The Tale of a Toadman | Series 5 Episode 5: Cambridgeshire
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Show notes
With Haunting Season 2024 now over, we're back to our regular business, and this week Eleanor is punting us along misty waterways as we explore the history and folklore of Cambridgeshire!
We start off chatting about Guy Fawkes, St Cleer and "Ringing Night," after which we cavort into Cambridgeshire, a soggy county whose landscape today is nothing like it once was.
Aside from chatting about the draining of the fens, the county's success in the lucrative field of fossilized poop mining, and the network of secret tunnels under Cambridge itself, Eleanor uses a boar bristle to bake bread, weighs up the possibility of us eating brawn, and teaches us how to make traditional Fenland Mead for week's County Dish.
When it comes to folklore, interspersed with some excerpts from next Saturday's Local Legends interview with celebrated author and Cambridge University folklore professor Dr Francis Young, we talk about a surprisingly lively Roman skeleton, protective ghostly bulldogs, hilltop duels with Otherworldly knights, and much more besides.
Then it's on to the main event: Eleanor's story, "The Tale of a Toadman" in which she channels the spirit of Edith Porter to narrate a spooky adventure which runs the gamut from hedge magic to bodily mutilation to mythical bog serpents.
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Three Ravens is a completely independent English myth and folklore podcast where we share stories, celebrate folk culture, and fall backwards through the hedgerows of history.
Hosted by real-life couple Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux, and mostly recorded at our home in rural Sussex in southern England, Three Ravens is rated 4.8/5 from over 500 reviews and has grown by word of mouth care of our lovely listener community ‘The Conspiracy of Ravens.’
We release three episodes a week, on Mondays, Thursday and Saturdays, through which we explore folktales, folkways, fairy stories, folk songs, mythology, local heritage, seasonal customs and traditional beliefs.
Our research inspires our retellings of stories from across history and culture, with episodes standing alone but connected together across over 500 chatty, mostly light-hearted, swear-free installments driven by passion, kindness and curiosity.
Now ranked as an all-time Top 5 podcast across several categories by Goodpods, charting in the Spotify, Apple and Rephonic UK Fiction Top 10 across 2024, 2025 and 2026, if you’re interested in ghosts, monsters, regional beliefs, and the things that unite us all, then join us round the campfire and listen in…
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