I’ve written elsewhere about mysterious huge black dogs, which seem to have been seen in different places all across the country, sometimes breathing fires, sometimes breaking down the doors of churches, sometimes as a portent of something bad about to arrive.
Sometimes these dogs have a particular name, Black Shuck, for example in East Anglia, Barghest in Yorkshire, and a whole load of different names in Lancashire, Gytrash, Padfoot, the Grim, Shag, Trash, Striker and Skriker. A local Devon legend of the yell or yeth hound, probably gave Conan Doyle his inspiration for The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Sometimes there is a substance to the stories which appear in the press; one year when we were on holiday in Northern Ireland, in County Antrim, there were reports in the local papers and on the news of a big black creature which had been seen locally… in this case, as far as I remember, it was an escaped or released big cat, formerly a pet.
This report,along with the other stories I knew of gave rise to a dreadful beast roaming my fictional old wood, Camel Wood, and it was known in my story as the Beast of Camel or Wulf Lupus. When I wrote this for the students I was teaching, I didn’t realise that very near here, in a village called Banwell, not ten miles from here, a big black creature was seen in 2007 by a woman out walking her dog. This creature was named the Beast of Banwell… I guess there are no local legends of such creatures so there was no folk name for it.
I might resurrect the Beast of Camel in my next book… maybe… perhaps!
Here is another blog about the Beast of Banwell:
http://mysterycats.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/uk-sightings-beast-of-banwell-2007.html
Lois Elsden 