Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh

The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh is a Northumbrian dragon-legend with a fairy-tale heart. The beautiful Princess Margaret of Bamburgh is transformed by her jealous new stepmother — a witch-queen — into a loathsome, venomous worm ('laidly' meaning loathly) that coils about Spindleston Heugh, a craggy outcrop near the castle, and ravages the country, demanding the milk of seven cows each day to keep its venom in check.

Her brother, the Childe Wynd, returns from over the sea to break the spell. Warned not to slay the worm but to kiss it three times, he does so, and the dragon shrinks away to reveal his sister restored; he then turns his vengeance on the stepmother, changing her into a toad said still to haunt the rocks below Bamburgh. Set down as a ballad in the eighteenth century and attributed to the 'Bard of Cheviot', the tale fuses the dragon-slaying tradition with the older motif of the disenchanting kiss — a distinctly tender variant among Britain's many worm legends.