Disorientated – Anna Eliza Bray and Pixie-led Psychogeography on Dartmoor and its Borders

This blog was written as a result of giving a talk about Anna Eliza Bray and her pixie writing at the Port Eliot Mystery and History Event, May 2025. After giving the talk I got chatting with Keith Wallis who researches and broadcasts The Piskie Trap podcast. It is a terrific listen, covering many aspects of Cornish folklore, and well worth a listen. As a result, he recorded a chat with me about Anna Eliza Bray and her folklore writing for the podcast. So, if you fancy listening to a more expansive consideration of Bray and her folklore writing then here is the link so you can check out the podcast: https://shows.acast.com/the-piskie-trap/episodes/anna-eliza-bray

Anna Eliza Bray, who lived a good portion of her life in Tavistock as the vicar’s wife, was the first person to collect and publish pixie folklore in any depth. Before her book ‘A Description of the part of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar and Tavy …’ (1836), pixies had occasionally been mentioned in poems and antiquarian-genre literature (Young, 2016), where generalisations of pixie characteristics might be given. Bray’s writing was different. She was the first author, aided by a servant called Mary Colling, to purposefully gather pixie stories with the intent of presenting them as folk belief, to be valued, not ridiculed.  

As well as highlighting the important and under-sung role Bray and Colling had in the development of folklore as a genre, the second half of this blog examines the place-based ‘psychogeography’ of the pixie encounters they recorded. Why psychogeography? Psychogeography is the study of the specific effects and affects of the physical environment on the emotions and actions of individuals and therefore provides a relevant way of understanding these pixie traditions. Given that I am predominantly a landscape writer, it is the landscapes within these pixie narratives that I find most interesting.

Bray’s Folklore Writing

Bray and the Poet Laureate

Already the author of several novels, Bray’s writing took a non-fiction and folklore turn in the 1830s’s, under the encouragement of the then Poet Laureate, Robert Southey. Southey had contacted Bray to express his enjoyment of her memoir, written about her first husband, Charles Alfred Stothard, thus initiating a long pen-friendship.

One of the three Lakeland Poets, alongside Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Southey expressed an impactful opinion to Bray in one of his early letters to her:

“If you would stoop from Fancy’s realms to truth, I should like to see from you – what English literature yet wants, a good specimen of local history; – not the antiquities only, not the nautical history, nor both together … nor statistics, – but every thing about a parish that can be made interesting , – all of its history, traditions, & manners that can be saved from oblivion …” 

Southey, Feb 1831 in Bray, Fulford, 2011, p27

Unfashionable Folklore

Perhaps influenced by the revolutionary and voracious folk-tale gathering of the Brothers Grimm on the continent, Southey acknowledged that oral tradition and folklore in Great Britain was in danger of being lost and that, where it did feature, it was being handled by ‘dull men’ (ibid). For several centuries, in the age of enlightenment, oral traditions had been looked down upon as vulgar nonsense. So, for example, even in Hitchins and Drew’s ‘The history of Cornwall, from the earliest records and traditions, to the present time’ (1824), he presents pixie belief under the heading ‘Ridiculous Superstitions Formerly Existing Among the Cornish Peasantry’ (see volume 1, p97).

Bray responded to Southey’s incitement to gather as many local traditions as she could. These she shared with Southey is a series of letters which were compiled and published in ‘A Description …’. and in which the sneering regard which oral tradition was held is acknowledged by Bray …

“And of pixy legends I now, methinks, have given you enough to prove that the people of this neighbourhood, in the lower ranks of life (from whose chitchat all these were gleaned), possess, in no small degree, a poetical spirit for old tales. The upper, and more educated classes, hold such stories as unworthy of notice; and many would laugh at me for having taken the trouble to collect and repeat them”

(Bray, 1836, V1, p192)

This quote emphasises why publishing this book was such an innovative and brave reputational choice for her, particularly as a female writer. In this context I wonder if the format choice – presenting the work as a series of letters to Southey – was purposefully deployed to emphasis the credibility of the subject matter, sign-posting the endorsement of the Poet Laureate.

