The village name was first written down in the tenth century as Wlpit, later as Wlfpeta. It derives from the Old English wulf-pytt: a pit for trapping wolves. East Anglia in the early Middle Ages still had wolves; they preyed on livestock, and villages dug deep pits and baited them. By the time the green children supposedly appeared, the wolves were nearly gone, but the pits remained scattered around the parish. The village sign today, mounted at the crossroads, shows two green children holding hands beneath a wolf. The village embraces the legend completely. Its weather vane on the church tower is a wolf. Its pub, The Bull, sells Green Children ale brewed locally.

According to the chroniclers, the boy soon sickened and died. The girl survived. She gradually lost her green colour as she ate ordinary food. She learned English. When she could finally explain herself, she told Sir Richard that she and her brother came from a land called St Martin's, a Christian place where the sun never shone brightly and twilight was constant. They had been minding their father's sheep when they followed the sound of bells into a cave, and emerged blinking into the harvest light of Woolpit. She grew up in the household, was eventually baptised, and is said to have married a man from King's Lynn. Folklorists, historians, and amateur theorists have argued ever since about what really happened. Lost Flemish immigrant children from Fornham St Martin, weakened by malnutrition and chlorosis? Visitors from a parallel world? A medieval fairy tale that wandered into the records by accident? The chroniclers themselves admitted they could not explain it but insisted that the witnesses were reliable.

The legend is not the only treasure here. The fifteenth-century parish church of St Mary's contains some of the finest medieval woodwork in Suffolk. Its hammer-beam roof is studded with carved angels, wings outstretched, faces serene, looking down on the congregation below. The bench-ends are intricately carved with figures and motifs from medieval bestiaries. The architectural historian Simon Jenkins included St Mary's in his selection of England's Thousand Best Churches. A holy well dedicated to Saint Mary lies on the village edge. It was a pilgrimage destination in the Middle Ages, when the church held an image of Our Lady of Woolpit said to have healing power. Pilgrims came from across East Anglia. The image was destroyed in the Reformation. The well remained. People still leave coins in it.

From the sixteenth century onward, Woolpit became known across England for its bricks. Local clay fired to a distinctive pale colour, almost white. Edward Duger and Richard Reynolds both had brick-kells, the local word for kilns, by the time of Elizabeth I. The traveller Frederic Shoberl wrote in 1818 that the bricks were equal in beauty to stone, and that most of the mansions of Suffolk were built from them. They turn up in fine houses across the county, and even in stretches of the Houses of Parliament in London. The brickyards closed long ago. The pits where the clay was dug filled with water and became ponds. Walk the footpaths outside the village and you can still find them: quiet hollows where a great industry once shaped the look of half a county.

Modern Woolpit has about 2,000 inhabitants, midway between Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, just off the A14. It has two tea rooms, a fish and chip shop, a bakery, an estate agent, a dentist, a hairdresser, and the inevitable industrial estates on the outskirts. The archaeologist Helen Geake of Channel 4's Time Team lives here. So did the actor Ian Lavender, Private Pike in Dad's Army. None of that explains why a Suffolk farming village, smaller than most suburbs of Ipswich, still draws visitors from around the world. They come because of two children who supposedly walked out of a wolf-pit nine centuries ago, speaking no English, eating only beans. Whatever they really were, they have outlived everything else in the village. The legend, in the end, is a kind of immortality.