by Kai Roberts
The bridge replaced an earlier ford over the river but one that was particularly vulnerable to flooding, much to the inconvenience of the local inhabitants. One day, as they were bemoaning this state of affairs, the Devil sauntered along and promised to construct a bridge for them, on the condition that he could claim the soul of the first living thing to cross it. The country folk accepted his bargain but spent many long hours debating who should be their sacrifice to Satan, until a cunning old shepherd spoke up with a solution. The shepherd owned a dog called Grim and once the Devil had completed his work, the old man swam to the far side of the river and whistled for his dog to follow. Grim obediently trotted across the bridge and the poor hound was claimed by the Devil for his prize. The bridge has been known as ‘Kill Grim Bridge’ ever since.
That the Devil should be associated with so many bridges in Britain suggests this narrative must have encoded a once-relevant message, yet it is now unclear why His Satanic Majesty should so often be credited with building these structures. Indeed, such legends seem to represent a counter-example to Jacqueline Simpson’s contention that features associated with the Devil tend to be unproductive; for whilst the terrain crossed by these bridges often fits that description, the bridges themselves are anything but. The theme of duping the Devil is doubtless important – as getting one over on a seemingly invincible adversary is a common trope in folklore and seems to have acted as an expression of local community pride – but why one of the favourite vehicles for such narratives should be the ‘Devil’s bridge’ legend remains an open question.
Moreover, in the legend’s basic form, there is not even any element of trickery: the Devil is simply credited with building the bridge during the night, before he is interrupted by the dawn and leaves the edifices in a shabby state. This tale is told of two sites in North Yorkshire: Butterton Bridge near Sawley, built in the thirteenth century by the monks of Fountains Abbey; and the original Hell Gill Bridge, which crosses a tributary of the River Ure as it plunges through a treacherous ravine on the flanks of High Abbotside. The antiquity of these structures suggests the legend may simply have arisen as a result of later generations’ incredulity that their ancestors could have been responsible for such feats of engineering. This echoes the attribution of prehistoric megaliths to giants, but perhaps they believed bridges required the Devil’s more powerful intellect.
Perhaps the most unique example of such a legend in Yorkshire concerns Dibble’s Bridge above Appletreewick in Wharfedale, in which the ‘Father of Lies’ behaves entirely honourably. The story relates that a cobbler from Thorpe, by the name of Ralph Calvert, was returning from Fountains Abbey, where he had been to sell his wares. His route home took him across Appletreewick Moor and forced him to cross a dismal ravine cut by the River Dibb, as it flowed down to join the Wharfe in the valley below. Ralph found the atmosphere of this gorge so ominous that he was forced to strike up a song to fortify himself as he went. The tune he selected was a popular one at the time describing the meeting between a miller and the Devil. But his courage soon dwindled when he heard another voice join him on the final couplet.
Ralph was soon heartened again when he saw that his fellow traveller was a distinguished looking gentlemen, and they soon struck up a lively conversation in that gloomy place. At length, the cobbler even offered to share some of his lunch and whisky with his new companion. Once they had both finished their repast, the stranger said that he must introduce himself and all of Ralph’s terror returned when the name he gave was ‘Satan’. However, the Devil told him that he had nothing to fear; indeed he was now in the cobbler’s debt for the hospitality he had been shown and wondered how he might repay the favour. Ralph answered that he would quite like a bridge built across the ravine which they had both just crossed. The Devil agreed and told him that the task would be completed in four days time.
Upon arriving home, Ralph told his wife all about the encounter and soon the tale was all around the village, prompting a great deal of ridicule. Thus, when the fourth day arrived, a sizeable party of local folk accompanied Ralph back to the ravine to see if the Devil had been true to his word. And sure enough, they discovered a new bridge, one which all those assembled agreed was as fine a specimen as they had ever seen. The village priest even agreed that it could be crossed without fear of diabolic molestation, although he sprinkled a little holy water and erected a cross at each end, just to be on the safe side. A Puritan minister pulled down the crosses during the Commonwealth, but the name remains as a testament to the structure’s creation. Originally it was called Devil’s Bridge, but over the years that title has been corrupted and now it is known just as Dibble’s Bridge.
