From Burnt Oak to Ironwood

From Burnt Oak to Ironwood

The Sussex Dialect Tales of Eleanor Boniface

Launch day 6th June 2025 ~ Available to Pre-order

“And that didn’t satisfy the Ironwood women at all, no, that it didn’t.”

Some People of Hogg’s Hollow by Eleanor Boniface was published in 1924, and it is a very peculiar sort of book. It is set around an unnamed Sussex hamlet and consists of fourteen monologues by various villagers, just chatting about their lives, families, neighbours, local history, superstitions, even gossiping, and it is entirely narrated in dialect. The dialect is actually quite easy to read, and the author also wrote similar things for Sussex County Magazine in the 1930s. Her other work though was about northern Wales, and S’Nellie’s Welsh Fairy Tales was followed by two slim volumes of poetry, Welsh Ways & Days, published by Pepler & Sewell, St. Dominic’s Press; and Old Holy Things of Wales; and some of her fairy tales were read out on Welsh radio.

This book features Some People of Hogg’s Hollow in full, and it also includes other examples of her Sussex work, as well as a few of her Welsh fairy tales, poems, and a short biography and photographs of the author – whose real name was Ethel Hansen Caine.

Warning: Some of the Sussex monologues include descriptions of murder, bullying, domestic abuse, and suicides. There are also potentially disturbing accounts of strange phantoms, ghosts, poltergeists, witches, and of people behaving very weirdly.