Barghest is a cryptid — a creature whose existence is unconfirmed by science — with reported sightings near North Yorkshire, England, GB. This file collects the accounts and folklore surrounding it.
Where and when was Barghest sighted?
Location
North Yorkshire, England, GB
Date sighted
Unknown
Coordinates
54.052, -1.897
Testimonies
0
Last updated
LOCATION
What is Barghest?
The Barghest of northern English folklore is not an animal, and the printed record says so from the start. The earliest definition anyone has been able to read is Francis Grose's, in 1787: a ghost, all in white, with large saucer-eyes, appearing near gates or stiles — which in York are called bars. A year later William Marshall called it a hobgoblin of the highest order, terrible in aspect and loaded with chains of tremendous rattle. No dog, no black, no death. The huge black hound that haunts a limestone gorge called Troller's Gill in Wharfedale arrives in print in 1828, in a ballad contributed to William Hone's Table Book by a correspondent signing himself T. Q. M. — who used the same pages to invent the bear-ghost etymology, and to report how the wags of Threshfield frightened a miller with a he-goat and a chain. Seven derivations of the name have been proposed since; the two lexicographers who knew the material best declined to choose between them. This file follows the record rather than the legend.
A limestone outcrop inside Troller's Gill, in Wharfedale, known locally as the Face of the Troll — or the Barghest — photographed by Adrian Smith for Geograph Britain and Ireland. This is the one image in the batch that argues for the entry rather than against it: the ravine's own rock happens to look like a face, which is the plainest possible statement of the case for pareidolia. It also helps date the legend. The first two printed definitions of the word, Grose in 1787 and Marshall in 1788, have no dog, no black and no death in them; the hound of Troller's Gill appears in William Hone's Table Book in 1828, signed T. Q. M. The gill was here long before the hound was.
Image:
Adrian Smith (Geograph Britain and Ireland) · CC BY-SA 2.0
What is the history of Barghest?
Read the printed record of the Barghest in the order it was printed, and the black dog is the last thing to arrive.
The word is not in the first systematic gathering of northern speech. John Ray's A Collection of English Words Not Generally Used (1674) runs, in its North Countrey list, from Balk to Bannock to Bargh — "A Horseway up a steep hill. York-shire" — and straight on to Barn, Bearn-trams, Beck. The lemma next door is there; the Barghest is not.
The earliest definition I have been able to read is Francis Grose's, in A Provincial Glossary (first edition 1787; the text below is from the corrected second edition of 1790, where the scan is legible). It is worth quoting whole, because almost nothing in it survives into the modern creature: "Bar-guest. A ghost, all in white, with large saucer-eyes, commonly appearing near gates or stiles; there called bars. Yorksh. Derived from Bar and Gheist." White, not black. A ghost, not a hound. And the first etymology on record is local and concrete — in York the city gates are the Bars.
A year later William Marshall, surveying Yorkshire farming, printed the word in his glossary of provincialisms (The Rural Economy of Yorkshire, 1788, vol. II, p. 316): "BARGUEST; a hobgoblin of the highest order; terrible in aspect, and loaded with chains of tremendous rattle." Two entries later he ranks the competition: "BOGGLE; an inferior hobgoblin." Still no dog, and still no death. Robert Willan's Yorkshire word-list of 1811, quoted in the English Dialect Dictionary, has "a spirit or demon attached to a town or village"; and William Carr's Dialect of Craven — first edition 1824, second 1828 — glosses it "A sprite that haunts towns and populous places."
Walter Scott is usually named at this point, and he did use the word twice. In Rob Roy (1817, ch. XIV) it is only a dialect noun in a northern household: a man who knows Greek and Hebrew "needed not to care for ghaist or bar-ghaist, devil or dobbie." In The Betrothed (1825) Scott spells it Bahr-geist and has his heroine define it — "a spectre, usually the image of a departed person, who … haunts the spot from time to time, becomes familiar to those who dwell there, takes an interest in their fate, occasionally for good, in other instances or times for evil." A family ghost on the Welsh March, borrowed, as Scott's own footnote says, "from a passage in the Memoirs of Lady Fanshaw". No dog there either.