Help from ‘the help’

It wasn’t just that Bray’s book showcased folklore in a way that celebrated, not denigrated it. Her book also accentuated the collection process of the stories and the voices of the ‘lower ranks’ from where they had come. This she did in a collaboration with a remarkable Tavistock servant Mary Colling. Mary, through her intellectual abilities, tenacity, and the kindness of ‘teachers’ (who could see she was more interested in literature than needlepoint) enjoyed writing her own stories and poems (Colling and Bray, 1831).

Bray and Colling made a good team. Bray, being a gentlewoman, held views on the ‘lower ranks’ that today we would find unacceptable. For example, in the preface to her 1854 book ‘A Peep at the Pixies’ (a collection of fictional pixie stories), Bray says that ‘the people who live in these humble dwellings are not very nice, for the pig-stye is generally near the door, and the children are not much cleaner than the pigs’ (p2).

Clearly, visiting the peasantry would have been a task she would have found distasteful. However, in her defence, Bray had attempted to gather folklore herself but found an obstacle:

“I had attempted to get some of the old women to repeat to me these charms, I never could succeed with them; … The reason was this: the lower orders entertain an idea that if once these charms get, as they say, into a printed book,’ all their efficacy will be for ever destroyed” 

Bray, 1836, V1, p332)

The solution was to work closely with Mary Colling. She was the one who chatted to the ‘village gossips’ and listened to their ‘long stories’ (Bray, 1836, V1, p180). Whilst critiquing Bray for her attitudes to those on the bottom societal rungs, it is also only fair to recognise how much she championed and celebrated Mary Colling’s invaluable input. Plenty of examples exist across the arts and sciences of people taking credit for work, whilst whitewashing out a less powerful contributor. Here Colling features prominently in ‘A Description’ and Bray went as far as to promote her poems to Southey and assist her in publishing her writings in a book called ‘Fables and Other Pieces in Verse’ (1831).

The Beguiling Pixies

‘A Description of the part of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar and Tavy …’ offered readers a new type of pen-portrait of the West Devon landscape. Unlike other books, populated with descriptions of antiquities, history, natural history and ’eminent’ people, her book engagingly described her locality, landscape and the anecdotes and belief-stories that also gave Tamar and Tavy country its identity. Most memorable and influential in the oral traditions that featured were the stories about pixies.

Pixies had previously received limited attention, as evidenced by Southey’s comment in a letter to her, stating that he had only ever heard of pixies through Coleridge’s poem the ‘Song of the Pixies’ (1879, ix). Prior to Bray, pixies only got the odd mention, sometimes inserted into poetry in ways that revealed an inkling of their character such as their propensity for leading people astray, and beliefs of how to counteract pixy magic (Young, 2016).

In describing pixies, or ‘pisgies‘ as Bray indicates they were locally termed, we learn several ‘facts’. Pixies are the souls of dead infants who died before they were baptised. Always wearing green, they are fond of dancing, particularly to the music of nature such as the hoots of owls. Pixie folklore has pixies turning up in all sorts of locations such as mines, fields, roads, and in the home. However, they are most fond of congregating arounds streams and other watery or desolate places. They are fond of mischief, sometimes playful and innocuous, but other times more dangerous and life-threatening. This mischief can be directed by the Elvin king to whom, Bray says, the pixies obey. Of all their magical pranks, leading people astray, typically by disorienting them, is their most common action. This magic can be counteracted by turning an item of one’s clothing inside out.

As well as generally characterising these little folk, who can be both playful or malevolent, her book shares a number of folk anecdotes that either relate to pixie encounters in specific places and/or which happened to certain individuals. In some of the examples, pixies are seen to be conducting their mischief in domestic settings, but for the most part (but not exclusively), the stories show pixies inhabiting the wilder, unenclosed moors and downs at the margins of urban life. It is with these pixie places this blog is concerned.

