New Glass Design Characters
We’ve some new-style glasses on the streets – a pint glass and a tumbler – featuring a host of wonderful and weird characters that have been associated with our beers in the recent past. Artist Claudia Bowler peppered the Bigger Picture artwork that formed our recent Yorkshire-wide treasure hunt with creatures and folk from various Yorkshire myths and legends – plus her own lurid imagination. The nine-can Bigger Picture series labels went on to form one treasure map of God’s Own County:
A number of the key characters (and often their partner animals…) feature in the new glass design wrap.
Can you remember how they were all involved? Here’s a quick breakdown:
Several of the characters above featured on The Western Wall can, which celebrated the ‘Western Wall’ of the Pennines as a bulwark against the badlands of Derbyshire. The image focusses on the story of the Cottingley faeries and imagines a doorway into the ether world of rock monsters, goat lords and other grey folk. Masked creatures and a floating fairy can be traced back to this label.
The person of the ‘Wanderer’ with his dog occurs in a couple of places within the Bigger Picture and is first seen in the initial can: ‘Where’s Malton?’. It’s on that label too that we encounter the junior offspring of the Slingsby Serpent – a local wyvern (or dragon). In 1619 the antiquary Roger Dodsworth recounted the story of a serpent having lived in a recess near the village of Slingsby. It was said that the villagers re-routed the road to avoid its lair, before it was slain by a member of the local Wyville family.
The sea monster image is drawn from ‘Monsters of the Deep’. Long before anyone had ever heard of a beast in Loch Ness, 1920s Hull lived in fear of a man-eating sea monster. First accounts of Humber estuary sea serpents appear in the Hull press from 1816, and reports continue to this day. West Hull’s famous polar bear and ‘The Pig Man’ of East Hull also crop-up in this image, alongside a slightly rude reference to the turnip-eating goblins of Lincolnshire. If you’ve not already detected the theme, then it’s fair to say that there is a little scepticism about what lies outside the borders of Yorkshire.
‘Kingdom of the Sparkle Pony’ gave us the unicorns of the Yorkshire Northwest and the Scottish raiders (with the helpful rabbits to preserve our modesty). A successful wrecker or smuggler enjoying their ill-gotten beery gains from ‘Smugglers & Wreckers’ is propped against a barrel – which presumably contains more of the same. Dracula has a cameo in ‘Werewolf vs Gytrash’, in reference to his arrival at Whitby. So too the Merman of Skinningrove, who was said to have come ashore in the village in 1530. Finally, the reputed witch Peg Fyfe is given a third eye and tentacle hair by Claudia Bowler. She led a gang of criminals in the Market Weighton area during the 17th century. Feared and detested in equal measure, she infamously flayed a young man alive after he betrayed her before a horse-rustling raid – but got her comeuppance at the gallows.
The new glasses only feature some of the characters invented by Claudia, but each one has a tale or myth behind it and remind us of the richness of the Yorkshire legends.
Find the new pint glass and tumbler in our webshop.
