Following the rove: intangible cultural heritage and creative writing practice.

England has a rich, varied calendar of folkloric customs, traditions that take place in the community which are usually governed, stewarded, and performed by the community itself. I am a creative writing researcher and novelist and in 2024 completed practice-based doctoral research at the Centre for Contemporary Legend, Sheffield Hallam University, UK, that explored the effect of using a calendar custom in fiction, and how calendar customs might be accurately and sensitively portrayed. This chapter summarises this research project, defines intangible cultural heritage and the calendar custom in this context, and offers considerations for writers, and other creative practitioners, on how they might work with intangible cultural heritage such as the calendar custom. It reflects on Thankstide, the novel I have written for my PhD, and the decisions I have made in its writing, influenced by three case studies, the concepts of the carnivalesque and the folkloresque, folk horror, cultural appropriation, and the appraisal of fiction that represents calendar customs