Pixie Psychogeography

Pixie-led

The most common trope observed across all pixie folklore is that of being ‘pixie-led’ – when pixies cause one to get lost or disorientated. We see this narrative in a few oral traditions that Bray preserved, but also more widely in later collections or pixie stories. Various explanations get offered in analysis, but prime of these is that being pixie-led occurs in wild and remote places where it is easy to get lost. Of this, and with specific reference to Dartmoor and its notorious fogs, the enemy of navigation, Bray says:

If such adventures [getting lost] have now and then happened, even in these latter days, how far more frequently must they have occurred, when there was no regular road whatever across the moor! How often a traveller, if he escaped with life, must have wandered about for hours in such a wilderness, before he could fall into any known or beaten track … I mention this because I think there cannot be a doubt that similar distresses gave rise to the popular belief still existing, not only on the moor, but throughout all this neighbourhood, that whenever a person loses his way he is neither more nor less than “Pixy-led”

It was in such circumstances that, over 400 years ago, the Elizabethan John Fitz and his wife Mary, were said to have become Pixie-led on Dartmoor.

Fice’s Well

Within Tavistock’s St Eustachius church, peacefully recumbent below a weighty canopy supported by slim Corinthian pillars, lies the effigy of John Fitz, MP (d. circa 1589). Costumed in armour yet incongruously sporting a generous ruff, Fitz lies beside his wife Mary; their stone bodies celebrating the lives and status of these wealthy Elizabethans. Their solid tomb is a reminder that, in death, their bodies were safely interred in consecrated ground, within the holy shelter of the church, close to the alter.  

How different their deaths could have been? For had it not been for that a well-known antidote to being pixy-led – water which breaks a pixie spell – the pair might have perished in desolation on Dartmoor.  Rather than dying a good death, their souls would, they believed, have been dangerously fated to restlessly haunt the moor whilst their bodies decayed into a mire.

Riding across Dartmoor, around the year 1568, John and Mary, according to tradition recorded by Bray, lost their way. Wandering in vain to find the right path, they became terrified. They knew that their predicament was caused by the malevolence of the pixies that had bewildered them. Fatigued and thirsty, it was with extreme relief they discovered a spring of water, whose powers seemed miraculous; for no sooner had they satisfied their thirst, than they found their way through the moor towards home ‘without the least difficulty’.

In gratitude for this deliverance, and the benefit they had received from the refreshing water that broke the pixie glamour, John Fitz had a stone memorial bearing the date of the year, to be placed over the spring, for the advantage of all pixy-led travellers. To this day the commemorated spring is known as Fice’s Well.

With a verifiable historic figure and an abiding dated memorial, this pixie tradition is very special. Bray’s telling of this Dartmoor pixie-narrative is the earliest datable pixie legend I am aware of in print. Whilst most pixie folk tales drift in a mist of myth and motif, this folklore is rooted in real geography and real people.

Whilst I do not believe that pixies ‘mazed’ John and Mary, the legend’s psychogeography has a truth to it. Losing their way in wasteland, the Elizabethan couple became disoriented in a truly isolated place. Today, Fice’s Well lies a mile or so to the north of Princetown and about a kilometre from the main road, amongst the walls of the prison’s farm fields. But in the 1560s there really was nothing here – no Princetown, no field walls to guide them, and no road to follow, for the development of the turnpike that first improved travel across the moor was still 200 years in the future.

Bray’s legend gives no context for the weather conditions, but fog can quickly descend on Dartmoor. In a featureless moor-scape, with no settlements, no metalled road, no walls, and probably no map and compass as a guide, getting lost on the moor was a common hazard. The couple’s fear is understandable given the confusion of getting lost, the real danger of exposure on the moor, and the fear-inspired beliefs this would provoke.

