem content submitted was supported with some kind of source,
which I think raises very interesting questions about when something becomes folklore.
We had some submissions along the lines of my grandma saw a ghost once in this place or that place.
And we tried to encourage stories, stories that were represented,
something experienced by more than one person and that required a source of some sort.
A newspaper article, perhaps old books, online source is maybe.
But of course, not every piece of folklore is well attested in some sources. So that raises interesting questions.
We also wanted to try and get a good geographical spread of stories and encourage submissions
have kind of a fairly uniform length and tone just so the map is accessible to people.
And that's part of why I was engaged in preloading some submissions onto the map.
So I picked one story from each county which we brief on research, all of those.
And the map has been a real success for English heritage and set out to achieve a lot of what we wanted it to.
We received over 250 submissions in total, so there was lots of public interest.
And what I found interesting was that we received positive responses from many places.
It's not just the people from these local places that know them that we're excited about.
I had a great email from somebody in Massachusetts in the US who submitted
something for Oxfordshire because they'd spent time as a student many years ago.
And they actually emailed me just to say how much they appreciated the map, which was really nice.
What else did we learn? Well, we saw some interesting patterns emerging in the map.
Once we began to see the stories populating it both from the public and also through my own research.
So, for example, we saw a proliferation of bell related legends, underwater battles on England's south coast.
And these do pop up all around the coastline. But I was surprised at just how many seemed to be clustered in Hampshire.
I'm so sick, so interesting.
As I mentioned just now and I spoke about the vampire rabbit, I also found it interesting to see the ways in which architecture,
civic parks and other such urban spaces took on the role of kind of prominent sites from.
So we'll talk graphical places in the countryside and the way that photos seem to cluster around them.
And finally, I thought it was also quite interesting to note the occasions when a folktale,
myth or legend seems to have outlived the places to which it is attached.
So the examples that immediately spring to mind here are the power of the terrifying blue skinned cannibalistic,
which blackness from the Deyn Hills and less to share the landscape which gave birth to the story has now very much changed.
But you can still find a black and his close if you turn down the right residential street.
This also pub connected with Dick Toppin is now gone.
It's just a karpoff, but people are still interested.
And I think that that cases like this raise interesting questions about how long these stories were lost and whether
they will change in the way they're told and passed down once the place is connected with them have changed or gone.
Of course, these are perennial questions for Congress. And finally, what's next?
Well, you'll be happy to hear that the map will stay online and you can still visit it.
If you just Google Maps, map and heritage, you'll pop straight up and you can explore.
We just thought it was such a viable set of data and such a lovely object that we decided to keep it online.
And in fact, shortage does have something else in the pipeline that is built on what we've learnt during this project and similar in some ways.
I can't say too much about that. I will say watch the sites.
And yet, just thanks for watching the presentation site, and I hope you enjoyed my stories.