Every village has at least one story that everybody knows and nobody can date. The lane where a grey lady walks at dusk. The pond said to be bottomless. The stone that turns over when the church clock strikes. These tales feel ancient, and that feeling is exactly what makes them worth investigating. Plenty of them can be traced to a single Victorian newspaper paragraph, a guidebook written to sell railway tickets, or one person who told a story well. Finding out which is which is the real pleasure of the work.

You do not need a degree or a membership card to do this. You need a notebook, a library card, patience and a willingness to write down what you do not know. Here is how to go about it.

Start with the version you already have

Before you touch a catalogue, write down the story as you know it. Then write down where you got it. If a neighbour told you, note their name, roughly when, and where they heard it. Variants are not noise — they are evidence. Two versions of the same tale, one from each end of the parish, tell you something about how it travelled.

Ask around before you go looking. Open questions work best: What do you know about the old mill? Do not correct anyone, and do not finish their sentences. Note the small details — a name, a field, a smell, a time of night — because those are the things that can be pinned to a place.

• Write down the story, the teller, the date and the place.
• Note any names, spellings and pronunciations, including variants.
• Mark the landmarks mentioned: the bridge, the well, the gate, the tree.
• Record which bits people agree on and which bits they do not.

The local studies library comes first

Most British counties have a local studies collection, usually in the main county library, a central reference library or a dedicated local studies centre. This is where you will find the accumulations that never made it online: parish files, cuttings collections, pamphlets by long-dead local historians, runs of the parish magazine, and indexes to the local paper.

Tell the staff the story in one sentence and ask what they hold. The county folklore volume is a good starting point if one exists — the Folklore Society's County Folklore series has been running since the 1890s, and it often gives a nineteenth-century version with a note of who collected it. Nationally, Katharine Briggs's A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales and Westwood and Simpson's The Lore of the Land are useful for checking whether your story turns up in the next county along.

Maps tell you what the story will not

Maps are the most underused tool in legend research. A story about a haunted lane makes much more sense once you see that the lane once led to a gibbet, a gallows field or a burial ground for unbaptised children.

Start with the Ordnance Survey first edition six-inch maps, surveyed from the 1840s onwards, then compare with the twenty-five-inch maps and later editions. Tithe maps and their apportionments, drawn up from the 1830s to the 1850s, give you field names. Those names are gold: Gallows Hill, Chapel Piece, Coldharbour, Dead Lane, Puck's Meadow. Enclosure awards, estate maps and tithe files can push you back further.

Then look at what has vanished. A filled-in pond, a demolished farm, a well under a car park — these are often the precise spots where a story sits. For above-ground remains, search the Historic Environment Record for your county; in Scotland, Canmore and Historic Environment Scotland hold the equivalent, and in Wales, Coflein and the National Library of Wales. Many historic maps are free to view online, which saves you a journey before you know whether the site is worth one.

Archives: following the paper trail

Your county record office holds the documents that can turn a story into a dated event. The most productive places to look are:

• Parish registers, for a burial that matches a name in the tale.
• Churchwardens' accounts, for payments for bells, candles, or the repair of a churchyard cross.
• Manorial court rolls, for disputes over rights of way, ponds, wells and commons.
• Quarter sessions and coroners' records, because a suspicious death is a fine seed for a ghost story.
• Antiquarian notebooks — nineteenth-century collectors often wrote down tales they heard, sometimes with the teller's name.

Search The National Archives' Discovery catalogue first; it reaches across hundreds of archives in one go, so you can order documents in advance rather than turning up cold. Newspaper archives are worth the effort too. Victorian local papers printed ghost stories, strange deaths and "singular traditions" as filler, and a printed version from 1874 may be the earliest surviving record of a tale your neighbours believe is medieval. Many libraries offer free access to newspaper databases on their own computers.

Take a pencil — most archives do not allow pens — and note the full document reference every time. Photograph where permitted, and write the reference in the same breath, or you will have a folder of images you cannot cite.

Oral history, done properly

If people will talk to you, that is a gift, and it comes with obligations. Ask permission before recording, explain what you intend to do with the recording, and be clear if you plan to publish, deposit or quote it. If you do plan to publish, get that permission in writing. Never record covertly, and accept "no" gracefully.

When you interview, keep questions open and follow the digressions, because the digressions often carry the detail. Useful questions include: who told you that? When did you first hear it? Did it happen to someone you knew? Has anyone told it differently? Note the date, the place and the setting. Transcribe the parts that matter while the conversation is still fresh in your mind, and offer to give the speaker a copy.

Weighing up what you have found

Now ask hard questions of your own material. What is the earliest dated version? Does the tale also attach itself to a village twenty miles away? Is the place name doing the work — a "Giant's Grave" that is really just a long barrow, or a "Roman road" that is a turnpike? Many customs described as ancient turn out to have been revived or invented in the nineteenth or twentieth century, and saying so is not a failure. Nor is saying "we do not know".

Keep personal-experience stories separate from traditional tales; a neighbour's account of something odd in 1978 is a different kind of evidence from a story printed in 1878. Be cautious with self-published local books that recycle claims without references, and with websites that quietly copy one another until a mistake looks like a fact.

Keeping a record worth passing on

Your research is only as good as the note you leave behind. Keep a log: date, source, reference number, what it said, and what you made of it. When you write up the legend, cite properly — author, title, publisher, year, page, and archive reference where relevant — and say plainly which parts are documented and which are still just stories.

Then give something back. Deposit a copy with the local studies library, the record office, the parish council or the local history society, and send a written summary to anyone who helped. In fifty years, someone will pick up your notes and start again from where you stopped, which is exactly how this work has always been done.

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