Fice’s Well is geographically congruent with the legend, for the commemorated spring is in a bizarre and inexplicable location. Not on a recognised historic route[1], nor near any historic buildings, the well isn’t associated with the cultural features one might normally expect a well to serve. What’s more, in a landscape sodden with water, what on earth would be the point of ‘making’ a well here? The strange memorial only seems to make sense if it commemorates an event that unfolded at this spot.

The well can still be visited today, hunkering low amongst reeds, protected by a rudimentary circular wall, built at a later date. It consists of a simple granite canopy bearing the date of its erection and IF[2] , John Fitz’s initials.

Although he doesn’t mention pixies, Eric Hemery, author of ‘High Dartmoor’, records more recent folklore attached to this place, which seems relevant. Hemery recounts:

“A local moorman told me that the water of Fice’s Well is traditionally held to have a curative effect on eye complaints; he could remember his mother more than once taking her children to the well and bathing their eyes” (Hemery, 1983, p380)

Could the well’s ability to heal the eyes be a folk memory related to the pixie legend? The spring broke the spell of the pixies which had ‘benighted’ Fitz. Benighted is the term frequently used in early folklore for the state that pixies put one in. It literally means to be overcome by darkness. The spring water, as well as refreshing the stray John Fitz and his lady wife, lifted the darkness from their eyes, allowing them clarity of sight to return home. Could this be, even into the 20th century, why locals thought it was imbued with optical magic?

Whitchurch Down and Pixie’s Cross

Whitchurch Down, on the outskirts of Tavistock, is busy, busy, busy. Cars brrrum back and forth whilst walkers, many with dogs, criss-cross on countless paths. Golfers in amongst the gorse go about their sport from green to green on the links course. Housing has stolen around its periphery where once there were fields. ‘The Pimple’, a well-loved landmark, watches over all activity.

Bray’s Whitchurch Down was different. Not unused, but certainly quieter. Its main functions were the common grazing of animals (as it still is today), and as a gateway where tracks led between town, moor, and outlying villages. Across this land a modest flow of travellers came and went, and these travellers were in danger of being pixie-led. Bray is far from convinced the pixie-peril they experienced on Whitchurch Down was magical:

“many an honest yeoman and stout farmer, especially if he should happen to take a cup too much, is very apt to lose his way ; and whenever he does so, he will declare …he heard with his own ears they bits of pisgies, a laughing and a tacking their hands, all to see he led astray, and never able to find the right road, tho “he had travelled it scores of times long agone, by night or by day, as a body might tell.”” (Bray, 1836, Vol I, p182)

With ale houses frequent along route-ways, providing many an opportunity to imbibe, coming home inebriated was nothing out of the ordinary. But perhaps Bray is too quick to ascribe this pixie superstition to drunkenness, for a few years later Rachel Evans recounts:

“I remember travelling in an open carriage over the soft turf of Whitchurch-down …. The wheels glided on without noise; there was perfect stillness around, while the moon beamed brightly on our path, and the delicious perfume of the heath flowers stole over our senses. On a marsh near us an ignis fatuus waved its magic fire.” (Evans, 1846, p76)

In pixie folklore, Will-‘o’-the-Wisp, otherwise known as ignis fatuus, is synonymous with pixies, the phenomena known for leading people astray.

Inexplicably, Bray doesn’t mention the one feature of Whitchurch Down which today reminds us of pixie belief – Pixie’s Cross. Supposedly a religious route marker on a monastic way, this cross has a very blasphemous name for a Christian symbol. What better antidote from being pixie-led is this granite cross which is both a way marker and a Christian emblem, so repellant to the supernatural; a quality we will learn more about next …

The Diminishing Pixie Domain

In presenting her oral traditions, Bray emphasises that pixies were rarely seen any longer beyond the wastes of Dartmoor and its surrounding downs. A committed Christian in the Church of England tradition, Bray charges that, despite the ‘bell, book and candle’ of the monks of Tavistock Abbey, these Catholics were less proficient at warding away pixies and that:

It is reported that in days of yore, as well as in the present time, the wild waste of Dartmoor was much haunted by spirits and pixies in every direction; and these frequently left their own especial domain to exercise their mischievous propensities and gambols even in the town of Tavistock itself.

