Tiddy Mun

The cry of a peewit carries a long way over flat wet ground. On the carrs of north Lincolnshire, in the shallow valley the Ancholme runs through, that thin falling screech was not always taken for a bird. When the mist lifted off the water-holes at dusk and the wind off the North Sea set the stunted willows creaking, people sitting round the fire would pull their chairs a little closer together, glance over a shoulder at the door, and say to each other, quietly, that the old man was out.

He was small. No bigger than a three-year-old child, and unmistakably ancient with it: long white hair, a beard matted and tangled into the same white mass, a grey gown that made him almost nothing against fog. He walked badly. The word the fen people used for his gait was *limpelty-lobelty*, which does the work of a whole paragraph of description. He lived down in the deep green standing water of the bog-holes and came up only in the half-light, arriving with a sound of running water and a sigh of wind, laughing like a lapwing.

He had no name. Tiddy Mun means little man in the local speech and nothing else, and the woman who told the story was firm on the point: it was a description, he had never had a name, and there was a reason for that which she would explain another time. She never did. What the carr-folk called him, when they had to call him, was Tiddy Mun wi’out a name, and the missing name was somehow part of the address.

The Ancholme carrs were bad country before the drainage. Ague and marsh fever ran through every household, the women shaking over the fire, the men shaking in the garth, the children shaking as a matter of course, and gin and opium were the ordinary medicine. In a wet year the water climbed the paths and stood at the doorsills. So at the first new moon the whole family went out into the dark, father, mother and every child, looked over the black water and called together, not steadily, because they were frightened:

*Tiddy Mun, wi’out a name, tha watter’s thruff!*

Then the peewit screech would come back across the swamp, and in the morning the water would be down and the paths dry. He had done the job. A rhyme went with him and set the terms plainly: white head, walking lame, and while the water fills the fen, Tiddy Mun will harm none. He was not one of the wicked ones. He was not the water-wives with their tantrums or the Dead Hands that came up out of the mud without arms attached, and nobody feared him the way they feared the boggarts. He was simply not safe to ignore.

In the seventeenth century the Crown brought in Dutch engineers under Cornelius Vermuyden to cut the marsh into fields. The carr-folk hated it. They believed the mists would lift and the fever go, and they still hated it, because bad is bad but meddling is worse. They gave the Dutchmen no food, no bedding and no civil word, and would not let one across a doorstep. Then the engineers began to disappear. Not one, and then another, and no body ever found, and everybody in the valley knew exactly where they had gone and who had taken them down into the water-holes that were not yet dry.

The draining went ahead anyway. The dykes ran longer and deeper, the black quaking bog turned to firm mould, and the water that had been his house drained away to the river. Then the blight started. Cows pined, pigs starved, ponies went lame, lambs dwindled, the meal burned itself, new milk curdled in the pan, thatch fell in and walls burst outward. Worst of all the children sickened, and the mothers sat holding small white faces that did not brighten again. At first nobody would believe the old man had turned on his own people, so they looked for someone easier to blame. They stoned a wall-eyed woman out of the market place. They ducked another in the horse-pond until she was nearly dead. They said the Lord’s Prayer backwards and spat to the east against the todlowries. None of it made the slightest difference, because they had the wrong culprit.

Somebody finally remembered that he had answered before, when he was asked properly. So on the next new moon they came down to the dyke edge in threes and fours, jumping at every gust and every black snag, each carrying a stoup of fresh water. They stood in the dark at the water’s edge, looking across at the new river, and shouted it out together: here’s water for thee, take the spell undone. Then they emptied the stoups into the dyke. What answered was not the peewit. It was a sound of small children crying, coming and going all round them in the dark, sobbing themselves quiet and then starting again louder, and the mothers cried out that these were their own dead babies. Women said afterwards that tiny hands had touched them that night and cold lips had kissed them. Then the wailing stopped, and out of the river came the lapwing screech, soft this time, and they knew the curse was lifted. They went home laughing and weeping at once, and the sick children mended, and the pigs fattened, and there was bread. After that the whole family went out to the dyke every new moon without fail, because he counted them, and anyone who stayed away without being ill got the spell laid on harder than before.

