Folklore Map of Britain & Ireland Myths, Legends & Spectral Encounters
Dragons Anwick, Lincolnshire

The Anwick Dragon

At Anwick a ploughman's horse was swallowed by quicksand and a winged drake flew from the hole; the boulders left behind, the Drake Stones, are said to guard the Devil's hidden treasure.

The Lincolnshire village of Anwick keeps the legend of the Drake Stones, two great boulders that stand outside the churchyard wall of St Edith's. The tale tells of a farmer ploughing the field when his horse and plough were suddenly sucked down into a patch of quicksand and lost; as the horse vanished beneath the ground, a drake — a dragon — rose up out of the hole and flew away. Where it had been, the villagers found a stone shaped like a drake's head.

The story

The stones were believed to cap the Devil's cave and to hide buried treasure, but they could not be moved. One man yoked all the oxen he could borrow and chained them to the great stone; the beasts strained and shifted it a little, but the chains snapped, the oxen collapsed, and the guardian spirit of the hoard burst out from beneath in the form of a drake. In the nineteenth century the larger stone was dragged to the church and broke in the moving, becoming the two 'Drake Stones' shown today — glacial erratics that folklore turned into the lair of a treasure-guarding dragon.

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