The Dragon of Knucker Hole, Lyminster in Sussex

There was a huge dragon living in a pool near Lyminster, eating people’s cows – and maidens, if he could get them. Brave Jim Puttock knew how to deal with the dragon; he made an enormous suet pudding and took it by horse and cart to the pond. “What you got there?” asks the dragon. “Pudden,” says Jim. And the dragon swallows up the pudding – horse and cart and all – and demands more.

Jim brings another enormous pudding, and this is enough to give the dragon the collywobbles, and he feels very poorly. Jim pretends to lean in to offer the dragon some medicine, but actually hits the stricken dragon’s head with an axe and kills him.

There are quite a few greedy dragon stories through history; in a Yorkshire version the sticky ginger treat, parkin, is the dragon’s undoing. The Yorkshire tale was in fact collected from a stable-hand in Somerset, so the story contains a good deal of Somerset dialect.

The history: This version of the Knucker Hole story was recorded in the Sussex County Magazine in 1929. British dragon-tales, about saints and knights who vanquish them with the help of God or sharp swords; about clever peasants who eliminate dragons through cunning; and the many dragons who still live hidden in our hills, have been collected by the well-known folklorist Jacqueline Simpson in her book British Dragons (2001).