A little bit of ambition can be a very good thing: and boy, is Yorkshire’s Strangest Tales ambitious. Author Leonora Rustamova hasn’t contented herself with retelling well-known folk tales from the last few centuries (though there are a few of those here too).
No, she delves far deeper into Yorkshire’s history – all the way back to the dinosaurs, in fact, for her opening essay Jurassic Yorkshire. It describes the marine reptiles that swam in the warm, shallow seas of what was to become Yorkshire, and the three-toed reptilian giants that stalked the sea shores.
Other ‘strange tales’ include the story of Britain’s oldest house (at Starr Carr, a Stone Age site near the North York Moors, built in about 11,000 BC); an account of the ‘Stonehenge of the north’ (Thornborough Henges in North Yorkshire); and a life of a ‘very old man’ (a Celtic warrior who died at the ripe old age of 60, before the Romans arrived, and whose body was discovered in 1834 near Filey).
An often surprising book, containing several nuggets of pure gold.
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