Royal Mail unveils eight folklore-inspired stamps

(Image credit: Royal Mail)

published 5 April 2025

If you see a sinister creature with long limbs, straggly hair and sharp teeth that looks like it wants to grab you, don’t go into the river.

The grindylow of Lancashire and Yorkshire folklore is among eight British mythical beings to be depicted in a new set of stamps by artist Adam Simpson.

Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill is there, along with Black Shuck, a terrifying East Anglian hound, Blodeuwedd, who was conjured from broom, meadowsweet and oak flowers, Beowulf defeating Grendel, the Loch Ness monster, a selkie and some mischievous Cornish piskies.

‘Each one is associated with a region, and each one has its own identity, and together they demonstrate our rich mythological heritage,’ comments the artist.

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Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.