Hob Hole is a cave in the cliff near Kettleness, a village that fell into the sea in December 1829. Local tradition associates the cave with a genial Hob who cures whooping cough, giving the place a modest folkloric presence in the Yorkshire landscape and, later, a possible clue in the investigation of Christabel LaMotte’s movements.

Setting and Local Tradition

Randolph Henry Ash describes Hob Hole in a letter about the Yorkshire coast. He contrasts the lack of legends he could find about drowned coastal communities such as Auburn, Hartburn, Hyde, and Aldbrough with Brittany’s richer legendary associations. The sea has yielded traces of houses and churches on offshore sandbanks, but the more immediate local marvel is the Hob of Hob Hole, whose supposed remedy for whooping cough is known in the district as a cure for the “kink-cough.”

The cave is tied to the fate of Kettleness: on a dark night in December 1829, the village slid smoothly down into the sea. Hob Hole thus sits within a landscape where ordinary coastal geography and supernatural explanation meet. Ash also describes his own collecting along the coast, including searching a deep pool at Filey Brigg for a polyp; a wave swept away a net he had left nearby, though he was otherwise unharmed. His letter sets folklore beside geological change and field observation, without resolving their different kinds of explanation.

A Motif in the Yorkshire Inquiry

The Hob story returns when Roland Michell and Maud Bailey consider the year before Blanche Glover’s death in June 1860, a period for which they have little evidence about Christabel LaMotte beyond letters from Lincolnshire. They note fragments of Melusina and fairy tales Christabel sent to Home Notes, including one about a Hob who cures whooping cough. The resemblance to Ash’s account is suggestive, but Maud stresses that it proves nothing: Christabel could have heard the tale from Ash, or encountered it elsewhere.

The parallel becomes one element in Roland’s proposed method of tracing the connection between Ash and LaMotte. He had considered retracing Ash’s steps in Yorkshire with the poems in hand, looking for correspondences that might reveal whether Christabel had accompanied him. Ash’s letter to his wife mentions the Hob who cures whooping cough, while Christabel wrote a tale about such a figure. Ash’s interest in drowned Yorkshire villages also connects in Roland’s reading with the City of Is, alongside the account he gives of Lyell’s geological observations. Taken individually, these echoes remain circumstantial; Roland’s hope is that their accumulation might disclose a pattern.

Storytelling and Transmission

The tale of the Hob also appears among the stories associated with winter storytelling in Brittany. Sabine de Kercoz records that her father told tales throughout the two Black Months, while Christabel was staying with the family. His scholarly, exacting style differed from the more theatrical storytelling of local figures, yet he had made Sabine believe in the creatures of myth and legend. Among the works Christabel had sent to Home Notes was the whooping-cough Hob story, placing the motif between written publication and the intimate world of family storytelling.

Sabine’s reflections on Gode’s oral tales clarify what is at stake in that passage between forms. Her father had tried to record Gode’s stories verbatim, preserving their rhythms while adding and removing nothing, but Sabine felt that the life of the telling disappeared on the page. She initially wanted her journal to record what she heard accurately, then abandoned that effort out of courtesy and concern for the loss caused by transcription. Her later decision to write privately for her own eyes gives writing a different purpose: not simply to preserve an oral performance, but to discover what she herself had seen. Against that tension, the Hob story’s movement between Ash’s letter, Christabel’s published tale, and later scholarly comparison makes folklore both a living tradition and a fragile documentary trace.