Hello!

Today marks the autumn equinox. Day and night are of equal length. It is a time of balance, which we need in these uncertain times. Creatively, it’s a nice time to put the finishing touches to work, and to continue to enjoy the fruits of my creativity. It is the doorway to winter, and I can begin to plant the seeds of new creative ideas I wish to nurture in the coming year. The equal measure of light and dark is an opportunity to reflect on what is and isn’t working in my creative practice, and acknowledge my strengths and weaknesses. 

In a time of division, it reminds us there is a neutral point between two polarised views. A common ground where fractures can be healed. We all have different opinions, but we are capable of discussing these. We can listen to another’s point of view and discuss it critically without resorting to insults.  

Finally querying!

There are many pathways to publishing, and I’m presently querying my novel to agents. It’s an exciting time. Luckily, I have experience in writing charitable funding applications, which have a similar acceptance rate. Rejections are hard, but all art is subjective, and agents want something they can get behind and see a market for it. I have fingers (and everything else) crossed.

Planting the seeds for a new story.

Curtis Brown Creative posts regular prompts on their Bluesky and Instagram pages (with writing courses for prizes). One prompt sparked a story idea about the relationship between a siren and a person with impaired hearing. This is one part of the writing community on social media which I love. A single prompt can blossom into an entire novel. 

Here is a recent piece I entered.

Something had shattered.

But I couldn’t hear the splintering pieces. The vessel leans. Frothing white waves like hungry, jagged teeth, consume the hull with ravenous bites until nothing remains except the mast and the writhing bodies of sailors battling to reach the shore.

Mor’s body tenses; my hand is his anchor.

From our shoreline hiding place, I watch the first sailors stagger through the shallows. How did they perceive the men rushing towards them? Friend? Foe? 

The nearest sailor learns the answer. A flash of steel. His outstretched arm is hacked clean away, and the wrecker’s boot in his chest leaves him floundering. 

My hand tightens over Mor’s. But it’s like he’s being pulled by an invisible current. 

He breaks from my grip. His eyes are the colour of the merciless sea. 

No, I sign. 

I will not see murderers go unpunished! he signs back, and enters the pandemonium. 

I knew Mor was from the sea. Not a sailor. Not even human, but he’s fooled everyone living in the bay. 

But not me.

No scales. No fishtail. But I’d heard tales of the bucca and the mermaid, and I’d read of Odysseus and the sirens. Mor was closer to those than he was to me. 

But in me, he found a friend because his voice had no power on my deaf ears. 

Mor speaks. I hear nothing. But everyone on the moonlit beach looks towards him, even the half-drowned sailors. His words float across the water, and they hold onto them like jetsam.

I read Mor’s lips. ‘Help them,’ he tells the wreckers. ‘Then fill your pockets full of stones and walk into the sea.’

My heart hammers in my chest. Thirteen sailors they dragged from the water. Thirteen wreckers, pebbles bulging in their pockets, disappear beneath the waves.

Sirens and mermaids are popular folklore creatures in fiction. Authors like Natalie Haynes are retelling Greek Mythology from the female perspective. Emilia Hart’s The Sirens is a recent bestselling novel about sisterhood and mermaids. Sam K Horton’s historical fantasy, Ragwort, delves into Cornish seafaring folklore. In my emerging story, I wanted to focus specifically on the mythological marine creature named the bucca. Perhaps you’ve never heard of the bucca before? If so, read on! 

The Bucca

The bucca is a Cornish sea creature that inhabits the sea, coastal mines and caves. 

All the tales I’ve found say the bucca is male, with brown skin like a conger eel and seaweed for hair. He is typically ambivalent, often helping fishermen by driving shellfish into their pots, and the fishermen would repay the kindness by leaving some of their catch for the bucca. This practice was so popular in Newlyn that bucca became a nickname in Penzance for those from Newlyn. 

Equally, the bucca would drive the fish away from the nets and call upon a bad wind if he didn’t like you. A supernatural take on 'be nice to your neighbours and they will be nice to you'.

