Looking Up Sheffield operated as a podcast during the heady days of lockdown, shining a cultural light on topics from skateboarding to Mary Queen of Scots.
Inspired by The Sheffield Tribune, Caught By The River and It’s Black O’er Bill’s Mothers, we felt the need for some more long-form journalism about our fantastic city and people.
As we evolve, we plan to feature a Start The Week interview with a well-known Sheffield face together with weekly book, record and running recommendations brought to you by those in the know across our great independent, outdoor and cultural scenes.
Fittingly, for our first interview of the year, and just after Loz has sung himself hoarse at a Twelfth Night wassail in his local pub, we shine the spotlight on folklore. The Centre for Contemporary Legend, based at Sheffield Hallam University, has a busy 2025 lined up with the launch of a survey about what people truly believe.
In 1964, John Widdowson and Paul Smith, armed with a mountain of printed slips, set out to conduct what would become the definitive survey of English folklore and traditions for the next 60 years.
They handed the simple forms out to anyone who visited Sheffield University, where they were based. And they wanted to know the answer to one question: what do you know to be true?
Several years later, young archaeology undergraduate David Clarke stumbled upon the archive on Glossop Road. The archive was a patchwork of observances, superstitions and local legends, passed down through families and communities about Hawthorn Blossom and white devil-haunted highways.
Six decades on, the Survey of Language and Folklore is finally being updated, and we spoke to Dr Clarke about why folklore matters, and where we will find it in Sheffield.
Why is folklore important to Sheffield? And as a journalist, why are folk tales so important to you?
My grandparents brought me up on Sheffield folk tales – tunnels under the castle going all the way to the Old Queens Head and Manor Lodge. When they told me about Spring Heeled Jack, some guy dressed in a white sheet with springs in his boots that used to leap out on you at night – I was hooked. As a nipper, because I was hearing all about Spring Heeled Jack and I was into Marvel comics, this was like Spider-Man and Batman. The name Spring Heel Jack captures all sorts doesn’t it?My grandparents gave me all the stories about the underground tunnels to the castle. They’d been passed on from people who claimed to have been down them, supposedly from the ruins of the castle, under Castle Market. My grandparents were absolutely convinced these tunnels existed, and that one of them ran up to the Star building on York Street. And another one ran across the valley to Manor Castle and there was an entrance to the tunnel under the Old Queen's Head, which was my granddad's favourite boozer. So I had all these connections, bubbling away, from when I was young.
My granddad was a steelworker and you can imagine them knocking back the beer after they'd done the shift at the steelworks and coming out with all these stories. And it did strike me as odd. How on earth could that be? And years later, I heard about the Megatron – the name hooks you in just like Spring Heeled Jack. Sheaf Storm drain doesn't have quite the same ring.
I think the Megatron is the basis of the legend of the underground tunnels. I think people knew that it was there, and that it had been covered up. And somehow that's become tangled up with the idea about there being an underground tunnel because that's effectively what it is.
There was a pre-existing tunnel legend. I think Joseph Hunter mentions it in 1823 about a tunnel between the castle and the Manor Lodge, but every castle in the entire of the UK, as far as I know, has got a similar legend; and it's entirely probable that there was some kind of escape tunnel from Sheffield Castle, the original Sheffield Castle, because every large castle in England certainly had what was known as a sally port, which was used if the castle was under siege and the people inside needed to get out secretly. They'd go down a short tunnel to take them out of wherever the enemy was besieging them. So, I am absolutely confident if they dig the castle in the right place, they'll find the sally port because Sheffield Castle was the third largest in the country at one time.
How excited are you about the castle redevelopment?
I'm on the committee of Friends of Sheffield Castle. and the Sheffield Heritage Board, representing intangible cultural heritage. So I'm got several hats on but what they've actually discovered on site is amazing. And I don't think there's any doubt now because one of the other legends about the castle is did it originate in Norman times when the first Lords of the Manor arrived and got rid of the Saxons.
There's a mention in the Doomsday Book of there being some kind of saxon hall, somewhere in Sheffield. And this was the hall of Waltheof, the Saxon Lord of Sheffield who got beheaded by William the Conqueror. And as you know, there was a famous harrowing of the North where he sent his soldiers and burned everything to the ground in this area, right up to York. So where was the hall of Waltheof?
There is a record that during the Barons' War, I think that's in the 13th century, this guy called Evil, Lord Evil, came through the city and burned Sheffield to the ground, including the castle.
