The Wollaton Park Gnomes: Schoolchildren Chased by Gnomes in Bubble Cars

Wollaton Park is the 500-acre deer park around Wollaton Hall in west Nottingham. Near its 25-acre lake lay a fenced, boggy patch of woodland the public was not allowed into. Local children called it the Swamps. In September 1979 a small group of pupils from Southwold Primary School in Radford knew it well. They said they had already seen the gnomes there once, during the summer holidays.

Sunday 23 September 1979. Sunset came at 7:02 pm. By about 8:00 pm, when the children reached the park, it was entirely dark. Some of them went through a hole in the fence. Two of the older boys fell into the marsh mud.

"We heard this little tinkly bell," one child said. "We started running and these little men came out of the bushes. There were about 60 of them in 30 cars like bubblecars. They were half my size and looked old." The gnomes rode two to a car. They had wrinkled faces with a greenish tinge, long white beards tipped with red, and caps like old-fashioned nightcaps with bobbles. One child thought of Noddy.

The red and white cars made no engine noise at all. A button rang a bell instead of a horn. There was no steering wheel. The gnomes leaned to steer. The cars could jump over logs. It was dark, yet the children saw it all. "I could see them in the dark," said Patrick. "They all showed up." The gnomes laughed, climbed trees and went in and out of holes in the trunks. For about 15 minutes they chased the children. Some remembered it as play. Others remembered fear.

Within 48 hours the headmaster, Robin Aldridge, questioned the children separately and recorded them on cassette. He noted a "wide measure of corroboration between the children". "The children do sound truthful," he said. Two of the children drew what they had seen.

The local and national press interviewed parents, teachers and children. A couple of the children appeared on BBC John Craven's Newsround. A brother or sister reported seeing the gnome cars again the day after.

Marjorie T. Johnson of the Fairy Investigation Society wrote to Aldridge and produced a report. She gathered older Wollaton sightings for her book Seeing Fairies, including little men "dressed like policemen" near the lodge entrance around 1900. Decades later the folklorist Simon Young found the tape transcript and published it. He appealed for the witnesses in 2017, and in 2022 he edited The Wollaton Gnomes: A Nottingham Fairy Mystery. Dan Green appealed again in 2021 through a local paper and BBC radio. No one came forward.

Young keeps three doors open. Perhaps the children invented the gnomes to explain the mud from a forbidden place. Perhaps something real, such as a startled animal, became a little man in a car in the dark. Or perhaps it happened as told. He concludes the encounter "was far messier than most accounts suggest".

Others point to Noddy and his car, or to Bowie's song "The Laughing Gnome". Green has suggested marsh gas and earth energies at the equinox. Through all of it, the children held to their story. No hoax has ever been confessed or shown.

Young counts about ten documented fairy or gnome encounters in Wollaton Park. Children reported small bearded men on Studham Common in 1977. Yet nothing else quite matches 60 laughing gnomes in bubble cars. The witnesses, now adults, have never answered the appeals.