Tiddy Mun

Tiddy Mun was the bog spirit of the Lincolnshire Fens — a small, bent old man no taller than a child, with long white hair and beard, dressed in grey so that he melted into the mist and the marsh. His laugh was like the call of the peewit, and though uncanny he was not unkind: the fen-dwellers regarded him as the keeper of the waters, able to draw back the floods that threatened their homes. When the waters rose they would stand at the bog's edge at dusk and call to him, and the floods, they said, would recede.

His most famous tale belongs to the seventeenth-century draining of the Fens by Dutch engineers, which the fen people bitterly resented. As the marshes were drained Tiddy Mun was angered: cattle sickened, children pined and folk fell ill, until at last the people gathered at twilight with pails of fresh water, poured them into the dyke as an offering and begged his pardon. Tiddy Mun is a vivid relic of a lost wetland world — the spirit through whom its people struck an intimate, wary bargain with the water.