Tallentire, a small village near Cockermouth, carries a local buried-treasure legend of an instantly recognisable folk type found in various forms across the country: a decapitated female ghost said to stand guard over a hoard of gold hidden somewhere near the village's own tower, her missing head an unsettling detail that marks her out even among treasure-guardian ghosts generally.
Treasure-guardian ghost stories of this particular shape recur across English folklore in many regional variations, and they generally function to explain a real or rumoured buried hoard while simultaneously discouraging anyone from actually digging for it themselves, the fear of the guardian doing the practical work of protecting whatever might genuinely lie beneath the ground.
No name, date, or account of how the woman came to lose her head, or why she specifically guards this particular gold, has been traced for this entry, and she is recorded here as a thinly detailed but genuinely distinct piece of west Cumbrian treasure-lore, her missing head standing in for a fuller backstory that has simply not survived alongside the bare image itself.
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