It may be that the Devil has become attached to these bridges through folk etymology alone. Needless to say, Dibble is not a corruption of Devil at all, but comes from the Old English ‘dybbel’, meaning ‘bridge over the pool’. Similarly, Kilgram Bridge is actually derived from the Old Norse ‘Kelgrim haugr’ meaning ‘Kelgrim’s mound’. Even Hell Gill, which seems a natural association for such a Stygian abyss, is more likely to be an Old Norse appellation meaning ‘flat-stoned ravine’. As such, these stories (with the exception of Butterton) are all back-formations to account for curious names; the true meaning of which have long since been forgotten.
Dibble Bridge in Wharfedale, constructed by the Devil. (Kai Roberts)
However, this still does not explain why they were associated with the Devil specifically; after all, ‘Kilgram’ or even ‘Kill Grim’ does not necessarily lend itself to such a connection. In this regard, a common feature which might be relevant is their association with monasteries. Kilgram and Butterton Bridges were constructed under the aegis of Jervaulx and Fountains Abbey respectively, and may have been associated with monastic traffic for many centuries thereafter. Similarly, Fountains Abbey is mentioned in the legend of Dibble’s Bridge and crosses were supposed to have stood at each end, until they were pulled down by a Puritan cleric in the seventeenth century. Could the connection with the Devil have arisen from a post-Reformation inclination to demonise the relics of their Popish forebears?
Yet, it seems the impulse may go deeper than this. Increasingly, folklorists have recognised that ‘liminal’ spaces were regarded as especially spiritually dangerous by the pre-modern mind. Such places were seen as thresholds which Otherworldy visitors could cross as easily as ourselves, and water-crossings were an archetypally liminal location. Indeed, bridges were doubly perilous as not only were they thresholds, they crossed water, itself a supernatural medium. Folklore records bridges as a particularly common location for uncanny encounters: ghosts, boggarts and barguests all frequented water-crossings, and apotropaic measures were often taken by locals to counteract their influence – from foundation sacrifices to carved heads (See Chapter Two).
Hence, it is perhaps not surprising that the Devil is so frequently connected with bridges. Such crossing-places are associated with malign influences in countless cultures and evidently folk-Christianity was no different in this respect. However useful the bridge may be, it was a significantly liminal space where the soul was always at risk. Suggesting that these structures were built by Satan ably expresses such anxiety; perhaps more instructively, those stories in which the Devil is tricked out of his due or builds the bridge honourably, represent a way of assuaging those anxieties. They communicate that whilst the fiend once tried to claim a named bridge for his dominion, he had been thwarted and it was now safe for good Christian souls to cross for evermore.
SEVEN
PHANTOM HOUNDS
One of the most familiar tropes of British folklore, examples of the ‘phantom hound’ that portends misfortune, can be found in numerous counties across the United Kingdom. The phenomenon is perhaps most familiar by its East Anglian name ‘Black Shuck’ and as the motif which inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, or the ‘Grim’ in J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter series. In Yorkshire, however, it is primar
ily known by the names barguest (sometimes spelled barghest), padfoot, guytrash and skriker. There does not seem to be any geographical pattern determining use of the names, and indeed, they are sometimes used interchangeably to refer to the same example.
This chapter will employ the generic term ‘phantom hound’ or whichever name was used in the original record on the grounds that they all broadly belong to the same category, although even this statement is controversial. Nearly everything about the phantom hound is ambiguous and liminal, forever slipping through attempts to define or classify it. It is perhaps best to consider the motif in terms of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ theory, whereby each instantiation of a phenomenon draws its characteristics from a common pool, but whilst many examples will overlap in the features they exhibit, very few will be identical.