This switch in character brought the distinction between buccas who are good/white (Bucca Gwidden) and bad/black (Bucca Dhu). A bucca-boo (a corruption of Bucca Dhu) was a threat to misbehaving children, who apparently liked to carry off naughty children.

Play your cards right

Quite often, the tales of the bucca become more akin to a typical bogeyman or devilish creature. A story from Stories and Folklore of West Cornwall by William Bottrell tells of a sociable old woman who, regardless of the weather, walked to Trebear to play cards into the early hours with her like-minded friends. This displeased her stepdaughter, who detested the gossip this caused. Keen to kill off her stepmother’s enjoyment, she convinced a servant to don a white sheet to impersonate a local ghost said to walk the lane the old woman travelled after midnight. After three hours of waiting in the rain, the cold, sodden, and thoroughly miserable ghost saw the old woman returning home. She climbed the stile near to where he hid and she said quite coolly: ‘Hello, Bucca Gwidden! What cheer! And what are you doing here with Bucca Dhu right behind you?’  

The bedraggled servant, so frightened by the possibility of the evil thing lurking behind him, ran off as fast as he could, and the old woman continued to go to her social card games and stayed up into the early hours for the rest of her days. 

Cakey Tea

Another tale mentions the bucca were partial to a bit of cake (who isn’t?) and would steal it from the oven when nobody was looking. 

A bucca was also a common name used for an oafish person. 

Many coves have their folktales of the bucca. M. A. Courtney’s Cornish Feasts and Folklore mentions rocks near Newlyn covered in strange markings. Legend says a bucca stole a fisherman’s net and cast it on the rock, where it turned to stone. The scientific explanation is these markings are veins of elvan, a very hard type of granite. 

Beauty and the Beast

Henry J Harris’ Cornish Saints and Sinners recounts a story of the bucca who lives in the cove and follows a plot similar to Beauty and the Beast. The bucca was once a handsome prince, cursed to live as a bucca for one thousand years unless he could win a woman’s love. 

Seeing the bucca was a sad, lonely creature, the cove’s inhabitants showed him kindness. In turn, the bucca filled their nets and helped their boats across stormy waters. Anyone ignorant enough to make fun of him found their nets empty and he would let the storms drown them.

Generations came and went, and the lonely bucca held no hope of winning a woman’s love until he saved a young girl named Grace from drowning. Grace grew into a beautiful woman, and he pined to win her love. But she married Seth Barton, who spent his days crabbing while leaving his new wife to mend his pots and gear ashore. When Seth was at sea, the bucca mended the pots and gear for Grace. He also slipped into her dreams as the human prince he once was. Grace fell in love with her dream prince, but in her waking life there was only the ugly bucca. She scorned him, saying: ‘That if he were but as her dream prince, she'd follow him over sea and land.’

That night, the prince returned to Grace’s dreams. Unbeknownst to her, she sleepwalked into her husband’s boat, and the bucca carried her across the waves. The sea shimmered with the creatures of the deep. All watched, hopeful the bucca would win his love. 

In Grace’s dream, the prince changed into the bucca and implored her to love him and break the curse. She looked deep into his flat, fish-like eyes and saw no human soul there. She screamed, jolting herself from the bucca’s dream. 

Wordlessly, the bucca guided the boat back to shore, knowing he was doomed to live a lonely thousand years in this form. He still lives there, and the women of the cove were never taught to row, lest the bucca take a fancy to them and carry them out to sea. 

It is a patriarchal ending to a sad tale. 

The buccas’ origins

The buccas' origins likely stem from the Irish Púca and the Welsh Pwca. Both names are associated with an ambivalent creature found within rural and marine communities, suggesting a Celtic connection. There are many sea creatures in Celtic myth. The Mari-Morgans (sea-born) are a Breton legend of ageless, beautiful women with hypnotic voices who sit in the water while seductively combing their hair. Depending on the tale, the men they ensnared were either drowned or taken into their underwater cave, and married them. Cornwall has its own mermaids, which I’ve mentioned here. 

Do you have any local folk stories? Have you ever been inspired to learn more or to write about them? Let me know! 

Much Love!

Emma