Black dogs · Yorkshire

The Barguest of the Oxwells

Headingley Hill, near Leeds, where the Oxwells spring once ran

Spooky: for older readers

In the old days there was a stretch of waste ground above a spring called the Oxwells, between Wreghorn and Headingley Hill, near Leeds. And on that waste ground there lived a Barguest.

Most of the time nobody saw it. But whenever someone of importance in the neighbourhood was about to die, the Barguest came out. It was a huge black dog, with flaming eyes as big as saucers. Behind it came every dog in the place, howling and barking.

You did not want to get in its way. If anyone crossed its path, the Barguest would strike out with its paw, and the wound it gave, to man or beast, would never heal.

A Yorkshire gentleman told William Henderson that he remembered it perfectly. As a child he had seen that dreadful procession go by, the black dog and all the howling dogs after it, just before the death of a certain Squire Wade of New Grange. He never forgot how frightened he was.

The people of Yorkshire had a saying for anyone who made a terrible noise: they would “roar like a Barguest”.

No plate yet. We are still looking for an old picture of this place.

What people said

A sign of death. Henderson thought the Barguest's real work was to warn of a death. He liked Walter Scott's idea that the name came from the German bahrgeist, “spirit of the bier”.
The Padfoot. In the villages round Leeds people feared the Padfoot, black and shaggy, the size of a small donkey, with eyes like saucers. It followed people by night, padding behind them, beside them, then in front, sometimes with the sound of a dragging chain. Old Sally Dransfield, the carrier from Leeds to Swillington, swore she had often seen it, sometimes rolling along the road ahead of her like a woolpack, sometimes vanishing through a hedge.
Don't touch it. It was safest to leave the Padfoot alone, because a word or a blow gave it power over you. A man who kicked it, when it kept getting in his way, was dragged through hedge and ditch all the way home and left lying under his own window.

Other tellings

Henderson thought the Padfoot was the same creature as the Barguest. A Barguest near Darlington could take the shape of a headless man who vanished in flame, a headless lady, a white cat, a rabbit, or a dog, white or black.
In a note in Henderson's book, the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould tells of a man in Horbury who saw the Padfoot as a white dog with “great saucer e'en”. When he struck at it, his stick went straight through it. He ran home, went to bed, fell ill and died.

What the history says

Henderson's Yorkshire gentleman had died not long before the book came out in 1879, and he had seen the Barguest as a child. [TODO: where the Oxwells spring was, and who Squire Wade of New Grange was]

Go and See

Where: Headingley Hill, in north-west Leeds. The pin marks Headingley Hill. [TODO: whether anything of the Oxwells spring or the waste ground survives]
Access: Public streets.
Allow: A few minutes.
Families: A spooky tale of a death-omen dog. Best for older children.

Visiting details checked 24 October 2026 with OpenStreetMap. Always check before you travel.

53.8181° N, 1.5734° W · Open in OpenStreetMap

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Sources

William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1879), pp. 273–275, with notes from the Rev. J. C. Atkinson of Danby and the Rev. S. Baring-Gould. Our main source. Internet Archive.

This is a legend, told as people told it. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.