According to her, the ‘more learned Church of England clergy’, and the ‘enlarged burial service’ meant that, by the early 19th C, ‘the spirits are more closely bound over to keep the peace, and the pixies are held tolerably fast, and conjured away to their own domains’.

Bray invokes protestant religion to explain why pixies had, by the early 19th C, been pushed to the margins. Later writers on the other hand, tended to express the view that pixie folklore was a dying tradition because of better education, and societal shifts, with people migrating to urban areas and being detached from the countryside and rural traditions.

It is within this context, of pixies being pushed to the margins and dwelling in the wastelands, that the next two pixie traditions fit.

The Pixie Grot, Sheepstor

The southern face of Sheepstor is steep and, even by Dartmoor standards, strewn with dense granite boulders. The substantial size of these blocks, which lean, higgeldy piggeldy against each other, form numerous nooks and crannies. One cave is more substantial than the rest. Although its entrance is no different to the other recesses, it conceals a hidey-hole big enough to harbour a person. Citing the Rev Polwhele in his 1793 History of Devonshire, Bray explains that this place was used during the Civil War by the local lord of the manor to hide from Cromwell’s men and that ‘the country people have many superstitious notions respecting this hole.

We learn little of this place’s pixie tradition other than its name. Polwhele does not expand on these superstitions and Bray merely informs us that the cave is known as the ‘Pixie’s Grot’ or ‘Pixie’s Cave’. Despite the lack of an uncanny pixie tale associated with the cavity, it is worth lingering on the psychogeography of this pixie grot.

A pixie cave is the reverse of the emotional experience of being pixie-led, in which one is lost in the featureless expanse of wild moor. A cave is enclosed and claustrophobic. Contrary to being able to get lost, one can barely move in a cave. Where straying from a track on the moor leaves one exposed, being in a cave conceals. A cave provides shelter, and yet its dark interior, enclosed by rock, is also unnerving, with supernatural associations as if a portal to a subterranean other-world.

Even though I do not believe in supernatural beings, when I visited the Pixie Cave, I was not happy about entering. I remained outside. In the rational sunshine.

Down House and the Pixie Ballroom

Closing in on Tavistock yet on the edge of its former downland comes an example of a pixie pit near Down House, a dwelling for which Bray also provides a ghost story. Here we get a different type of pixie anecdote, unconcerned with how pixies interfere with humans, and instead recounting the pixie’s social world and their love of music and dance. Of this she says that:

“in a field near Down-house, there is a pit which the pixies, not very long ago, appropriated for their ballroom” (Bray, 1836, Vol I, p182)

We can only hazard a guess at whereabouts of this pixie pit today, for the glamour of its pixie past has gone. Unhelpfully, there are two Down Houses near Tavistock – one to the north-west and one to the south-east – and Bray does not make clear which one she is talking about. Its name in this story is telling. Enclosure of ‘waste’ in the late 18th and early 19th centuries further tamed the agricultural landscape, but it tells of a time when either of these Down Houses stood at the threshold of open downland. Here apparently:

“in the depth of night, the owl … would hoot between whiles; and sounds, such as never came from mortal voice or touch, would float in the air, making “marvellous sweet music”; Whilst the “elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves”, would whirl in giddy round, making those “rings, whereof the ewe not bites“” (Bray, 1836, Vol I, p182)

Not quite as otherworldly as the Pixie Grot cave, this pit also has subsurface and hidden associations. Here people imagined pixies to be able to be free, unseen, and literally in-tune with nature, an antithesis to the increasingly congested urbanised lives people were living. Not a Manchester nor a Birmingham, small Tavistock was nonetheless experiencing its own urbanisation; the town becoming rapidly over-crowded as copper mining snow-balled in the area, causing a massive influx of miners, and ancillery workers.

