Ask someone to name a British folk tale and you will probably get King Arthur, or a green man on a pub sign. That is the catch. British folklore is not a tidy set of stories you can learn in one sitting. It is a patchwork of local legends, farmyard superstitions, calendar days and half-remembered things hiding in place names. It looks like a locked door. It is not — it opens easily, and most of the best material sits within a few miles of wherever you live.

What follows are the figures, rules and traditions worth knowing first. Enough, anyway, to follow a folk tale you overhear in a pub, and to know where to look next.

The creatures you will meet most often

Most British folk creatures fall into two camps: those who live alongside us, and those who live under the hill. Start with these.

• The brownie — a household spirit from Scotland and the north of England. Leave out a bowl of cream or bread, and it will tidy the kitchen and thresh the corn overnight. Give it clothes, or thank it too warmly, and it leaves for good.
• The boggart — the brownie's bad-tempered cousin, at home in Yorkshire and Lancashire farmhouses. It hides tools, spoils milk and follows families when they move. The remedy in the tales is rarely violence; it is negotiation, or the grim discovery that the boggart came along in the cart.
• The kelpie — a Scottish water horse that waits by lochs and rivers. It looks like a fine pony, but its mane is like reeds, its skin is sticky, and anyone who mounts it is carried under the water.
• The selkie — a seal who slips out of her skin to walk on land. In Orkney and Shetland tales, a man who hides the skin keeps her as a wife, and she stays until she finds it again.
• The piskie — Cornwall's small, sharp-edged folk, blamed for leading travellers astray in the lanes. If you find yourself piskie-led, turn your coat inside out.
• Black Shuck — a huge black dog with eyes like saucers, reported across East Anglia. Church records from 1577 describe a storm at Bungay and Blythburgh in which the dog appeared and left scorch marks on the door.
• The bean sìth, or banshee — a keening woman heard rather than seen, said to warn of a death in Scottish and Irish families.

Fairies are neighbours, not characters

In Wales they are the Tylwyth Teg; in Scotland, the guid neighbours; in Cornwall, the piskies. Whatever you call them, the traditional rules are strikingly consistent, and they read like etiquette for a difficult neighbour.

• Never say thank you. Thanks creates a debt, and debts are how people get into trouble.
• Do not eat or drink anything you are offered, however good it looks.
• Do not give your real name, and do not ask for theirs.
• Iron and salt keep them out; a piece of bread in your pocket was said to do the same.
• Do not follow music you cannot place, especially at dusk.
• If you must speak, be polite and brief.

Read enough of these and a pattern appears. The people who suffer most in fairy stories are rarely the rude ones. They are the greedy, the curious and the boastful — the ones who take what was not offered.

Three stories worth knowing

The Lambton Worm

In County Durham, young John Lambton skips church to fish the River Wear, catches a small, ugly worm and throws it down a well. Years later, home from the wars, he finds the worm grown monstrous, coiled around a hill and taking livestock. A wise woman tells him to wear spiked armour and let the creature destroy itself against him in the river. One condition comes with the plan: he must kill the first living thing he meets afterwards. It is his father. He kills a dog instead, and a curse is said to hang over the family for nine generations.

Tam Lin

A Scottish Border ballad. Janet, a young noblewoman, goes to Carterhaugh wood and meets Tam Lin, a man taken by the fairies. When she learns he is to be given to Hell as a tithe, she holds him on his horse as he changes shape — a snake, a lion, a burning bar of iron — and refuses to let go. He becomes a naked knight, and she has won him back. It is the best introduction to how fairy abduction works in British tradition: the rescue is a matter of grip and nerve, not cleverness.

The Wild Hunt

Not one story but a pattern. In Devon the yeth hounds run; at Windsor Great Park, Herne the Hunter is said to ride with antlers on his head. A pack and its leader sweep across the sky or through the woods at night, and anyone caught outside is in danger. It is usually a warning about time and trespass — knowing when to be indoors.

Customs that still keep time

A surprising number of British calendar customs are performed every year, often by people who would not call themselves folklorists. These are the ones worth watching.

• Up Helly Aa, Lerwick — the last Tuesday in January. Hundreds of torches, and a Viking galley burned in the harbour.
• Wassailing — January, in the cider counties of Somerset, Herefordshire and Kent. Cider is poured on the roots of an apple tree, bread hung in the branches, and a great deal of noise made to wake the tree for the year.
• Well dressing — from May onwards in Derbyshire and Staffordshire. Pictures made from petals, seeds and clay are pressed into wooden frames around village wells.
• The Padstow 'Obby 'Oss — 1 May in Cornwall. Two hobby horses dance through the streets, one of them with a black painted face.
• First footing — Hogmanay in Scotland. A dark-haired visitor comes in after midnight carrying coal, shortbread or whisky, and the year begins well or badly depending on who it is.
• Harvest lore — the last sheaf of the field was once cut with ceremony and shaped into a corn dolly, kept until the following spring.

Where to start near you

Folklore is a local subject, and the quickest way in is through the place you already know.

• Read the map. Words such as barrow, tumulus, crag, hob, puck and boggart in field and lane names point to older stories.
• Look up inside churches. Roof bosses, bench ends and misericords carry mermaids, hares, green men and dragons, carved by people happy to mix the sacred and the strange.
• Check pub signs and house names. Some are far older than the buildings they hang on.
• Ask the local library or county record office about folklore collections for your area. Most counties have at least one.
• Go to a custom in person. Dates are usually published by the organisers or the local tourist information centre, and it is polite to ask before photographing anyone.
• Keep a notebook. Much of what we know about British folklore was written down by people who simply asked their grandparents questions.

A few books make good company: Katharine Briggs on British folk tales, Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson's The Lore of the Land, and Ronald Hutton's The Stations of the Sun for calendar customs. Take them out to a place rather than the other way round. Folklore makes most sense standing in a wet field in January, watching an apple tree being toasted with cider. And treat the customs you find with respect — they are practised, not performed.

Photo: Zed Can77 / Pexels