It is even unclear exactly what sort of entity the phantom hound is supposed to represent. Is it a ghostly apparition, a demonic fiend or an anomalous, but nonetheless, physical beast? At times it seems to be able to interact with the corporeal world, at other times it cannot. In some places, the thing seems to have a definite purpose, whilst elsewhere it merely lurks in the shadows of the local psyche, a nebulous bogeyman which crudely embodies all the terrors of the night. The only thing that seems certain is that its presence was universally regarded as ominous; a source of nocturnal terror across Yorkshire in earlier centuries.
The archetype of the phenomenon is an unnaturally large black dog, with long, shaggy hair and glowing eyes ‘as large as tea plates’. For instance, in his influential 1879 work, Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders, William Henderson describes the padfoot around Leeds as ‘the size of a small donkey, black with shaggy hair and large eyes like saucers’ and many other accounts feature a similar depiction. The fiend was also supposed to ‘utter a roar totally unlike the voice of any known animal’ and walk with a distinctive ‘shog … shog … shog’ sound. In some places it appeared with a long, rattling chain attached to its legs. Doubtless, it was these aural attributes that earned it names such a skriker and padfoot.
However, even this model varies considerably. The taxonomy of ‘phantom black dogs’ is very much the product of Victorian folklorists, who, in thrall to the natural sciences’ mania for classification in the nineteenth century, were ever eager to shoehorn a diverse array of phenomena into a single unwieldy category. As a result, it is unclear if the name given to individual examples – whether it be barguest, guytrash, padfoot or skriker – was the common local term, or simply the preferred category of the folklorist who collected the story.
Similarly, it is hard to tell whether the phantom hound was the most common manifestation of this being, or merely the classification it most closely fitted in the mind of the collector. For in several stories, the same names are used to refer to things which take other forms, animal or otherwise. In an unpublished work, Branwell Brontë refers to the guytrash as ‘a spectre not at all similar to the ghosts of those who were once alive, nor to fairies, nor to demons … (mostly) a black dog dragging a chain, a dusky calf, nay, even a rolling stone.’ Meanwhile, as the folklorist Jeremy Harte observes, ‘Behind the standard phrases which describe these apparitions – “as large as a donkey”, “as big as a calf”, “shaggy as a bear” – there are traces of earlier stories in which they had actually been bears, calves and donkeys.’
In some instances, the phenomenon was actually multiform. For example, one story from Almondbury tells of a man who encountered the padfoot ‘like a hound dog, all white; he tried to coax it but it turned into a calf … When he got below it turned into a bear and began to roll all the way down.’ Even more bizarrely, the Holden Rag, which haunted the moorlands of upper Calderdale around the West Yorkshire/Lancashire border, ‘was said to appear sometimes in the form of a great black dog and at other times as a rag of white linen on a thorn … which always eluded the grasp of mortal hands, shrivelling up and vanishing in a flash.’
It seems that Branwell Brontë’s interpretation was influenced by a tradition attached to Ponden Hall at Stanbury, a few miles from his family home in Haworth. This spirit variously took the form of a ‘shadowy greybeard carrying a lantern’ or ‘a flaming barrel which rolled down the fields and past the house’ and was regarded as an omen of ill-potent.
In this respect, the phantom hound and its relatives seem to be a corrupted descendant of the shape-changing apparitions which were a common motif of medieval superstition. In the early fifteenth century, an anonymous monk at Byland Abbey in North Yorkshire recorded some notable examples of such revenants from around the region. One manifestation went through a series of transformations from a crow into a ‘dog with a chain on its neck’; next into ‘a shape of flame, transparent, and words came not from its lips but from its centre’; then into a ‘goat which went round … moaning’; and finally became ‘the shape of a man of great stature, lean and spine-chilling to look at.’
Taking these various concerns into account, it is perhaps more fruitful to look for commonalities in the function of these apparitions, rather than their formal characteristics. As previously mentioned, the only universal attribute of phantom hounds is that they were once widely feared and it was generally held that to encounter one was a very risky business, although once again the reasons for this dread can differ. Sometimes the terror seems to have derived from the physical harm the entity could inflict, whilst on other occasions it was because such an encounter was an augury of disaster for the witness, his loved ones or his neighbourhood.