Everything the modern Barghest is can be traced to a single article. In 1828, in volume II of William Hone's Table Book (cols. 653-658), an anonymous correspondent signing T. Q. M. contributed "Stories of the Craven Dales, No. II". It contains three things. First, a ballad, "The Legend of the Troller's Gill", in which a man goes "to the horrid gill of the limestone hill, / To call on the Spectre Hound" and is found at dawn with "marks … imprest on the dead man's breast — / But they seem'd not by mortal hand." Second, the encounter that every later book reprints, told by a named-but-masked witness, Billy B——y, a clock-dresser walking home to Threshfield from Grassington: something going "brush, brush, brush, wi' chains rattling a' the while", and on his own doorstep "a girt thing like a sheep, but it war larger … and it war woolly like", with eyes "as big as saucers". Third — and this is where the etymology quarrel starts — T. Q. M. quotes Carr's glossary, declares it "most erroneous", floats German berg (hill), and then settles it: "the real derivation appears to me to be bar, Germ. a bear, and geist, a ghost." His evidence is a footnote: "That bears were common in Craven in ancient times is evident from one of our villages being called Barden, i.e. the bear's den."
The compilers took it from there. William Henderson (Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties, 1866; 2nd ed. 1879, pp. 274-6) added the death-omen in its fullest form — on the death of anyone of local importance a Barguest came out above the Oxwells, near Leeds, "a large black dog with flaming eyes as big as saucers, followed by all the dogs of the place howling and barking" — his informant "a Yorkshire gentleman, lately deceased" who as a child had seen it before the death of "a certain Squire Wade, of New Grange". Henderson also handed on a fourth etymology, and to a famous name: "Sir Walter Scott's derivation of his name from the German 'bahrgeist,' spirit of the bier, seems the most probable among the many suggested."
Billy B——y, meanwhile, went round again. His narrative reappeared in the Leeds Mercury Supplement of 28 February 1881 signed "F. W. J.", still opening "having, only a few days ago, seen Billy B——y" — fifty-three years after it was written. Joseph Lucas lifted it from there into Studies in Nidderdale (1882), and Thomas Parkinson lifted it from Lucas into Yorkshire Legends and Traditions (1888), where the ballad is at last attributed, sixty years late and with a hedge, to "the late Dr. Dixon" — James Henry Dixon (1803-1876) — "and is probably from his own pen".
Timeline: the documented record of Barghest
1674 — a silence with its neighbour intactJohn Ray's North Countrey word-list runs Balk, Bannock, Bargh ("A Horseway up a steep hill. York-shire"), Barn, Beck. The lemma that would sit beside Barghest is present; Barghest is not.
1732 — a date I could not checkThe Oxford English Dictionary dates its earliest evidence for the word to 1732, in the Gentleman's Magazine. The OED entry is behind a subscription and the 1732 volume was not reached; nothing in this file depends on it.
1787 — the first definition, and it is whiteFrancis Grose's Provincial Glossary: "Bar-guest. A ghost, all in white, with large saucer-eyes, commonly appearing near gates or stiles; there called bars. Yorksh. Derived from Bar and Gheist." No dog, no black, no death omen — and the first etymology on record.
1788 — a hobgoblin of the highest orderWilliam Marshall, surveying Yorkshire agriculture, prints in his glossary: "BARGUEST; a hobgoblin of the highest order; terrible in aspect, and loaded with chains of tremendous rattle." Two entries on: "BOGGLE; an inferior hobgoblin."
1805 — the gorge without the houndT. D. Whitaker describes Troller's Gill in detail in his history of Craven and identifies it as the lost Gordale of Appletreewick. A full-text search of the volume returns no Barghest in any spelling, against 57 hits for Barden and 79 for "gill".
