Yeth hound

One deep winter, somebody walked to the top of the Dewerstone through fresh snow and left two lines of tracks behind: a bare human foot and a cloven hoof, side by side, climbing the granite and not coming down again. That was the report a correspondent sent to Notes and Queries in 1850, and having set it down he added, almost as housekeeping, that the valley below the crag was haunted by a black headless dog.

The dog had several names, depending on which side of the moor you asked. Robert Hunt, gathering the folklore of Devon and Cornwall in the 1860s, put them all in one line: the wish or wisked hounds of Dartmoor, called also the yell-hounds and the yeth-hounds. He set their coursing ground along the Abbot’s Way, the old track that runs west off the moor into Cornwall, and their meeting place in the valley beneath the Dewerstone. Where the names came from he could not say for certain. He liked the idea that wish was the west-country word whist, meaning a melancholy with something weird sitting inside it, and he printed a line of Polwhele’s verse to prove the word was in common mouths. John Kemble preferred to hear Woden in it. Hunt thought Kemble simply wrong. Nobody settled it.

What the hounds looked like depends entirely on who was frightened. The oldest and flattest statement is the one from 1850 and the one Hunt repeats: they have no heads. William Crossing, writing his Dartmoor folklore later in the century, gives a pack whose quarry stood little chance because if scent failed then sight made up for it, their eyes glowing like balls of fire and as big as saucers. A headless dog with burning eyes is not a description, it is two descriptions sharing a name, and neither collector seems to have noticed the problem. What survives across every telling is the size and the colour. They are big, they are black, and there are a lot of them.

They do not run alone. The huntsman behind them is the figure Dartmoor calls Dewer, whose stone the crag above the Plym is named for, and who is generally taken to be the Devil. Murray’s 1851 handbook for travellers gave him a shape: on stormy winter nights the peasant heard the whist hounds sweeping through the rocky valley with the cry of dogs and the winding of horns, and their unearthly master was sometimes visible, a tall swart figure with a hunting pole. Sabine Baring-Gould added the motive in 1913. There is a great cliff of granite rising above the river, he wrote, and on top of it the Wild Huntsman is seen with his fire-breathing wish-hounds, his horn heard ringing afar over the moors. He hunts human souls. Two old ladies who lived at Shaw nearby assured him they had often heard the horn and the yelping of the pack.

It goes like this. The weather closes over the moor after dark and the rain comes in sideways, and out of the stunted oaks of Wistman’s Wood the pack spills onto the open ground with the horn behind it, running the Abbot’s Way west, the noise arriving well ahead of anything visible. Then the sound thins out toward the Dart and stops, because for reasons no one has explained the hounds will not cross that particular water.

The quarry, when Devon named it, was a child. Here the tradition splits cleanly down the middle and stays split. In one account the hounds hunt the souls of babies who died before baptism, running them down across the heather and carrying them off. In the other, printed in Brewer’s dictionary and repeated ever since, the yeth hound is itself the spirit of an unbaptised child, a headless thing wailing through the woods at night. Both versions do the same work. Dartmoor farms were far from any church and the weather could shut the lanes for a week, so a newborn might wait a dangerous length of time for the font, and mothers on the moor were known to slip a piece of consecrated bread beneath the pillow to hold the pack off until the journey could be made. The story was, among other things, an argument for getting to church.

The most complete encounter was published in Folk-Lore in 1897 by M. J. Walhouse. A farmer riding home across the moor at night met the Black Hunter and, being full of ale, shouted for a share of the game. The Huntsman threw him something. He caught it, took it for a fawn, and carried it in his arms the rest of the way home, where a man came out with a lantern and said there was bad news, that there had been a loss in the house since morning. The farmer answered that he had gained something at least, got down, and brought the bundle into the lantern light. It was his own dead child, who had died during the day.

Devon attached the pack to a real man as well. Richard Cabell of Brook Hall in Buckfastleigh, dead on 5 July 1677 and remembered locally as an unusually foul piece of work, was said to have been escorted out of the world by black dogs breathing fire, howling around the house. He was buried under a heavy stone inside a small building with iron gratings, which is still there, and which the village will tell you was built to keep him from coming back up. This is the legend that eventually reached Arthur Conan Doyle, though he was careful about it afterwards. Asked in 1907 what his novel had been founded on, he said it was based on nothing except a remark by his friend Fletcher Robinson that there was a legend about a dog on the moor connected with some old family.

Their powers are the powers of an omen and very little else. They announce. Hunt records the sharpest version of the effect: if dogs hear the cry of the wish hounds, they all die. Human witnesses in the Dewerstone stories fare badly for a more mechanical reason, since the huntsman was said to lead men up the crag in the dark and then simply not be there any more, leaving them to find the edge with one foot. The hounds themselves do not need to touch anybody.

Their limits are just as plain, and they are the limits of a thing bound by rules rather than by strength. They keep to their ground, the Abbot’s Way and the Dewerstone valley and the country around Wistman’s Wood, and they turn back at the Dart. They run at night and in foul weather and are never once described in daylight. Against a baptised child they have no claim at all, which is why the bread under the pillow was thought to be enough, and why the whole terror could be dissolved by a short walk to a church on a fine morning. For a pack of hell’s dogs, they are remarkably easy to avoid.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Yeth hound?

A Yeth hound is a headless black dog from the folklore of Devon in south-west England, said to run the wastes of Dartmoor at night in a pack. Its name appears in west-country folklore collections alongside the yell-hounds and the wish or wisht hounds, which the collectors treated as the same creature. It is a death omen rather than a physical attacker.

Where do the Yeth hounds live?

The Yeth hounds are associated with Dartmoor in Devon, and specifically with three places: the Abbot’s Way, the old track running west off the moor toward Cornwall; the valley beneath the Dewerstone, the granite cliff above the River Plym; and the stunted oak grove of Wistman’s Wood, which tradition names as their kennel. They are said to refuse to cross the River Dart.

Who is the huntsman who leads the Yeth hounds?

The huntsman is the figure Dartmoor calls Dewer, generally understood to be the Devil, and the Dewerstone is named for him. A traveller’s handbook of 1851 described him as a tall dark figure carrying a hunting pole, seen on stormy winter nights. Sabine Baring-Gould wrote in 1913 that he hunts human souls and that his horn could be heard ringing across the moors.

Are the Yeth hounds the souls of unbaptised children?

The sources disagree, and both versions circulated in Devon. One tradition holds that the hounds hunt the souls of children who died before baptism; the other, recorded in Brewer’s dictionary, holds that the yeth hound is itself the spirit of such a child, wailing through the woods at night. Either way the belief attached to a practical anxiety on Dartmoor, where remote farms and bad weather could delay a christening for weeks.

Did the Yeth hound inspire The Hound of the Baskervilles?

The Dartmoor black dog legends, including the story of Richard Cabell of Buckfastleigh who died in 1677 and was said to have been met by fire-breathing black dogs, are commonly named as the background to Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel. Doyle himself was more cautious. Asked about it in 1907, he said the story rested on nothing but a remark from his friend Fletcher Robinson that there was a legend about a dog on the moor connected with an old family.

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