There are stories that belong to a place so completely that the land itself seems to remember them. Woolpit, a quiet village in the Suffolk clay, carries one such story — and it is, I promise you, one of the strangest tales these islands have ever produced.

Pull your chair closer. This one deserves your full attention.

The Arrival

Sometime during the troubled reign of King Stephen — so we are talking the 1130s or 1140s, when England was tearing itself apart in civil war — the people of Woolpit found something extraordinary at the edge of their village.

The wolf pits were still in use then. These were the great earthen traps dug to catch the wolves that plagued the Suffolk countryside, and they gave the village its name. One harvest time, the reapers working the fields near these pits heard a commotion and went to investigate. What they found stopped them dead.

Two children — a boy and a girl — were crawling out of one of the pits. They were small, frightened, clinging to each other. They wore clothing of an unfamiliar material and colour. And their skin was green. Not a trick of the light, not the flush of illness that might pass for something odd. Green. The deep, unmistakable green of living leaves.

The children were weeping, babbling in a language nobody could understand. The villagers, to their great credit, did not drive them away or do them harm. They were taken to the home of Sir Richard de Calne, the local landowner, where attempts were made to feed them.

But the children refused everything. Bread, meat, pottage — they turned away from it all, growing thinner and more distressed by the day. It was only when someone brought in freshly cut broad beans, still in their stalks, that the children fell upon them with desperate hunger. For weeks, raw broad beans were the only food they would touch.

The boy, always the weaker of the two, never thrived. He grew listless and pale — or rather, his green pallor deepened into something sickly — and despite the care of Sir Richard's household, he died. Some accounts say he was baptised before the end. I hope that brought comfort to someone.

But the girl survived.

The Girl's Tale

Slowly, over months that stretched into years, the surviving child changed. She began to eat other foods. The green colour of her skin faded, gradually, until she looked much like any other Suffolk girl. She learned English. She was baptised. And at last, she could tell her story.

She said they came from a place called St Martin's Land.

It was, she explained, a country of perpetual twilight. There was no sun as we know it — only a soft, dim light, like the glow just before dawn that never quite arrives. Everything in St Martin's Land was green. The people, the landscape, the strange half-light that suffused it all. Across a wide river, she said, you could see another land — a bright, sunlit country — but the people of St Martin's Land could not reach it.

She and her brother had been tending their father's flocks when they heard a great noise. Some versions say it was the sound of bells — the loud, deep clanging of church bells, though from where she could not say. Drawn by the sound, the children followed it into a cavern. They walked through darkness for what felt like a long time, guided by the ringing, until they emerged blinking into a light brighter than anything they had ever known.

The sun. The ordinary English sun. It struck them like a blow.

Dazed and terrified, unable to find the cavern entrance again, they stumbled about until they fell into the wolf pit, where the reapers found them.

The girl eventually married a man from King's Lynn — or possibly Lenna, as the old sources say. Ralph of Coggeshall, who recorded the tale, described her as "rather loose and wanton in her conduct," though one suspects old Ralph disapproved of most women who spoke their minds. She lived out her days in Norfolk, a woman from nowhere, carrying the memory of a green twilight land that no one else had ever seen.

What the Scholars Say

Now, here is what gives this story its backbone. It was not written down by some anonymous scribbler centuries after the fact. Two serious chroniclers of the twelfth century recorded it independently, both claiming to have gathered their accounts from people who knew the facts directly.

William of Newburgh, a Yorkshire canon writing his Historia rerum Anglicarum around 1198, included the story with visible unease. He was a careful historian — sceptical, even — and he prefaced the tale by saying he had long doubted it, but that the weight of reliable witnesses compelled him to include it. He considered it a genuine mystery.

Ralph of Coggeshall, a Cistercian monk at an abbey in Essex, wrote his account around the same time. His version includes slightly different details — he names Sir Richard de Calne as the children's protector and adds the detail about the girl's eventual marriage. Ralph was closer to Suffolk than William, and his account has the feel of local knowledge carefully gathered.

Two independent sources. Both writing within living memory of the events. Both troubled by what they were recording. That is unusual, and it is what has kept scholars arguing about Woolpit for nine hundred years.

So what actually happened? The theories are numerous, and none of them is entirely satisfying.

The most pragmatic suggestion is that the children were Flemish orphans. In the mid-twelfth century, Flemish immigrants were present across East Anglia, and they faced periodic persecution. Some were massacred after the Battle of Fornham in 1173. Two lost, malnourished Flemish children, speaking a language the Suffolk villagers could not understand, wandering in from the forests — that much is plausible. The village of Fornham St Martin is only a few miles from Woolpit, which might account for "St Martin's Land."

The green skin has been attributed to chlorosis — green sickness — a form of anaemia that can give the skin a distinctly greenish tinge, especially in severely malnourished children. A diet of nothing but raw beans would be consistent with desperate hunger and unfamiliarity with local foods.

Others have pointed to arsenic. The forests of medieval Suffolk were used for copper smelting, and arsenic exposure can produce a greenish discolouration of the skin. Two children living rough near such works might well have absorbed enough to turn visibly green.

And then there are the folklorists, who note that the story follows patterns found in fairy traditions across Northern Europe — the underground land, the passage through a cave, the otherworldly colour, the inability to return. The Green Children may be a real event that accumulated fairy-tale motifs as it was retold, or a fairy tale that attached itself to real children. The boundary between history and folklore in the twelfth century was thinner than we like to pretend.

I will tell you what I think, for what it is worth. I think something happened at Woolpit. Two children appeared, and they were strange enough to be remembered. Everything else — the green skin, St Martin's Land, the bells in the cavern — may be true, or may be the story that grew around a kernel of genuine bewilderment. That is how folklore works. It does not lie, exactly. It remembers differently.

Visiting Woolpit

Woolpit today is a handsome Suffolk village, the kind of place where you might stop for a pint and end up staying all afternoon. It sits just off the A14 between Stowmarket and Bury St Edmunds, surrounded by the gentle, rolling farmland that makes this corner of Suffolk so quietly beautiful.

The village sign, standing proudly on the green, features the two green children — a wonderful piece of local art that tells you immediately this is a place that owns its strange history. You will want to photograph it.

St Mary the Virgin, the parish church, is a beauty. It dates from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with a stunning porch and some fine flintwork that is characteristic of the great Suffolk wool churches. The church is usually open during daylight hours, and it is well worth a visit in its own right, quite apart from its proximity to the old wolf pits.

The pits themselves are long gone, filled in centuries ago, but the land around the church and to the south of the village is where they are believed to have been. Stand there on a grey autumn afternoon, when the mist is sitting low on the fields and the light is fading, and you will feel it — that particular Suffolk quality of deep, layered time. This is old country. The clay remembers.

The village has a well-regarded pub and a small but excellent local museum. Bury St Edmunds, with its magnificent abbey ruins and cathedral, is only fifteen minutes away by car. You could easily combine a visit to Woolpit with a day exploring the medieval heart of West Suffolk.

But come to Woolpit first. Stand on the green, look at those two green figures on the village sign, and ask yourself the question that has troubled people for nearly nine hundred years: where did they come from?

Nobody knows. And that, I think, is exactly as it should be.