An Eagle Owl by Edward Lear, 1830s. Aside from his nonsense rhymes, Lear was most celebrated for his paintings of species of parrot but he could obviously paint a pretty mean owl, too. #OwlishMonday #owl #birds #illustration #artsky

Walter King Stone, 1906. Endpaper from Robert Chambers’ ‘Mountain-land’ #illustration #endpaper #1900s #WalterKingStone

Boscawen Un, Cornwall, by Ithell Colquhoun. #StandingStoneSunday #Cornwall #womensart #artsky

“And it was just over there that Michael Hordern was chased by a weird cunt in a blanket.”

Serra Draconis #MerMay To avoid falling prey to other inhabitants of the deep sea this mermaid wraps herself in the assembled remains of her would-be predators.

Have you nesting House Martins near you? Help support the conservation of this red-listed species: surveys.cbwps.org.uk/house-martin... All contributors will be entered into our monthly prize draw with one lucky winner receiving a signed print by Cornish Wildlife artist Natalie Toms.

Hey! I'll be doing a talk on Megaliths in Folk Horror film & TV on 19th June for Darkness In The Fields: Midsummer 4! There's a fabulous lineup, and a handful of different ticket types you can get at this link: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/darkness-i...

FYI: Sign ups fo the 5th year of the Mari Lwyd themed Artwork Charity Auction (Dec 2026) will start 1st June!

Building crucifixes Stilgoe style!

Armstrong Sperry, 1940. #illustration #1940s #owl #ArmstrongSperry

I love that Poppies were once known as Thunderflowers, their blooms seen as harbingers of summer storms #heatwave

Recent Maypole shenanigans at Meanwood Valley farm, pictures taken by my daughter

'It is as much an exercise of history as it is an experiment of alchemy' - Wisconsin Death Trip.

You may not like it, but this is what peak museological performance looks like

Help! My dog keeps hunting these little animals in my yard. I don’t know if this is an endangered species. Anyone has tips on how to stop dogs from doing this?

Double take on this church door sign when my brain read the bottom line first...

If you would like to, please consider signing this, and sharing it with your networks. So important for LGBTQ+ communities, who may face endless discrimination and exclusion when trying to use services. Huge thanks.

Make this the save/respawn place in a Zelda soulslike.

‘Come away, O, human child! To the woods and waters wild, With a fairy hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.’ ~ W.B. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish. #BookWormSat

Rare occultism / toothpaste angle.

One from the vaults! A Book of Charms and Changelings (1971) by Ruth Manning-Sanders, illustrated by Robin Jacques

"The running of a hare along the street or mainway of a village, portends fire to some house in the immediate vicinity." Notes and Queries, 1851, Northants. #FolkloreThursday 🎨A Hare Running, with Ears Pricked - James Seymour

“In former times people said if a crow hovered or circled above a person’s head, it was a sign of decapitation.” (Elias Owen “Welsh Folk-Lore”, 1887) 🎨 Catherine Hyde #folklorethursday

The Banshee Appears, by R Prowse (1682). #PhantomsFriday

“The owl hooted scornfully. ‘Don’t talk to me about daylight!’ He said scornfully. ‘My eyes hurt just listening to you . In my opinion, moonlight is quite bright enough. I don’t like anything brighter.’” (Ottfried Preussler “The Little Ghost”) 🎨Nika Goltz #owlishmonday

- The Wyvern (two-legged dragon type guy) swallowing a man was my favourite...

Earlier today I found myself in the UK's smallest city, so I visited St. David's Cathedral to check out their fine selection of oak carved 15th-16th century (with a few Victorian replacements) misericords...

"Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close! The Nightingale that in the Branches sang, Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!" (Quatrain LXXII) Persian poet and polymath Omar Khayyam was born #OTD 1048 🎨 Edmund Dulac

If you don’t want thistles growing in your garden then heed this seasonal thistle lore from the Museum of Country Bygones at Marton. (Caveat: except they are a good food source for insects so maybe leave a few). #FolkloreSunday

It’s the last midnight! Send your sirens songs today! 💙🩵

#StandingStoneSunday The Whispering Knights, turned to stone by a witch along with a King and his men who became the nearby Rollright Stones, depicted on this cover by M. Maitland Howard, for the 1970 Shire guide to Discovering Regional Archaeology: the Cotswolds and the Upper Thames.

