Peak Experience

Picture of Bogghart in the wood  Picture of Bogghart on the moorland  Picture of the tips, Edale  Picture of bearda hill

 

Boggart was the name for a troublesome ghost or spirit like a poltergeist.  It is related to barghast, from the German Geist or spirit, a devilish dog-like creature with large saucer-shaped eyes, which terrorized night travellers on the lonely lanes.  They are said to be soundless, about half the size of a calf, with a shaggy black coat, and they vanish as quickly as they appear.

 

By tradition, the boggart is a forewarning of death or disaster.  The apparitions of black dogs often occur near burial grounds and sighting the animal means impending death for someone important nearby.  Perhaps it will be the vicar, if the burial ground is by a church.  Or it may be the Lord of the Manor if the burial ground is on his land.  It is not the person who sees the phantom who is at risk of death but the person for whom the phantom comes.

 

A black dog used to be buried in the corner of a newly consecrated burial ground so that its spirit would wander, not the spirit of others buried there.

 

Sometimes black dogs appear in places where murder has been committed.  Sometimes they appear where a suicide victim has been buried at a crossroads – a body placed there so that its soul cannot find the true path.  And some accused of witchcraft were themselves buried at theses crossroads so their soul would be forced to forever wander.

 

Superstitious lead miners connected certain accidents with sightings of a ghostly black dog.

 

Boggarts and barghasts live all over the Peak District – in Birchover Shale Hillock, Kinder, the Edale Tips, Bradwell, Bradnop, Ipstones, and Swinscoe, to name just a few.

This boggart lived beside a road leading into Birchover, hiding deep inside a wall built against a bank of trees.  It was never seen but you could hear strange gulping noises from the ‘boggart hole’ and people were afraid to pass the spot, especially at night.

At Oxhay Farm, Bradnop near Leek (at the time the Red Lion pub), two drunken Scottish Jacobites quarreled over 300 years ago.  One killed the other.  He is buried behind the farm and ever since then a black dog haunts the road.

 

A story from Bradwell tells of two miners returning home by moonlight.  One saw a boggart.  He saw ‘a strange and perfectly black dog of unusual size, that came slowly up to them and vanished under their feet’.  The other saw nothing.  He ignored his friend’s warning not to go down the mine the next day and was killed in a rock fall.

 

Sightings of ghostly dogs are most common on the moorlands.  Tales of Kinder boggarts can terrify travellers – especially when they are lost in fog on the High Peak moors.

Edale people sometimes saw a phantom black dog near the mounds known as The Tips.  These mounds were created from the material dug up to create the Cowburn Tunnel for the Sheffield to Manchester railway line.

Black dogs are still sighted all along the route of the Old Way around Swythamley.  It is scattered with the graves of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Scottish soldiers, defeated in the Jacobite Rebellion.  Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender to the English throne led his army of Highlanders and Lowlanders as far as Derby before they decided to turn back.  Not wishing to surrender, nearly all lost their lives in a massacre.  They retreated along the Old Way.  It goes through Bearda Hill SK963643 at Swythamley and over Gun to Leek and was the way between Manchester and Ashbourne and Derby before a turnpike was constructed in the 1700s.

 

The Bosley Boggart lived at Lud’s Church and spread terror throughout the surrounding countryside.

At Swinscoe on the Leek to Ashbourne road, three Jacobites were ambushed and slain in the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion. A phantom black dog guards their graves.