Every town and village keeps a legend it half-believes: the tunnel running from the church to the manor, the stone that will not sit still, the pub where a coachman still orders his half. These stories arrive second-hand, told with the confidence of long repetition. Tracing one back to its earliest version is among the most rewarding kinds of local history you can do — and you can begin this week with a notebook, a library card and a willingness to ask awkward questions.

Write the story down first

Before you look anything up, capture the version you already have. Write it out in full sentences, including details that seem trivial: a date, a surname, the number of steps to the buried gold, the direction the tunnel runs. Legends drift, and small discrepancies between tellings are often the most revealing thing about them.

Then start a list of variants. Every person who tells you the tale gets an entry: what they said, who they heard it from, roughly when. A running document is enough.

Start with the local studies library

Your county record office and the local studies section of your library should be first ports of call, not last. Between them they usually hold parish histories, old guidebooks, pamphlets, sale particulars of big houses, newspaper cuttings and the unpublished work of earlier researchers — sometimes index cards typed up in the 1960s and never printed. Much of it is loosely catalogued, so ask staff what exists rather than trusting the online catalogue alone.

Join the local history society if there is one. Its members will know whether your legend has already been chased, by whom, and who holds the unofficial archive.

Read the landscape through maps

Legends cling to features, and many of those features are mapped. Tithe maps and their apportionments, mostly from the 1840s, name individual fields and owners. Enclosure awards and estate maps do the same for earlier periods. First-edition Ordnance Survey sheets show holloways, ponds and ruins as they were before modern development. Most are viewable at record offices, and large runs of historic maps can be studied online through national map collections.

Two tricks are worth knowing. Field names often preserve the story — a Gallows Piece or a Barrow Field tells you the tale was fixed in the landscape before the surveyor arrived. And place-name dictionaries, which give the earliest recorded spelling of a name and its likely origin, will sometimes show that a "legendary" name is simply Old English for a bend in the river.

Search archives and newspapers

Newspapers are where local legends most often surface in print. The British Newspaper Archive, together with digitised runs held by many libraries, covers inquests, strange deaths, hauntings, finds of coins and bones, and letters from readers recalling what their grandmothers told them. Microfilmed local papers go back further than the digital collections and repay the eye strain.

For documents, the National Archives' Discovery catalogue searches across hundreds of record offices at once, so it is a good place to put a surname or place name and see what survives. Before you visit in person:

• Ring or email the record office and ask which collections are relevant.
• Order documents in advance where the catalogue allows it; many repositories fetch items only at set times.
• Take a pencil. Pens are banned almost everywhere.
• Bring photo ID for a reader's ticket, and check opening hours — plenty of offices are part-time.
• Photograph the document reference with each image so you can cite it later.

Look in the folklore indexes

The printed folklore literature is better organised than most people expect. The Folklore Society's library, held at University College London, is the natural home for this kind of search, and the Society's County Folklore series collects material county by county. Katharine Briggs's Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language groups tales by type and gives sources, which makes it easy to spot when your apparently unique story is one of dozens about a hoard guarded by a headless figure. A Dictionary of English Folklore by Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud is a good first stop for motifs, while Jennifer Westwood's Albion surveys legendary Britain county by county.

Read these for pattern, not for answers. A printed version from 1890 tells you the story was in circulation then, and usually points to an older oral telling. It rarely tells you where the story began, and it may have tidied it up considerably.

Record the people who still tell it

Oral history is the part that cannot be done from an armchair, and it needs care. Ask permission before recording, explain what you intend to do with the material, offer the speaker a copy, and accept it if they would rather not be named. Never repeat something you have been told in confidence.

Good questions are specific and open: Who told you that? How old were you when you first heard it? Does anyone tell it differently? Has anything ever been found there? Then stop talking and let the silence work. A phone recorder is perfectly adequate; test it, sit away from the kettle, and note the date, place, speaker's name and roughly their year of birth. If they agree, offer the recording to the local archive, where it will outlast both of you.

Separate the evidence from the story

You will end up with three kinds of material, and they should be kept apart. There is documented evidence: a will, a map, a newspaper report, a burial register. There is plausible background: a manor that really did have a tunnel, a pond really drained in 1874. And there is the legend itself, which usually belongs to a family of stories found all over the country — the sunken village, the devil's bridge, the spectral hound, the treasure that can never be counted.

Write up your findings with the versions side by side and cite every source precisely. If you cannot find an origin, say so plainly. The absence of a record from 1750 does not mean the story was invented in 1950; it usually means nobody wrote it down.

A first afternoon's work

Pick one legend. Write down the version you know, in full. Look up the place name and the field names on the earliest map you can find. Run the place name through the Discovery catalogue and your local newspaper index. Then ring the local history society and ask, simply, whether anyone has looked into this before. That single afternoon will tell you whether you have a small curiosity or a proper project — and either way, you will have made a start most people never make.

Photo: JillWellington / Pixabay