Hello, and a very warm welcome to No Heathen Land a podcast retelling macabre, intriguing and just plain weird stories of the past from God’s own Country, Yorkshire.

In my opinion, Yorkshire is the perfect breeding ground for the most weird and wonderful tales. In Yorkshire we have the rolling vast countryside of the dales, dark tangled woodlands, remote backroads but also industry, hard labour, a history of staunch religion, faming, tight knit communities, immigration, a welcoming attitude, intolerance, riots…much of this documented, a vast amount not. It’s the stories in-between the newspaper headlines that I really want to get into - through my experience in working in Local History it’s really quite surprising how many odd tales you come across simply looking into one single person’s family history for example, a newspaper article, a diary entry, a theatre playbill, a photograph. I’m very lucky to have made friendships and connections with interesting and enthusiastic people right here in Yorkshire, each episode will feature one of them as a very special guest where we will delve into some of the stories we’ve come across that have fascinated, baffled and sometimes unnerved us.