Folk Tales of Cornwall — Part 1 (The Small People's Cow · The Fairy Dwelling on Selena Moor · Betty Stogs's Baby)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part one — the premiere of a new shelf. Three folk tales of Cornwall from William Bottrell's Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall, Second Series (Penzance, 1873), heard in Bottrell's English exactly as he printed it. In The Small People's Cow, Rosy, the Pendars' red cow of Baranhual, gives twice the milk of any ordinary cow, because the Small People milk her every night into buttercup cups; a four-leaved clover in the milkmaid's hat lets her see them at their work — but when greedy Dame Pendar takes a witch's counsel and salts the cow, Rosy runs wild, and the farm's luck runs out with her. In The Fairy Dwelling on Selena Moor, Mr. Noy of Pendrea, riding home from the harvest, is piskey-led into the Small People's dwelling on a bog-island of the moor, and finds Grace Hutchens — his sweetheart, buried three years before — kept there as their housekeeper; she warns him to touch neither fruit nor flower, and though he scatters the sprites with an inside-out glove, he spends his remaining days wandering the moors in search of her. Read with it, as Bottrell printed it, is his second telling of the same story — Richard Vingoe, piskey-led in Treville Cliffs. And in Betty Stogs's Baby, a Towednack mother who leaves her baby alone and unwashed finds the cradle empty: the Small People have carried the child off, washed it clean, and left it sleeping in gay chintz among sweet herbs — and the fright makes Betty a careful mother. The episode opens and closes with its theme, Midnight Forbidden Saxophone, heard also briefly between the stories.
Chapters
0:38 The Small People's Cow
12:55 The Fairy Dwelling on Selena Moor
42:30 Betty Stogs's Baby
Three more tales of the Second Series are not read in this part. Held for the owner's ruling by name: The Changeling of Brea Vean · The Fairy Master, or Bob o' the Carn. Excluded by name: Giants of Castle Treen — its climax is an enacted killing. Standing on the bench for later parts of this shelf: How a Morvah Man Bought Clothes for His Wife · How a Zennor Man Choked Himself, but Had His Will in His Pocket. Robert Hunt's Popular Romances of the West of England, a separate Cornish collection, is on file for a later episode and is not drawn on here. No claim of completeness for Bottrell's book is made.
From Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall, Second Series, by William Bottrell (1873), public domain — complete and in book order, in Bottrell's English as printed. Narrated by Magnolia. Theme: Midnight Forbidden Saxophone.
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