Perhaps the best-known example of the phantom hound in Yorkshire was certainly capable of causing bodily injury. This fearsome barguest was supposed to dwell in a deep and treacherous limestone ravine known as Trollers Gill, in Wharfedale. A local ballad, first recorded by William Hone in 1827, relates that after a good many drinks, the sceptical John Lambert of Skyreholme vowed to confront the fiend. He made his way to the gorge at midnight and called on the demon dog. At this, a storm brewed up, then suddenly:
A dreadful thing from the cliff did spring
And its wild bark thrilled around –
Its eyes had the glow of the fires below
‘Twas the form of the spectral hound.
The following morning Lambert’s corpse was discovered at the bottom of the gill:
And marks were impressed on the dead man’s breast
But they seemed not by mortal hand.
Belief in the barguest of Trollers Gill was still clearly common in Wharfedale a century after this ballad was chronicled by Hone. Writing in 1929, Halliwell Sutcliffe – a resident of nearby Linton – relates the experience of a cobbler from Fountains who met the barguest, when he stumbled into Trollers Gill after losing his way over Greenhow Hill one night. The wayfarer told how, ‘the dog came out into the moonlight, big as a littlish bear … with great eyes like saucers. He’d a shaggy sort of smell as he went by, and I counted myself for dead. But he chanced not to glimpse me, praise all the saints that ever were.’
Trollers Gill in Wharfedale, haunt of a fearsome barguest. (Kai Roberts)
Less terminal traditions are also recorded. Henderson writes of the widespread belief that ‘if anyone came in its way, the barguest would strike out and inflict a wound that would never heal’. Meanwhile, a close encounter with the Almondbury padfoot was thought to cause paralysis of the arms. If one wished to escape unharmed, it seems to have been prudent to ignore the padfoot as far as possible, for one source claimed, ‘A word or blow gave the creature power over you; a story is told of a man who … kicked the thing and was forthwith dragged along through the hedge and ditch to his home and left under the window.’
Evading a barguest or padfoot was invariably a difficult feat and Halliwell Sutcliffe’s cobbler is a rare example of someone who succeeded. They moved with uncanny speed and agility, ‘padding lightly at the rear of a person and within a stretch of thought would be in front of them or at their side.’ Keeping an eye
on the brute was similarly challenging. The prolific West Riding historian, J. Horsfall Turner, recorded that the guytrash, ‘when followed by an individual … begins to walk backwards with his eyes fixed full on his pursuer and vanished at the slightest momentary inattention.’
Moreover, attempting to escape a phantom hound that had already marked you for its attention seems to have been a futile endeavour, as fate would always intervene. Reverend J.C. Atkinson relates the story of a young man who was walking home drunk one night and chanced upon the donkey-shaped barguest that haunted the vicinity of St Hilda’s Church in Egton. Seeking to cross the cemetery on his route, he found the way blocked by the fiend, who thwarted his every attempt to pass through the gate. The youth proceeded to evade the thing by following a nearby lane and climbing into the churchyard from there. Yet all his cunning proved in vain, for as he crossed the hallowed ground in darkness, he stumbled into an open grave and broke his neck.
The old cemetery at Egton, where a donkey-shaped barguest once lurked. (Kai Roberts)
It seems that if the barguest did not do harm itself, then it often presaged death or ‘betokened evil’. The tragedy it foretold did not necessarily have to befall the witness or his family, but often appeared to folk upon the death of some local worthy. This was certainly the case with the guytrash at Horton near Bradford. Victorian antiquary, William Cudworth, relates the story of a man who encountered the fiend ‘jumping at his heels’ as he walked past the gates of the now-demolished Horton Hall in the ‘witching hour’. At the sight of the hound, the man fled home as fast he could and collapsed into a faint. The following day, he learnt that the master of Horton Hall had died around the same time as he had seen the guytrash.