His power was the water and only the water. He could hold a flood back or let it in, he could take a man down into a bog-hole and keep him, and he could rot a whole parish from the livestock upward. What he could not do was stop the work. The dykes were cut, the carrs became fields, and the spirit whose whole existence was standing water had nowhere left to stand. The old woman who remembered the rite said he had been frightened off by the new ways and the new machinery, that folk no longer knew him, and that the poor swamp-bogles had flitted out with the water. She had seen them go. He lost.

Everything known about him rests on one collector. Marie Clothilde Balfour published the tale in the journal *Folk-Lore* in 1891, saying she had it from an aged woman of the carrs who had performed the new-moon rite herself as a girl and would not admit to it in front of her grandchildren, whose indifference wounded her. The woman was dead by the time it went to print, and Balfour doubted anyone else still knew the legend. That single thread has been pulled at ever since. Joseph Jacobs accepted the stories, and so did Katharine Briggs and Richard Dorson; Neil Philip found them strange enough to raise real doubt; Jeremy Harte called them a deception outright, good Frazerian stuff and a myth of rural paganism invented decades before Gerald Gardner, but not folklore. Maureen James spent years on the question and was awarded a doctorate in 2013 for research defending the collection, arguing that the dialect and the folkloric content are genuinely north Lincolnshire and that the tales carry the signatures of oral telling. The argument is not settled, and an honest account of Tiddy Mun has to say so.

A separate strand survives alongside him. Writing in *Folklore* in 1955, Ethel Rudkin recorded a belief in the same valley in a small race called the Tiddy people, also known as the Strangers, the Greencoaties and the Yarthkins, described by one of her informants as creatures no more than a span high with arms and legs thin as thread, enormous hands and feet, and heads rolling about on their shoulders. They danced on the flat Stranger Stones, which people smeared with blood and lit fires on for reasons Rudkin could never get anyone to explain, and they were paid in first fruits, bread and salt. They share the dialect word for small and little else. Whether their king was the grey man in the water-holes is a later tidying-up rather than anything the sources say.

There is one more reading, and it is the least supernatural and the most unsettling. In a 1987 paper in *Folklore*, Darwin Horn went through the curse item by item against what actually happens when a wetland is drained. Ponies raised on soft ground go lame on the new hard crust. Walls crack as the drying peat compacts and subsides. Livestock moved from marsh plants to oats and rape sicken. Draining destroyed the standing water’s own predators and the mosquito populations climbed rather than fell, so the fever got worse before it got better. Every item on the list resolves into ecology except the curdled milk. The people of the carrs were not superstitious about a disaster that never happened; they were describing an environmental collapse in the only language they had, and they were broadly right about the cause. In 2022 the new bridge on the A47 at Guyhirn was named Tiddy Mun Bridge, after a naming competition won by a thirteen-year-old. He is back, in the way things come back, presiding over a road across drained fen.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Tiddy Mun?

Tiddy Mun is a bog spirit from the folklore of the Lincolnshire carrs, the wetlands along the River Ancholme. His name simply means “little man” in the local dialect, and the tradition insists he had no true name at all. He controlled the level of the water in the marshes and was called on at the new moon to push back floods.

What did Tiddy Mun look like?

Tiddy Mun was described as no bigger than a three-year-old child but looking like a very old man, with long tangled white hair and a matted white beard. He wore a grey gown that made him hard to see in the fen mist, and he walked with a pronounced limp. His laugh sounded like the screeching cry of a peewit, or lapwing.

Why did Tiddy Mun curse the Lincolnshire fens?

He cursed the carrs because Dutch engineers were draining the marshes in the seventeenth century, emptying the water-holes he lived in. Cattle and pigs sickened, ponies went lame, milk curdled, walls collapsed and children died of fever. The people ended the curse by gathering at a dyke at the new moon and pouring fresh water into it as an offering.

Was Tiddy Mun evil?

No. Tiddy Mun was regarded as a protector rather than a menace, and the old rhyme promised that while the water filled the fen he would harm nobody. Fen people feared the boggarts and the Dead Hands far more. His anger came only after the draining destroyed the wetland he belonged to.

Is the Tiddy Mun legend genuine folklore?

That is disputed. The whole legend comes from a single account published by Marie Clothilde Balfour in 1891, taken from one elderly woman in the Ancholme valley. Joseph Jacobs, Katharine Briggs and Richard Dorson accepted it, while Neil Philip doubted it and Jeremy Harte called it an invention; Maureen James was awarded a doctorate in 2013 for research defending its authenticity.

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