3moors · Landscape Storytelling
Folklore of the Moors
Legends, local stories and place-based myths from Dartmoor, Exmoor and Bodmin Moor. British landscape storytelling tied to real places, old paths and long memory.
Lost places and old stories
The moors are not empty. They are layered with memory — in the names of tors, the paths between villages, the ruins of engine houses and the old ways that still cross open ground. Folklore here is not ghost tourism. It is the residue of working lives, genuine fear, local knowledge and the attempt to explain a landscape that has always resisted easy description.
Featured stories
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The Pixies of Exmoor
Tiny lights in the heather. Strange laughter in hidden combes. Across Exmoor, stories of pixies and moorland spirits have survived for centuries among farmers, travellers and shepherds.
The Black Hound of Exmoor
Across the lonely tracks of Exmoor, travellers once spoke of a great black hound that emerged silently from the mist. Its glowing eyes and soundless stride became one of the moor’s most feared night-time legends.
The Beast of Bodmin Moor
For decades, rumours of a large black cat stalking Bodmin Moor have unsettled walkers, farmers and locals alike. Whether myth, misidentification or something stranger, the Beast remains one of Cornwall’s most enduring mysteries.
The Mermaid of Dozmary Pool
Dozmary Pool is best known for its Arthurian connections, but older Cornish stories speak of a mermaid rising from the dark waters to lure lonely travellers and shepherds.
The Hairy Hands of Dartmoor
For more than a century, travellers crossing lonely Dartmoor roads have repeated the same unsettling story — unseen hairy hands suddenly gripping steering wheels, forcing vehicles towards the edge of the moorland highway.
The Lost Village Beneath Fernworthy Reservoir
The quiet Dartmoor reservoir that submerged an older landscape of farms, tracks and forgotten lives.