Jeremy HarteEvery podcast appearance, updated as new ones drop

Jeremy Harte, President of the Folklore Society, joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book Treasures on Earth: Buried Wealth in Landscape and Legend (Reaktion, 2026). The book uncovers the deep folklore of Britain's buried riches, fears, and desires. From haunted barrows to ruined castles, Britain's landscape is rich with tales of hidden treasure--stories not just of gold, but of ghosts, curses, and forbidden knowledge. Treasures on Earth gathers hundreds of these traditions for the first time, showing how folklore, shaped by local memory and longing, has imagined wealth not merely as currency, but as power, danger, and loss...

Jeremy Harte, President of the Folklore Society, joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book Treasures on Earth: Buried Wealth in Landscape and Legend (Reaktion, 2026). The book uncovers the deep folklore of Britain's buried riches, fears, and desires. From haunted barrows to ruined castles, Britain's landscape is rich with tales of hidden treasure--stories not just of gold, but of ghosts, curses, and forbidden knowledge. Treasures on Earth gathers hundreds of these traditions for the first time, showing how folklore, shaped by local memory and longing, has imagined wealth not merely as currency, but as power, danger, and loss...

Jeremy Harte, President of the Folklore Society, joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book Treasures on Earth: Buried Wealth in Landscape and Legend (Reaktion, 2026). The book uncovers the deep folklore of Britain's buried riches, fears, and desires. From haunted barrows to ruined castles, Britain's landscape is rich with tales of hidden treasure--stories not just of gold, but of ghosts, curses, and forbidden knowledge. Treasures on Earth gathers hundreds of these traditions for the first time, showing how folklore, shaped by local memory and longing, has imagined wealth not merely as currency, but as power, danger, and loss...

In this episode of the Anglotopia Podcast, Jonathan Thomas sits down with Jeremy Harte — folklorist, winner of the Catherine Briggs Folklore Award, curator of Bourne Hall Museum in Surrey, and author of Cloven Country: The Devil in the English Landscape and Travelers Through Time: A Gypsy History — to discuss his remarkable new book Treasures on Earth: Buried Wealth in the English Landscape , published by Reaktion Books. Jeremy has spent his career chasing the uncanny side of the English landscape, and in this book he has gathered hundreds of treasure legends together for the first time — organizing them not by region or date but by emotion: memory, ruin, strife, terror, failure, and longing. The result is one of the most original and quietly brilliant books on English folklore in years, and the conversation it generates is irresistible: Why did people surround buried gold with dragons, black hens, and demons? What does the moment a laborer on the River Ribble accidentally uncovered a Viking army's war chest have in common with Oak Island? Why is the folklore always cruelest at the very last minute? What is the real fantasy underneath the search for treasure — not gold, but escape, freedom, and the dream of never having to work again? And what does the figure of Mackenzie Crook's Detectorists , swinging their machines over Essex fields and dreaming of Saxon gold, tell us about the ancient human urge that these legends have always mapped? Links Treasures on Earth by Jeremy Harte (Reaktion Books) Cloven Country: The Devil in the English Landscape by Jeremy Harte Travelers Through Time: A Gypsy History by Jeremy Harte Bourne Hall Museum, Ewell, Surrey The Cuerdale Hoard The Rillaton Cup Detectorists — Mackenzie Crook (BBC/AcornTV) Friends of Anglotopia Club Takeaways Treasure legends are not really about gold. They are, as Jeremy Harte argues throughout, about the emotions that surround gold — longing, memory, failure, terror, and the fantasy of transformation. The stories survived because of what they did to the people who told and heard them, not because of any actual buried wealth. The Cuerdale Hoard — the largest Viking silver hoard ever found in Britain, unearthed by laborers straightening the River Ribble in the 1840s — is one of the most powerful examples of how real treasure finds retrospectively generate legends. Almost all treasure "traditions" that seem to predict a find are only recorded after the find is made. The classic Anglo-Saxon image of the dragon sitting on a barrow of gold — doing nothing but guarding it forever, sacrificing whatever life a dragon might have — is, Jeremy argues, an early cultural articulation of what happens when treasure takes over a human life. The same psychology drives Oak Island today. Treasure guardians shift with the centuries — dragons and giants give way to fairies, then to demons, then to ghosts — not randomly but in response to what each era finds believable. A legend must sit in the zone between "obviously true" and "obviously made up" to function: too real and it's history,

Jeremy Harte, author of Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape , talks to David Saunderson about the colourful folklore surrounding England's countryside, where legends depict a landscape shaped by devilish hands. You can buy Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape from Reaktion Books . Discover more British and Irish folklore on Spooky Isles .