Good afternoon. Shockingly not sore from having prepared the ground and building a brick patio yesterday. Not old yet apparently. Plan to stay as fit as I can be for as long as I can. For art, would some witch/mudlarking suit you?

Now watching: ‘Laurin’, dir. Robert Sigl, 1989. Set in 19th century Germany, shot in Hungary, dubbed into slightly stilted English, with a moody synth score, all of which adds to the out-of-whack vibe. 🎥🎬

'Creatures' by Artus Scheiner. #monsters #fantasy #illustration #artsky

They say Mother Thel had a tongue made of thorns. They say she could tap her fingers against any object and know who made it. They say the trees of the wood would bow as she passed. She has become immortal in the imagination in the way that only folklore bestows. – Dr. M. Benn

Bixie (辟邪), the “Evil-Averter,” was ancient China’s divine guardian beast, a winged lion-tiger with two horns, fierce eyes, feathered hind limbs, tiger claws, and a long forked tail. In the Han dynasty, its stone body stood watch over tombs, not as decoration, 1/3 #folklore

THE ANKOW'S BAIN: 36 page comic celebrating the life & work of WILLIAM HENRY PAYNTER, Cornish witch-finder & ghost hunter. An imagined paranormal investigation set in 1950s Cornwall to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. www.thebigfootstudio.com/shop-comics.... #folklore #Cornwall #kernowgoth

A major score!: Popped into Kim's Bookshop in Arundel and found this book lurking in the astrology section priced at, let's just say, much much less than it's listed online. What I've heard of it sounds like a hoot: Lovecraft, Goblin Universe, MIB, Ultraterrestrials, secret societies and much more.

“In Scotland it has been an old belief that the otters have a king, of larger size than the rest of the species, and farther distinguished by having his coat streaked or varied with white…” —Robert Scott Fittis, Sports & Pastimes of Scotland (1891) #FolkloreThursday (& yesterday was #WorldOtterDay)

Have just asked the publisher of the first Hookland booklet if they could put the following after the ISBN details: The author of the work would like to give fair warning to anyone intending to pirate this book that they will activate a curse embedded in its text if they do so.

In Eskdale Forest, #Yorkshire, a hunted boar barged into a hermit's hut. He refused to let the hunters get at it because, he said, the beast had taken sanctuary. Enraged, the bloodthirsty aristocrats hacked at him with their swords and he later died from his injuries [1/2 #FolkloreThursday #folklore

"The fox was regarded as the devil’s spy, and any place much frequented by foxes, or neighbourhoods where these animals had their dens, were 'in the power of Satan.'" (Marie Trevelyan “Folklore and Folk-Stories of Wales”) 🎨 Culpeo-Fox #FolkloreThursday

None of us are free until all of us are free. No exceptions. Ever.

+'NUADA' CAPS // LAST FEW+ With the warm weather well and truly here we have a batch of our 'Nuada' walking caps in production, which will ship around 1st June. We ran a pre-order over the last few weeks and only have a handful extra left. Grab one quick 🌞 hiddenbritain.bigcartel.com/product/nuad...

My favourite bit of plant related creature lore:the tomato (Love Apple~Blackwell 1757) also known as ‘the wolf peach’ was avoided in C18th UK as some believed it was used by witches to turn their enemies into werewolves~{The Werewolf, Lucas Cranach the Elder1472-1553) #folklorethursday

One from the vaults! A Book of Ghosts and Goblins (1968) by Ruth Manning-Sanders, illustrated by Robin Jacques, cover by Brian Froud #FolkloreThursday #ghosts

It’s payday! – the perfect time to treat yourself and support indie creators Grab a copy of General Witchfinders Issue4. 76 pages of unsettling folk horror stories, fantastic art, articles, and artist profiles. Print copies & back-issue PDFs here www.generalwitchfinders.com

In contrast, here's a dark, deeply cut giant in low light, from a postcard of, presumably, the 1910s/1920s

The English country pub is akin to a good ghost anthology by diverse authors. Within its walls, a dozen spectral stories. For the price of pint, you can hear tales that will trouble for decades. Old Ash on the counting child, Young Adam telling of the Blood Maiden's tongue. – #CLNolan

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