But the new excavations have found evidence that there was something there before the Norman castle. I don't know exactly what, and it's not been fully dated, but they're quite confident now that there was something there. Maybe even back to Roman times. If you think about it, it was right on the confluence between the Don and the Sheaf. You've got Lady's Bridge. It's a natural place where the Roman soldiers from Templeborough would have crossed the rivers to get out to Manchester. It’s amazing stuff. And they found this well, this huge motte and bailey that the castle sat on and one of the first things they found during the excavation is this massive sort of 30-odd-foot well that just drops into water. So what on earth is at the bottom of that? So I'm just stunned. But I knew they would find interesting stuff once they started excavating.
This is where Mary Queen of Scots would have been led into the castle back in the 1560s. In terms of a draw for tourists to Sheffield, if the people involved in this have got a bit of vision like the makers of Jorvik had 30 years ago, it could be amazing for the city. At Jorvik, as much as I love it, there's nothing there - they've created a fantastic experience where you can get in and go back in time to Viking period and experience the smells.
But Sheffield could do far better than that. All they've got to do is put some glass over it, let people walk over the drawbridge in medieval garb or whatever. I mean, come on! So much could be done. But it needs money; it needs vision; and it needs commitment to it.
Tell us about the Centre for Contemporary Legend. How did that start?
It was a group of like-minded people, like-minded academics, coming together and saying, 'Oh, you know we ought to set up a research group.' But we've got an actual office now, a physical office at Sheffield Hallam Uni, for the project. We've got a new postdoctoral research associate starting in January who's going to be working with me for two years on the survey, Sophie Parkes-Nield.
We’ve got Diane Rodgers, also of Sheffield Hallam, Andrew Robinson, Ceri Houlbrook and Owen Davies who founded the MA Folklore Studies course at Hertfordshire University, together with US sociology professor Christopher Bader.
So we will be surveying a sample of I think about 3, 000 people, and we can definitely say it will shine a light on modern folklore because this will be a gold standard survey, it won’t just be an anecdote here or an anecdote there. It's great to have 10,000 collecting slips with bits of information about people's ghost stories and sayings and dialect. But at the moment, those survey slips are just tied up with string sitting in a basement at University of Sheffield. I want something that will give us robust data.
So what tales are worth celebrating in Sheffield - what would you put on a folkloric walking tour?
Well, the first thing you see when you come out of the station is the rocket-shaped monument, the Cholera Monument. The Cholera Monument ground is Spring Heeled Jack's haunt, so that would be top of my list. If you go up there, you know, there's lots to see, and there are some amazing metal sculptures. One of which actually shows Spring Heeled Jack leaping over rooftops.
Then head uphill on City Road to Manor Castle or Manor Lodge, and obviously you've got all the legends there. There's the Manor Lodge pub which has a White Lady ghost, and you've got the tunnel that's supposed to run from there under the Cholera monument to the Old Queen's Head.
The Megatron would be top of my list. I know you can't just go, well you can go down it, but I wouldn't recommend it. It's better to go on a guided tour with the Sheaf and Porter Trust, and they're doing them very frequently.
If you go in the other direction into the city centre, my first port of call, after you've had a pint in the old Queen's Head, which has got numerous ghosts and an amazing set of carvings; one that's supposed to be Mary Queen of Scots, another that's supposed to be Queen Elizabeth, her jailer, another that's supposed to be Lord Shrewsbury, another Lord of the Manor who had to keep Mary Queen of Scots in prison for 14 years. And she nearly bankrupted him because she constantly wanted to have baths in white wine, and his wife, Bess of Hardwick, got more and more jealous, thinking he was having an affair with Mary Queen of Scots.
If you then head up into the city centre, you have got to go to the Cathedral, which has got numerous stories and legends, but the most amazing sight of all, if you go into the oldest part of the Cathedral, and look into the roof of the Lady’s Chapel, which is 15th century, and you will see an amazing suite of carvings, all of which are folkloric, including at least six green men, and what we could conservatively call a medieval acrobat. And then there’s the missing crypt coffins. There's a crypt under the cathedral where we know all the key Sheffield lords were buried - but there’s only two coffins. So the sixth Earl and the fourth Earl, probably the two most famous ones, are missing. Where are they!?
Then you should finally visit Bishop's House in Meersbrook. It's got lots of stories and there are what are known as ritual marks, marion marks that people in the Tudor times used to cut into fireplaces and entrances to keep away evil spirits.