1817 and 1825 — Scott's two usesIn Rob Roy the word is only a northern noun — a learned man "needed not to care for ghaist or bar-ghaist, devil or dobbie". In The Betrothed Scott spells it Bahr-geist and defines it as "a spectre, usually the image of a departed person" attached to a family, crediting the Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe. The spelling, not any argument, is all Scott contributes to the etymology.
1828 — Carr's second editionWilliam Carr's Dialect of Craven: "BARGHEST, BAR-GUEST, A sprite that haunts towns and populous places", with "A. S. burge" added and Scott's Betrothed quoted. The entry sits immediately below BARGH, "a hill".
1828 — the balladIn Hone's Table Book vol. II, cols. 653-655, a correspondent signing T. Q. M. prints "The Legend of the Troller's Gill", in which a man goes "to the horrid gill of the limestone hill, / To call on the Spectre Hound" and is found dead with marks that "seem'd not by mortal hand". This is the origin of the Troller's Gill hound.
1828 — the bear, and the goatIn the same article T. Q. M. calls Carr's derivation "most erroneous" and coins the bear-ghost reading — "bar, Germ. a bear, and geist, a ghost" — on the strength of a footnote deriving the village name Barden from "the bear's den". The same pages report the Threshfield wags who put a chain on a he-goat and frightened a miller into praying in his cart.
1866 and 1879 — the funeral processionWilliam Henderson prints the fullest death-omen version: above the Oxwells near Leeds a Barguest came out at the death of any notable person, "followed by all the dogs of the place howling and barking". His informant is "a Yorkshire gentleman, lately deceased", unnamed; the death is that of "a certain Squire Wade, of New Grange". Henderson also assigns the "spirit of the bier" derivation to Scott.
28 February 1881 — the witness recycledThe Leeds Mercury Supplement reprints Billy B——y's narrative signed "F. W. J.", still opening "having, only a few days ago, seen Billy B——y" — fifty-three years after T. Q. M. wrote it. Joseph Lucas took it into Studies in Nidderdale (1882) and Thomas Parkinson took it from Lucas in 1888.
1898 — the dictionary that refusedJoseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary gives BARGHEST eleven counties and some thirty quotations — and no etymology at all, where the entry above it and the entry for Shuck in volume V both carry one.
1911 — the fusion, and a false attributionThe Encyclopædia Britannica lines up Gwyllgi, Trash, Shuck, the Mauthe Doog, the Demon of Tedworth and the Black Dog of Winchester as one "spectre-hound", and states that Scott mentions the Barghest in The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The lines it quotes are Scott's on the Manx Mauthe Doog; the word appears nowhere in that poem or its notes.
1913 — "but whatever its origin"Elizabeth Mary Wright lists three more derivations — barn-ghaist, bier-ghaist, and a bar-ghaist explained by the spectre's habit of "sitting on the top rail of a gate or fence" — and declines to choose between them.
16 April 2017Adrian Smith photographs a limestone outcrop in the gorge and files it with Geograph as "Face of the Troll (Barghest) in Trollers Gill", captioned "Dry limestone gorge with the semblance of a face". It is the image on this page.
Is there a rational explanation for Barghest?
Nobody has ever proposed an animal. That is the first thing to say, because it is the thing our own file used to obscure. In two centuries of dictionaries, county histories, folklore collections and dialect surveys, not one writer quoted here treats the Barghest as an undescribed species, a survival, or a candidate for zoology. It is a bogey: Simpson and Roud, in A Dictionary of English Folklore (2000), file it as "a particularly alarming shape-changing bogey animal", note that "sometimes it was only heard, not seen", and add that to hear it "was an omen of someone's approaching death — possibly one's own". A being defined by what its appearance means cannot be a species.