The final two examples I am going to showcase are a bit different to Anna Eliza Bray’s pixie yarns. This is because, in both cases, Bray does not tell us a pixie narrative. What links them is that they both have to do with places named for pixies. However, as we will see, this is for completely different reasons.

Pixy-Lane

Home to many of Tavistock’s industrial units, Pixon Lane is today heavily used by through traffic circumventing the town centre. In Bray’s time the lane was a country lane – peripheral to the town, and flanked by hedges. Its name was also different. Back in the day, and confirmed by another 19th C Tavistock writer Rachel Evans, (who we met earlier in this blog), Pixon Lane was known as Pixy Lane or Pisgey Lane.

Bray introduces us to Pisgey Lane by relaying an event that had the whole town talking. In the summer of 1828 at this place a ‘monstrous snake’ leapt out of the hedge, over a boy’s shoulder. The long-cripple (as snakes were apparently locally called) was seen by a passing old man who declared the snake’s body to be as big as his thigh. So exercised were the people of Tavistock by this serpent that an application was made to a magistrate on the matter for the ‘security of the neighbourhood’.

What a super serpent story this is, but it has nothing to do with pixies, which is our focus. What it does tell us is that Tavistock’s Pixon Lane was seemingly previously called after pixies, and that this fact has been quite forgotten. That Bray does not tell us any folklore of pixies in Pisgey Lane suggests that, by the time she was writing, nobody thought much about its name anymore and that any pixie associations had been forgotten. Or perhaps the name never did have much to do with pixies in the first place, which leads us nicely to our final pixie place …

Pixie’s Pool

Near Kilworthy House, a stone’s throw north of Tavistock, is a stream over which ‘an old broken bridge of a single arch’ spans. Here ‘formerly a pond was supplied by a pretty little streamlet that runs meandering through the grounds’. Bray describes:

‘The spot is so hung with aged trees, their roots starting from the banks, and overshadowing with their green arms the rippling waters, that it is the very scene in which one would fancy the pixies and fays make their haunts’

On the first and second edition OS 6″ to the mile map, this place is labelled as Pixie’s Pool. This has been removed from the current map, however, a dwelling at Kilworthy is still noted as ‘Pixie’s Pool Cottage’.

Bray offers us no legends of pixies here; she just thinks of this scenic watery location as quintessentially the type of place pixies might inhabit. Her descriptive writing, in this case, was so influential that the place was named because of her literary representation:

This place has, since I endeavoured to describe a scene suggested by it, received the name of the Pixies’ Pool.

So, it seems, not all pixie place names are relics of folk belief. Here it is Bray’s own reputation and her impact that led to the Pixies’s Pool receiving its epithet, warning us that caution should be given before assuming all pixie places were pixie places.

Conclusions

Anna Eliza Bray, assisted by a talented and singular servant Mary Colling, were pioneers of folklore gathering, before the term had been coined and the discipline developed. At a time when traditions and beliefs were still disparaged, Bray bravely published these local, enchanted anecdotes in a series of volumes that brought to life her local Dartmoor and Tamar Valley landscapes. The customs and magical-thinking tales she assembled, particularly those of pixies, but also of other sinister and spectral encounters, has left a legacy of Dartmoor being a folkloric terrain (Fulford, 2011, p27 and Manning, 2015, p83). As such, she still has a direct and indirect impact on the way that Dartmoor is conceived, experienced and marketed.

In focusing on the landscapes of her pixie tales I have attempted to explore how the emotional and psychological experience of the settings may have interacted with the narratives themselves. Unenclosed ‘wastes’, be this high Dartmoor, or its surrounding downlands, feature prominently. These are untamed, featureless, wild and marginal landscapes. On moors and downs people could easily lose their way and would feel disconnected from the comfort of civilisation. These were therefore places of physical and psychological disorientation, a relationship that goes way back. Such landscapes have a history dating back to at least the early medieval period, of being inhabited by mystical beings (Flight, 2021).

