At Tunstead, between Chapel-en-le-Frith and Whaley Bridge, a skull in three pieces has long been kept inside the window of a house. It is known as Dicky Tunstead. If the skull is taken away, things will go wrong in the house and on the land. When the house was being rebuilt and new windows put in, they set Dicky on a couple beam in the barn, and thought they had done with him, and would hear no more of him; but at the rearing supper he made such a disturbance that they had to bring him back into the house. Dicky appears in all kinds of shapes—sometimes as a dog, and sometimes as a young lady in a silk dress. In whatever form he appears, he will point to something amiss if you will follow him. One of the “quarrels” of glass in the window where Dicky is is always out, and if it is put in it is always found taken out again next morning.[120]
I was told that at Dunscar, a farmhouse in the parish of Castleton, there is a human skull on the outside of a window sill. If it is removed, the crops fare badly. I went to the farmhouse myself, and found no skull there, and the tenant who had lived there many years had never heard of such a thing.
Christmas Eve
In Bradwell Christmas Eve is known as Mischief Night. On that evening gates are pulled off and hung in trees, and farmers’ carts are taken away. They sometimes find them in the morning in a brook at the bottom of the hill. On a certain Mischief Night a farmer was pushing a cart down a steep hill into the brook with great eagerness, not knowing that it was his own cart. He said to his companions, “layt it choiz,”[121] i.e., let it down gently.
New Year
If you see the first new moon in the New Year through a glass there will be a death in the family.
At Great Hucklow they say that if you put clothes out on New Year’s Day there will be a death in the family before the end of the year.
Easter Observances
At Castleton and Bradwell, and in other villages of the High Peak, Easter Monday is known as Unlousing Day, i.e., releasing day. When a young woman came out of a house on the morning of that day the young men used to say “kiss or cuck.” If the girls refused the kiss the young men came in the evening and “cucked” them, i.e., tossed them up. The young women at Castleton used to “cuck” the young men on Easter Tuesday, and a tale is told there about a young man who was “cucked” so often on Easter Tuesday that he fell on his knees and implored an old woman who was driving a cow home not to “cuck” him. If the girl accepted the proffered kiss she was released, i.e., she escaped being tossed.