So the conversion here is not zoological, it is a conversion of catalogue, and it was ours. This entry came into Enigma Atlas through `db/data/cryptids_new.json`, a batch of fifty records in which "cryptid" was operating as "anything frightening": its file-neighbours include Krampus, a Japanese slit-mouthed woman, a detached flying head and a talking mongoose. The old text then supplied the missing zoology in one unsigned sentence — that the belief was "likely rooted in real encounters with large stray dogs, wolves before their extinction in Britain, and the unsettling effect of glowing eyes reflecting torchlight". No source in this file says that. It has been removed rather than reworded, and no replacement has been invented.
The etymology is where the case is really argued, and nothing in it is settled. Counting only derivations printed by people who worked on the word, there are seven: bar + gheist, from York's gates, the Bars (Grose, 1787); berg-geist, hill-spirit, and bär-geist, bear-spirit (T. Q. M., 1828); burh, town-ghost (Carr's gloss, plus the "A. S. burge" he added in 1828); bahrgeist, spirit of the bier (Henderson, 1879); and barn-ghaist plus a second bar-ghaist, explained by the spectre's "habit of sitting on the top rail of a gate or fence" (E. M. Wright, 1913). Two verdicts matter more than the seven. Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (1898) gives the word no etymology at all — eleven counties, some thirty citations, and no square-bracketed derivation, where the entry immediately above it (BARGHAM) has one and so does Shuck in volume V. And E. M. Wright, having listed three, simply writes: "But whatever its origin…". Where the two people who knew the material best declined to choose, this file declines too.
Two attributions to Walter Scott do not survive checking. Henderson credits Scott with the bahrgeist = "spirit of the bier" derivation. Scott supplies the spelling and no derivation: in The Betrothed the Bahr-geist is explained at length and never etymologised, and a full-text search of Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), the obvious place for it, returns zero occurrences of bahr, barghest, barguest or bar-ghaist, against 75 for the control word "ghost". Worse is the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1911, which states flatly "It is mentioned by Sir Walter Scott in 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel'" and quotes three lines. The lines are real, and they are about the Manx Mauthe Doog, as Scott's own note to that stanza explains. In the 1806 edition of the poem, notes included, barghest and its variants appear zero times (controls in the same file: "spectre" 4, "Mauthe Doog" present). That Britannica article is also where the fusion happens — Gwyllgi, Trash, Shuck, the Mauthe Doog, the Demon of Tedworth and the Black Dog of Winchester laid side by side as one "spectre-hound" — and it, not any folk tradition, is the ancestor of every modern sentence beginning "folklorists group the Barghest with…".
The Troller's Gill hound is literature, and it can be dated against a control. Thomas Dunham Whitaker described the gorge minutely in The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven (1805) — "a winding but nearly perpendicular fissure in the lime-stone rock, about half a mile in length, a very few yards in width, and, upon an average, about sixty feet high" — and identified it as the lost medieval Gordale of Appletreewick. He says nothing about a hound. A search of the whole 1.8-megabyte text returns nobarghest in any spelling (the only near-misses are "Bargh", "bargain"), while the controls in the same file return Barden 57, Burnsall 24, Grassington 20, Appletreewick 5 and "gill" 79. The gorge acquires its Spectre Hound in 1828, in T. Q. M.'s ballad.
And the star witness is thinner than the legend he carries. Billy B——y is the only first-person Barghest account in this whole file, and even he did not see a dog: he heard chains and found something "like a sheep, but it war larger … and it war woolly like". The hound is the ballad's. More telling still, the same 1828 article that made the Barghest famous also debunks it: T. Q. M. reports, with relish, that the wags of Threshfield used to turn a he-goat with a chain round its neck into the lanes at night, and that a miller coming from Kettlewell market took it for the Barghest and knelt in his cart to pray. The contemporary natural explanation is not a modern imposition on the tradition. It was printed inside it, by a believer, on the same page.
