Dragon of Ludham

In the Norfolk Broads village of Ludham, an undated manuscript preserved in the Norfolk Record Office tells of a dragon that made its lair in a maze of tunnels running between the churchyard and the main street. By night the creature burst from its burrow to terrorise the village, and however thoroughly the villagers packed the entrance with rocks and rubble each morning, the dragon tore its way free again by dusk.

The standoff was broken, the story goes, on an unusually sunny day when the dragon crawled out to bask in the open at the centre of the village. While it lay sprawled and drowsy, one resident rolled a huge boulder into the mouth of its tunnel, sealing the entrance for good. Furious to find its lair blocked, the dragon thrashed its tail and took to the air, flying along the causeway towards the ruined Abbey of St Benet at Holm, where it passed beneath the great gatehouse arch and disappeared into the vaults below, never to be seen again.

Whether the tale has any basis in fact is impossible to say, but it is intriguing that the Norfolk Chronicle of 1782 reported a giant snake, nearly three feet round and over five and a half feet long, killed at Ludham by a local man — a creature whose head, the paper noted, bore two horn-like growths. Real serpent or folk memory of the dragon, the story has kept Ludham's reputation as a dragon-haunted village alive into the present day.