Deep in the folklore of West Cornwall lies a particularly sinister tale attached to a place that, today, is barely recognisable as anything extraordinary. At Higher Bodinar, near Newbridge between Penzance and St Just, an ancient underground structure known as a fogou was once feared as the dwelling place of a group of grotesque supernatural beings: the spriggans.
These were not the playful piskies of Cornish folklore. The spriggans were something considerably darker — ugly, spiteful creatures believed to guard ancient treasures hidden beneath the earth.
And at Higher Bodinar, tradition placed them directly beneath the feet of the living.
The Giant’s Holt
The underground structure at Higher Bodinar was traditionally known as the Giant’s Holt. It was one of Cornwall's fogous — mysterious subterranean chambers generally associated with Iron Age settlements.
Fogous remain difficult to interpret with certainty. Suggestions for their purpose have included storage, refuge and ritual activity, although there is no single explanation that applies conclusively to every example.
Higher Bodinar's fogou has unfortunately been destroyed. Today, little remains beyond a grass-covered depression in the ground.
But its folklore survived.
In the nineteenth century, Cornish folklorist William Bottrell recorded that the fuggo at Bodinnar, known as the Giant's Holt, had been greatly feared. Local tradition held that it was inhabited by "ugly spriggans" who guarded treasures believed to remain buried within the ancient hiding place.
It is a remarkably atmospheric combination: an ancient underground chamber, rumours of buried treasure and supernatural guardians supposedly prepared to punish anyone who disturbed their domain.
Spriggans were among the darker figures of Cornish fairy folklore, particularly associated with the western part of the county.
Unlike the comparatively playful piskies, spriggans were regarded as dangerous and malicious. William Bottrell described them as among the most dour and ugly of the supernatural beings belonging to the elfin world. They were traditionally associated with ancient ruins, barrows, giant's quoits, castles and other places where treasure was believed to lie hidden.
Their appearance was hardly reassuring. Folklore commonly portrayed them as wizened, grotesque little figures, sometimes with disproportionately large heads and shrunken bodies. Yet their diminutive appearance could be deceptive.
Some traditions claimed that spriggans possessed the ability to increase enormously in size, becoming formidable guardians when their territory was threatened. This led to the idea that they might represent, or even be the ghosts of, ancient giants.
In other words, the creature lurking beneath an ancient Cornish ruin might appear small — right up until somebody attempted to take what it was protecting.
Guardians of Buried Treasure
The connection between spriggans and treasure is particularly strong. Across Cornish folklore, ancient monuments and ruins were sometimes imagined as containing hidden wealth. The spriggans became the supernatural custodians of such places.
They were not necessarily the ones who had buried the treasure. Rather, they were its guardians. This distinction is important.
The danger was not simply that treasure existed. It was that someone might become foolish enough to try to take it.
At Higher Bodinar, the fogou therefore fitted perfectly into the traditional folklore surrounding spriggans. It was an ancient, mysterious underground structure, associated in local imagination with something valuable hidden beneath the earth.
And if the treasure really was there, the stories already had an explanation for why nobody had recovered it.
The spriggans were guarding it.
A Dangerous Place
The folklore surrounding Cornish fogous often transformed these mysterious underground structures into supernatural places.
At Boleigh, for example, tradition associated a fogou with evil spirits and the Bucca-boo. At Pendeen, another fogou was associated with the frightening "Spirit of the Vow". Higher Bodinar was specifically remembered as the haunt of treasure-guarding spriggans.
This suggests something broader than a single ghost story.
For generations, underground places could inspire a particular kind of fear. They were dark, enclosed and difficult to understand, while their original purpose had long since been forgotten.
Once their builders had disappeared from living memory, folklore could fill the silence. An ancient chamber became a giant's dwelling. A buried structure became a hiding place. And something unexplained beneath the ground became the home of supernatural beings.
The Spriggans' Dark Reputation
The spriggans were feared for more than protecting treasure.
Traditional stories attributed a remarkable range of mischief to them. They could supposedly create sudden whirlwinds, bring destructive weather, damage crops and torment people who ventured into their territory. They were also associated with the frightening folklore of changelings, in which a human child was supposedly stolen and replaced by a supernatural substitute.
This made them very different from the friendlier supernatural beings of Cornish tradition. Piskies might lead people astray or play tricks. Spriggans were something else.
They were guardians, bullies and supernatural enforcers — creatures whose job was effectively to make sure that humans respected boundaries.
And the boundary at Higher Bodinar may have been particularly important.
It was the boundary between the ordinary landscape above and an ancient hidden world below.
What Was Really Beneath Higher Bodinar?
The most intriguing question is not whether spriggans genuinely inhabited the fogou, but why this particular place acquired such a story.
The archaeological structure was real. The fogou existed. The ancient landscape surrounding it was real. And people evidently remembered the location strongly enough for its supernatural reputation to survive into the nineteenth century, when Bottrell recorded the tradition.
What we cannot establish is whether the original Iron Age occupants used the fogou for ritual purposes, storage, refuge or something else.
Nor can archaeology demonstrate that treasure was ever actually hidden there. The treasure belongs to folklore.
But that is precisely what makes the story interesting. The legend may preserve a distorted cultural memory of a place whose original meaning had been lost centuries earlier.
The Lost Fogou
Today, there is no dramatic underground chamber waiting to be explored at Higher Bodinar. The fogou has been destroyed, leaving little more than a grassy depression.
The physical place has therefore almost disappeared.
Its inhabitants, however, have survived.
The ugly spriggans of Higher Bodinar remain part of Cornwall's rich tradition of supernatural guardians — creatures imagined lurking beneath an ancient landscape, protecting whatever secrets and treasures might have been concealed there.
Perhaps the most fascinating part of the legend is that the spriggans were never simply monsters. They served a purpose. They marked forbidden places. They guarded the dead, the ancient and the buried.
They warned people not to disturb what lay beneath the ground.
And perhaps, in a landscape filled with prehistoric monuments and forgotten underground structures, that was exactly what a good monster was supposed to do.
The Mystery Remains
Higher Bodinar's spriggans cannot be excavated or photographed. The fogou they supposedly inhabited is largely gone, and no archaeological evidence demonstrates that supernatural beings — or even the legendary treasure — ever existed.
But the story recorded by Bottrell gives us something almost as fascinating: a glimpse into how nineteenth-century Cornish people understood an ancient landscape whose original inhabitants had vanished thousands of years earlier.
Somewhere beneath the grass at Higher Bodinar was once a mysterious underground chamber.
According to legend, ugly little guardians were waiting inside, protecting treasure that nobody had yet been brave — or foolish — enough to take.
And perhaps that is why the old stories never needed to tell us exactly what the treasure was.
The spriggans were still guarding it.
Read more on:
Boleigh Fogou: Cornwall’s Underground Mystery of Witches, Spirits and the Iron Age
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