Call of the wild

When COUNTRY LIFE’s Henry Avray Tipping spotted a 17th-century four poster languishing in a Herefordshire attic in 1911, he set off a chain of events that saw the bed leave its ancestral home and land at The Met in New York

What supernatural folklore reveals about human nature

Weather deities, magical portals, earth-moving giants and haunted valleys – Britain’s mountains are humming with myth, magic and mystery. Hanna Lindon explores upland legends from around the country

Whether vestiges of paganism survived Europe’s Christianisation is a subject of enduring fascination. Scholarly debate navigates between the ‘maximalist’ position (much survived) and the ‘minimalist’

AFRICAN FOLKLORE

Galls, which can range from the delicately beautiful to hideously unattractive bulbous growths, are among Nature’s most intriguing phenomena, discovers Deborah Nicholls-Lee