A luminous journey through a thousand years of folklore and English history.
Once upon a time in a Hertfordshire field, an ancient yew tree hid a dragon hunted by a giant named Piers Shonks. Today, the dragon and its slayer are the survivors of an 800-year battle between rural legend and national record, storytellers and sceptics.
In this brilliant and lyrical history, Christopher Hadley journeys from churches to tombs to manuscript margins, to explore history, memory and legend, and the magical spaces where all three meet.

Praise for Hollow Places
‘Impossible to summarise and delightfully absorbing, Hadley’s book is comfortably the most unexpected history book of the year’ Sunday Times

‘An ingenious meditation on what history, in all its complexity and unevenness, really is’ Rosemary Hill in The Guardian
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'Hollow Places is both the piercing dissection of a folktale and a thrilling rummage through the thickets of the English imagination...In fluid and satisfying prose, Hadley succeeds in transforming a literally parochial subject into a means of illuminating the tangled roots of story-telling and lost rural life. It is a reminder that to study folklore is to study the way that people construct meaning and a sense of belonging in the world around them: there are few subjects more compelling.' Thomas Williams, author of Viking Britain
‘Delights in [the] imaginative tales which have shaped and coloured the cultural landscape of the nation … Enriching and at times surprising’ Emma J. Wells in TLS
‘The past is animated with imagination and knowledge … Shonks and his story, the tomb and the now vanished yew are a starting point for a digressive and affectionate exploration of a local tradition that has survived for 800 years … Authoritative and well-researched’ Carolyne Larrington in The Spectator
​‘A sensitively intelligent excavation into Hertfordshire history, the English imagination and omnipresent myth’ Derek Turner in Country Life
​‘Enthralling … Hadley is not a professional historian but he is, as he shows in his meticulous and occasionally inspired researches, following a distinguished line of gifted, patient, sometimes brilliant amateurs’ David Horspool in The Oldie
'Hollow places is a love poem to a mysterious and enigmatic piece of stone, and a meditation on the enduring power of folklore to make sense of our world and its past...After so many centuries, the legend of the dragon slayer has found in Hadley a storyteller who revels in holding rapt the attention of his audience long into the night.' Kelcey Wilson-Lee, author of Daughters of Chivalry
‘This meditation on the power of folk myth lives up to its billing as an ‘unusual history’. It’s also engaging, wide-ranging stuff, exploring how stories become ties that bind’ BBC History Magazine
'Hollow Places may be set in Hertfordshire but its story speaks to us all....peels back the layers of the onion which lie behind anyone’s sense of place and history.....It is far more than "An Unusual History of Land and Legend" described on the cover; it is a magnificent history... Hollow Places is that most special of books. It invites us to see the landscape we are left with and to query how it came to be. It shows that everyone in a landscape is part of its tapestry.' Mythical Britain
Out now from William Collins in paperback, hardback, on Kindle and audiobook

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