Most of the material was commonplace stuff to a modern reader; nothing Ellie couldn’t have found with a five-minute Google search, had the internet been working: folk rituals to find out the boy or girl you’d marry, like eating an apple at midnight on Halloween and looking in a mirror, or sleeping with a sprig of rosemary and a crooked sixpence under your pillow. And the ghost stories, of course: the headless woman who walked at a three-lane-ends between Dronfield and Cold Aston, or the murdered one who appeared by night in a house near Stony Middleton, poking holes in the bread.

But there were the other, darker tales: the little people; the cannibals of the woods near the Dane Valley, or the lost town of Kirk Flockton that had once stood on Fendmoor Heath and had sunk into it overnight “either – depending upon which account one takes heed of – due to tremors of the earth, flooding that made the Heath so marshy and dangerous a place, or due to being claimed by the Devil for the wickedness of its inhabitants”. Or that old Derbyshire staple, Hob Hirst – “from hob of the hirst”, Bayliss wrote, “although it may also derive from the Anglo-Saxon thurs or thyrs, meaning giant or monster”.

Thurs, Ellie noted: Thursdale?

“The current Church is not the original”, Bayliss noted, “having been built scarce fifty years ago. The original St Alkmund’s was on the far side of Barsall Village, where Blackfield Meadow now lies. Thus far I cannot determine the old church’s fate, or why it was not rebuilt upon the original site.

“Blackfield Meadow itself will, no doubt, repay further investigation: it is the site of the so-called ‘holy well’ – as elsewhere in the region, Barsall folk ‘dress the well’ each year, decking the well or spring in flowers to propitiate its native spirits – or, perhaps, the ‘little people’ who dwell beneath it. For in the legendry of Derbyshire we find, again and again, tales of hobs and sprites dwelling underground or in deep caves.

“The educated reader will of course be aware that many Christian churches were erected on sites once sacred to older, pagan faiths. Doing so both demonstrated the new faith’s superiority to the old, while subsuming the old faith into the new. I believe the old St Alkmund’s Church to have been one such case. I believe the name of the farmstead it stands beside – Grove Lea – to refer to one of the pagans’ sacred groves.