North Yorkshire Folk Tales by Ingrid Barton Read Free Book Online Page B

and nothing more was heard of the giant. No more unwary travellers or lonely shepherds disappeared. People began to think Jack’s tale might be true, however unlikely. Soon a well-armed band of brave folk ventured to Dalton Mill. There, right in front of the door they found the giant, dead and covered with a veritable mountain of buzzing flies. Jack’s blow had obviously done more damage than he had thought and pierced the giant’s brain.
    They buried the giant in front of his house – the big mound is still there. The knife was kept inside the mill and shown to visitors as proof of the story well into our own time.
    Jack recovered quickly from his adventure. Thanks to his stay with the giant, he was so skilled in the miller’s art that a few years later he actually got a job in that very trade (as far away from Dalton Mill as he could get), but to the end of his days he could never stand dogs!
W ADE AND H IS W IFE B ELL
Western Moors
    Not all giants are evil. Clumsy they may be but grinding bones for flour is a deviant practice pursued by only a very few – in Yorkshire, at any rate. Most Yorkshire giants employ themselves in changing the landscape or throwing stones about.
    Wade and his wife Bell were both giants. He had once been a Germanic sea-god (related to Woden) famous for owning a magic boat, but he liked it so much in North Yorkshire that he decided to settle there with his wife and his son, Weyland. There not being many giants’ houses available, they first had to build a nice castle to live in. Wade wanted to live at Mulgrave near Sandsend where he could keep an eye on his boat, but Bell wanted to live further west near the moors at Pickering, where there was better grazing for their giant cow. They argued about it for a while, but in the end they decided to build two castles and split their time between them.
    They each began to build in their chosen place, lugging huge stones from the moors. However, they had only one giant hammer between them (human hammers were not nearly big enough of course), so they had to share it.
    ‘W HERE ’ S THE HAMMER ?’ Wade would yell from his building site near the sea.
    ‘C OMING OVER !’ Bell would scream back from Pickering, flinging it the eighteen odd miles to Mulgrave. And so they went on, throwing and catching the hammer as they needed it.
    Eventually the two castles were built and the giants began to live in them, sometimes strolling by the sea at Sandsend; sometimes taking the air on the hills by Pickering.
    The giant cow, Bell’s pride and joy, wandered the moors wrapping her huge tongue around trees and bushes as she took each mouthful. Cows are notorious for ‘poaching’ the ground with their sharp feet. Bell’s cow had gigantic hooves and when it rained her hoof prints filled with water, creating the bogs still found on the moors. Over time, these became deeper and more dangerous. Poor Bell, giantess though she was, grew tired of plodding through marsh and mire to milk the cow each day. She often complained to Wade saying how much she wished there was a nice smooth road between Mulgrave and Pickering to make milking time easier. She said it so frequently that, like any husband, in the end Wade ran out of excuses for inaction.

    ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘You get the stones and I’ll lay them.’
    Bell began to collect stones. She got some from the moors and some from the beaches off the East Coast, carrying them in her vast apron. Sometimes she picked ones that were too heavy to carry the whole distance to where Wade was working, so she had to drop them by the side of the path where they still lie today. At one place, her apron strings broke, dumping twenty cartloads of rocks at a place now called The Devil’s Apronful.
    Wade made the road’s solid base out of big stones. Then he added a second layer of smaller ones well hammered down. Finally, he surfaced the whole thing with sand brought up from the seaside in Bell’s capacious apron. Both the