I’ve now seen the new Boggart Sourcebook. The unglue.it aggregator has it and usefully offers a “Save to Dropbox” feature that works in getting the PDF file. The normal PDF download is still not working.
The new book has the usual Kidsgrove boggart article and gives it as a good fully transcribed text…
* ‘Up and Down the Country: Ranscliff’, Staffordshire Sentinel and Commercial and General Advertiser, 6th December 1879.
It also brings to light…
* A newspaper article on a Harecastle tunnel rape trial (Wolverhampton Chronicle and Staffordshire Advertiser, 16th August 1843, page 4), which shows the lore was well-know to boatmen in 1843.
* Leese, Philip R. The Kidsgrove Boggart and the Black Dog, Stafford: Staffordshire Libraries, 1989.
Full title of the latter is found to be: Philip R. Leese, The Kidsgrove Boggart and the Black Dog: A Version of the Story and an Examination of the Written Source. A 32 page booklet. This is new to my North Staffordshire Folk-lore bibliography, and will be in the next edition.
Not published as full-text or identified as North Staffordshire in the Boggart Sourcebook is the reference…
* Wigfull, Chas. S. ‘Alton Addenda’, Derbyshire Advertiser, 6th May 1927, page 31.
I suspected this was Alton in the Moorlands. Cross-referencing this with the list of ‘Boggart Names’ in the book shows that this newspaper article had noted a named “Barberry Gutter Boggart”. This gave me a lead to follow. Folk-lore journal (1941) usefully stated that the Gutter was located “on the road from Alton to Farley”. In Folk-lore, the places referenced either side show that the Manifold Valley area is under discussion. Hence, this is Staffordshire’s Alton and not some other Alton.
The new book offers a useful ‘Boggart Census’ for Derbyshire, none of which are items shading over toward Staffordshire. The same is true of Cheshire. It then appears our Kidsgrove Boggart is very much an outlier.
But my above winkling out of the “Barberry Gutter Boggart” at Alton now gives North Staffordshire one more boggart.
Where, then, is or was the Barberry Gutter? Folk-lore tells us this was “on the road from Alton to Farley”, and interestingly one also finds there a headless horseman riding a white horse and clad in armour (again, according to Folk-lore). Such rural tales are admittedly common and often late confabulations, but it might be interesting to know if it can be found before the re-discovery of the very nearby head-chopping tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
A study of local molluscs for the journal of the North Staffordshire Field Club (1921) adds a little more data to the location of this Gutter. The diligent mollusc-hunter Mr Atkins noted a colony thriving under damp fir-bark at Alton on or near the…
Earl’s Drive, Barberry Gutter
The boggart could then be somewhere along the well-known “Earl’s Drive”. The drive having been built in the 1800s by the Earls of Shrewsbury, a lovely ride going over damp ground by a series of bridges. So far as I know this could also be used by the public.
An old map then reveals the correct location of the Gutter, seen here spelled as “Barbary” and in relation to the Towers and the Castle…
It is thus also the location of the “Chained Oak”.
(This modern Earl’s Drive is not to be confused with the medieval Earlsway).