You worked as a journalist at the Sheffield Star. What tales did you unearth there?
I was working for a little free sheet called the Stocksbridge Trader when the whole thing about the Stocksbridge bypass kicked off. It was Bob Westerdale who tipped me off through his contacts at South Yorkshire Police. Do you know the bypass was officially opened on Friday the 13th 1988? Bodes well, doesn’t it! It was being built to take the traffic away from Stocksbridge town centre and the whole thing was just a building site with a massive pile of muck and stone on either side with the Pearoyd Bridge sitting there in mid-air with nothing connected to it.
One of the contractors there heard the sounds of children at night when there were no children; another had seen a ring of children dancing around a pylon. They'd gone out in this Land Rover with the lights shining on the bridge and they'd seen this cowled figure standing on the bridge and they were so terrified they drove down into Stocksbridge, hammered on the door of the vicarage and they got the vicar out : “can you come and exorcise it?” And the vicar refused!
So they got the police in, and these two coppers drove up there, sat in the car one night, in the freezing cold, pitch black. Just taking the piss out of it, having a fag, and all the rest of it. And then suddenly there were all these bangs on the back of the patrol car, and then this figure appears in front of the car.
And they reported this to South Yorkshire Police, which is how Bob started getting the story. Obviously, I was on site almost immediately, with my massive ghettoblaster recording the story from these two coppers. And I was out on vigil trying to see this thing myself. Absolutely nothing, I just got absolutely frozen solid. But then loads of other people came out of the woodwork saying they'd seen weird stuff and this phantom monk and all the rest of it. Something weird and inexplicable.
I’m normally a debunker of these things, but I do think there are things that go on that we're never going to know what they are, and I'm quite happy as a folklorist to leave it like that. I don't have any pressing need to find whether something is true or false, because a lot of these things are experiences that people have.
We've got to talk about Robin Hood, haven't we?
I remember watching the first episode of the 1980s TV series and it's all set in Loxley. And it's all about, you know, how the Normans attacked, attacked and killed all the Saxon Lords; and the young Robin was sort of saved and hidden away and went on to become this rebel fighting against the hated Normans. And when I saw Loxley on screen, I just thought, Loxley? What, in Sheffield?
And so I started digging into it at that point. And I came to realize that there's an equally long tradition that goes way back. It's even in the guy who did the survey for the castle. In 1634, for the Lord of the Manor, he went out to Loxley or what was then Loxley; and he records, you know, the remains of the cottage where Robin Hood was born. And there's another reference to it in the Bodleian Library as well about somebody called Robert Loxley having killed his father and then fled into the woods where he met Little John. And as you know, you've got the whole Little John legend at Hathersage, a few miles away, across the wood.
Why is it such a big deal that he could have been born in what is today modern-day Sheffield, outlawed, and then spent the rest of his time ranging from West Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottingham because that's what outlaws do - they're on the move all the time, so why does he have to belong to Nottingham? And people who come to me and say, 'Oh, you're trying to steal Robin Hood’ but I just laugh and say, 'Well, you tell me where Loxley is then'.
He was born in Sheffield. His mate lived in and died there, the villain lived in Nottingham and, he died in Kirklees in West Yorkshire, so he's a true Englishman, a true English hero, which we should all be celebrating. And I don't see why Nottingham, Sheffield, Hathersage and Kirklees can't all work together; to set up a Robin Hood trail, which is what I’d love to do.
You’ve gone from being a journalist to finding this incredible career investigating UFOs, folklore and its place in contemporary Sheffield - what advice would you give to a young writer today?
I remember a colleague from the Sheffield Star saying the way to make it in journalism is to become an expert on something, you know? If you're in the police, you start as a generalist and then after 18 months on the beat, you become a traffic officer. It's the same for journalism, you need to learn how to write, you need to learn how to tell stories. But then you become a specialist, become an expert, become respected, and then you will never be out of work.
And those words have stuck with me, and it's absolutely true.
In the meantime, tell your friends!
Good luck with the new newsletter! And what a fantastic interview. There's a few stories in there which I'm familiar with through my father-in-law, Terry Howard (whose Inner City Round Walk of Sheffield - https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1507783610/inner-city-round-walk-of-sheffield-by - was featured in It’s Black O’er Bill’s Mothers). Terry and I are working on a revised edition of his Moorland Notebook, originally published in the 1990s, and I imagine that he would make a great future interviewee.