Bessingby, on the edge of Bridlington, sits close to the line of a former Roman road, one of the few tangible traces still left in the local landscape of the Roman presence that once ran through this part of the East Riding. Two thousand years of ploughing and building have erased most of the physical evidence of that road, but the ground it once ran through has kept, according to local tradition, something less tangible than any surviving stonework.
The folklore attached to the fields here is modest, specific, and entirely without drama in the way it is told: dogs are said to behave unusually when crossing the area, growing hesitant or unsettled in a way their owners cannot otherwise explain, a change in behaviour that local tradition connects directly to the buried Roman route running beneath their feet rather than to any ghost, sighting, or dramatic historical incident.
Stories of animal sensitivity, dogs, horses or other creatures reacting to something their human companions cannot perceive at all, form a common and fairly low-key strand of English rural folklore, quieter and less theatrical than most of the ghost stories gathered elsewhere in this collection. Bessingby Fields offers a clear, honest example of exactly that type: no apparition is described, no historical death is named, nothing beyond an old buried road and an old, persistent belief that the animals crossing it notice something their owners simply walk past.
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