In this village, near Howden, once stood the Elizabethan mansion of Spaldington Hall.

The family there had a hob or brownie known as Robin Round-cap, who was still remembered by many of the old inhabitants of Spaldington when Dunhill was writing. Like a number of other hobs, hobthrusts and hobmen he was a good-natured creature who sometimes lent a hand to the threshers or the maids, but at other times played them annoying tricks - mixing the winnowed wheat with the chaff, putting out the fire and kicking over the milk pail.

He was eventually conjured by three clergymen into a well, where he agreed to remain quiet for a given number of years.

According to a rationalised version of the story that probably arose when people no longer believed in fairies and elementals, Robin Round-cap was the revenant or ghost of a family jester in the time of James l. One day, when he had proved especially irritating, someone kicked him downstairs and he was killed. His ghost haunted the hall thereafter, getting up to the same tricks as in life, until the owner of the hall had the local vicar pray it down into a well for three generations. They made sure of keeping it down by a willow stake driven through its heart. (This illogical detail - how do you stake a ghost? - appears to have crept in from tales of staking executed criminals and suspected vampires, to stop them 'walking').

The hall was pulled down in about 1800, and a farmhouse built on the site, some of the old materials being reused. Robin Round-cap's Well was still in existence in Dunhill's day but was subsequently covered and is now somewhere under the yard behind the farmhouse.

Edna Whelan and Ian Taylor, in Yorkshire Holy Wells and Sacred Springs (1989) reported poltergeist activity in the house, locally attributed to Robin being 'out of the well'.

Taken from The Lore of the Land, a Guide to England's Legends, from Spring-Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson.
Published by Puffin.