Two accretions are recent and worth naming. The Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority's own page describes "a magical dog living there called the Barguest that turns you to stone with one look from its huge eyes": petrifaction is in none of the nineteenth-century sources. And the recurring claim that the Barghest inspired The Hound of the Baskervilles rests on newspaper features (Yorkshire Evening Post, 2006; Yorkshire Post, 2010), not on anything Conan Doyle wrote.
Finally, the limits of this file, dated. As of 15 August 2026 I could not read the Oxford English Dictionary entry (subscription), so its statement that the earliest evidence is of 1732, in the Gentleman's Magazine, is unchecked here, and I did not reach the 1732 volume. Carr's first edition of 1824 would not download from the Internet Archive (HTTP 500, repeatedly), so his original wording is known here only through T. Q. M.'s hostile quotation of it. Henderson's first edition of 1866 I know at second hand, through Simpson and Roud, who cite its page 239. And the two modern discussions they recommend — Ethel Rudkin in Folk-Lore 49 (1938) and Theo Brown, "The Black Dog", in Folklore 69 (1958) — are behind a subscription. Nothing above rests on any of them.
Can you visit Barghest?
There is no building, no exhibit and no ticket. What you can visit is a dry limestone gorge in Wharfedale, and the honest reason to go is that it is the place a poem put on the map in 1828.
Troller's Gill (also spelled Trollers Gill, and known as Trollerdale) lies about 800 metres up Skyreholme Beck from the hamlet of Skyreholme, near Appletreewick, roughly 7.5 km south-east of Grassington, in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Ordnance Survey grid reference SE 068 619; the gorge runs about half a kilometre between limestone walls a few metres apart. For most of the year the streambed is dry, the water having gone underground upstream. The National Park Authority's own page is blunt about the one hazard everybody meets: "During heavy rain, take care, the rocks can be very slippy" — and after prolonged rain the beck does flow through the cleft, which turns an easy scramble into a difficult one.
Take the other hazards seriously, because this is old mining ground rather than a managed attraction. The gill holds several caves and a pothole called Hell Hole, 55 metres deep with some 210 metres of passage, not somewhere to look into without caving equipment and company; on the ground around it are the ruins of the Gill Head lead and later fluorspar mines, with open shafts and spoil heaps. Sources differ on when the mines closed (the 1960s, or 1981). The spoil carries a lead-tolerant flora the National Park asks visitors to look at rather than walk over.
Getting there. There is no car park at the gill; walkers use verge and lay-by parking around Skyreholme and Appletreewick and on the B6265, which fill early on fine weekends, on single-track lanes with passing places. The best-documented approach is the circular walk published by the county tourist board, Burnsall and Troller's Ghyll — 8.3 miles, about 3½ hours, 476 metres of ascent, graded moderate — taking in the gorge, Parcevall Hall and Howgill. One caution I could not resolve: I have not confirmed from a rights-of-way authority whether the floor of the gill is a public right of way or open access land, and walkers report a very old "no public access" notice on one approach track. Treat the ground as working farmland and follow the waymarked route.
Parcevall Hall Gardens, at Skyreholme nr Appletreewick, BD23 6DE, is the one place nearby with opening hours and the sensible base. Its own website states: open daily April to October, 10.00 to 18.00, last admission 16.30; £12 adults, £11 senior citizens, under-12s free, credit card only; well-behaved dogs welcome; toilets in the tea room and garden; free on-site parking for garden visitors, which is not a public car park for the gill. (Checked August 2026 — confirm before travelling.)
York is the other place the sources genuinely put the Barghest, and it is free. Grose tied the word in 1787 to the city gates, the Bars, which still stand at Bootham, Monk, Micklegate and Walmgate. The tourist embellishments — the Barghest of the Snickelways, the house at 1 The Shambles that carries the name — are modern, and no early source connects them to the word.
One last note about the photograph on this page: it shows a limestone outcrop in Troller's Gill locally called the Face of the Troll, or the Barghest, which happens to look like a face. That is a fair emblem for the whole file.
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