The Harry Potter films have really captured the public imagination and our Harry Potter London walk, that explores the locations in London where the movies were filmed has proved extremely popular since it was launched at the end of December 2008.
Our Hary Potter London tour is one of our self guided tours that you can print off and do yourself. It is structured as a step by step tour around London but also includes a treasure hunt to keep the kids happy between the locations.
The harry Potter stories draw an awful lot on English folklore and so we thought that today we would take a look at the legend of the Cauld Lad of Hylton Castle, which is located in the north of England.
The hollow shell of its fifteenth century gatehouse is about all that remains of Hylton Castle. Yet it possesses a timelessness that no amount of urban encroachment can dispel. Although Baron William Hilton built the castle in the early fifteenth century, the events behind its legend occurred some three hundred year later when it became the haunt of that most useful of household spirits, a brownie.
In his 1597 Daemonologie, James V1 and 1st, defines a brownie as a devil that, having taken the appearance of a naked and hairy man, would haunt “divers houses, without doing any evill, but doing as it were necessarie turnes up and down the house”. Quite naturally, most people were delighted to find their abode haunted by a spirit that would appear in the night to perform all manner of domestic chores, and they would go to great lengths to ensure that they did nothing to drive their nocturnal visitor away. Reginald Scott in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) warned that “if the maid or good wife of the house, having compassion of his nakedness, laid any clothes for him”, then the brownie would never return.
Hylton Castle’s Brownie was known as the “Cauld Lad” and each night the servants, who slept in the great tower, would hear him working away in the kitchens. The next morning they would find that days’ food prepared and yesterdays’ dirty utensils washed and put away. But should the servants leave no chores for the Cauld Lad to do, he would show his displeasure by smashing crockery, mixing the salt and sugar together and filling the flour bin with ashes. Perhaps it was this latter behaviour that drove the servants into deciding to get rid of him. Or maybe they just feared that the Cauld Lad’s usefulness would make them redundant! Whatever their motivation, one day they fashioned a cloak and hood from the finest Lincoln green cloth and that night, having laid it out in the kitchen, concealed themselves to watch what would happen. At midnight the Cauld Lad appeared and was obviously overjoyed by the garment. The servants watched him put it on and then saw him dance around the kitchen singing:-
Here’s a cloak, and here’s a hood,
The Cauld Lad of Hilton will do no more good.
Thereafter the cold Lad was never seen again.
On our Harry Potter London walk you will see many of the locations associated with the film, but it is always nice, we feel, to get a little glimpse of some of the magical folklore of England’s past.
Tags: Harry Potter London Tour, Walk. Walks. The Cauld Lad. Brownies.