Other of Bray’s pixie landscapes features caves and hollows; locations with an entirely different, yet none-the-less, disconcerting psychology. Hollows and caves are secretive, private, and can be dark, with connotations of gateways to subterranean other-worlds.

Despite stating that pixies favour watery places, only one of Bray’s pixie stories, that of the Fice Well, seems to have a direct relationship with water. Her Pixie’s Pool was entirely a pixie place of her own inadvertent making, getting its name only because of her romantic description of the place. Pixies are supposed to take the form of will-o’-the-wisps, otherwise known as ignis fatuus, a flame-like phosphorescence caused by gases from decaying plants in marshy areas. None of Bray’s stories feature a pixie-led will-o’-the-wisp, or the wet and boggy areas they are found it, so common in wider pixie-lore.

Finally, in bringing pixie-lore to national attention through her writings about Dartmoor and Tamar and Tavy country, and then later turning her local folklore knowledge into fictional pixie stories in ‘A Peep at the Pixies’, Bray forefronted the wave of pixie and wider fairy interest that was to become such a dominant Victorian and Edwardian fascination in the new discipline of folklore and across the arts.

[1] See Hemery’s rationale discounting any claims that the Fice Well lay on an ancient track (1986, p380)

[2] In early handwriting the letter I was commonly used to represent our modern letter J.

[3] Amazingly, it is from this stream that John Fitz, the same man of our earlier story, erected a conduit house to pipe water to his mansion at Fitzford.  The date of the conduit house, like Fice’s Well on Dartmoor, is also 1568.

References

Bray, A, E. 1836. A Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy; Its Natural History, Manners, Customs, Superstitions, Scenery, Antiquities, Biography of Eminent Persons, &c. &c. In a Series of Letters to Robert Southey, Esq. London: John Murray.

Bray, A, E., 1854. A Peep at the Pixies: or, Legends of the West. Grant and Griffith.

Bray, A.E., 1879. The Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy; their natural history, manners, customes, superstitions, scenery, antiquities, eminent persons etc. In a series of letters to Robert Southey Esq (Vol. 2). W Kent & Co: London.

Colling, M. M. and Bray, A.E. 1831. Fables and Other Pieces in Verse by M.M. Colling. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green.

Evans, R. (1846). Home Scenes, or Tavistock and its Vicinity. Simpkin and Marshall (London) and J.L. Commins (Tavistock).

Flight, T. 2021. Basilisks and Beowolf: Monsters in the Anglo-Saxon World. Reaktion Books. London.

Fulford, T. 2011. Romanticizing the West Country: or, Hell-Hounds in Hard Cover and Pixies in Print. In Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History, Ed. Trower, S., Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, pp25-40

Hemery, E. (1983). High Dartmoor. Robert Hale: London.

Hitchins, F. and Drew, S. 1824. The history of Cornwall, from the earliest records and traditions, to the present time. William Penaluna: Helston.

James, R.M., 2018. The Folklore of Cornwall: The Oral Tradition of a Celtic Nation. University of Exeter Press. (Chapters 4 and 5).

Manning, P. 2015. Pixie’s Progress: How the Pixie Became Part of the Nineteenth-Century Fairy Mythology. In The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a  Popular Culture World, Eds. Foster, M.D. and Tolbert, J.A. Utah State University Press, pp81-102

Moore, T., 1829. The history of Devonshire from the earliest period to the present by the Rev Thomas Moore. Illustrated by a series of views drawn and engraved under the direction of William Deeble (Vol. 1). London: Robert Jennings.

Young, S. 2015. Four Neglected Pixy-Led Sources from Devon. Devon Historian. 85, pp 39-50.

Young, S., 2016. Pixy Led in Devon and the South-West. Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 148, pp.311-336.