The return of the Boggle

The boggle is still a fancy dress favourite of Cumbrian children

THERE’S much excitment in West Cumbria at the moment over another ‘big cat’ sighting. To the wildlife lover, this is an enigmatic rare species of wild cat that has escaped capture. To researchers of the paranormal, it’s a mystical beast that slips in and out of reality. But to Cumbrians there’s no doubting what it is: It’s a boggle.

Boggles – like fairies, ghosts, elves and other creatures from the fringes of existence – have all but died out in Cumbria. To many people, boggle has come to be just another word for a ghost or poltergeist but historically it was a very separate beast. Jeremiah Sullivan, writing in 1857, said: “Animal shapes are amongst those most commonly assumed by boggles. Large dogs, white horses, unaccountable cats, and white rabbits, all add to the boggle family; but are expected to appear where they have no business, to vanish through the dark side of stone walls, or to disappear down craggy, steep paths near which no well meaning animals should be found.”

This latest big cat was spotted by a witness at 7.30 last Monday morning near a gate on the road from Arlecdon to Whitehaven. The witness – fairly knowledgable on British wildlife – could not identify it except to say it was the size of a labrador, had a long bushy tail and was light brown in colour. Such a creature should be quickly found in this farming community but it has vanished as mysteriously as it arrived. Typical boggle behaviour.

Even in 1857, Jeremiah Sullivan reported in his book, Cumberland & Westmorland, Ancient and Modern, that “The most general superstition yet lingering amongst us, is the belief in apparitions, in the native dialect commonly called boggles. There is no nook of the country inaccessible to boggles, no mind so incredulous that it may not at some moment, or in some way, be converted from its scepticism“.

I’ve jotted down just some of the other names for boggles in Cumbria in the 19th century. Just as the apocryphal Eskimos had thousands of words for snow, so Cumbrians had numerous words for boggles. Here are just a few: bo, bu-kow, hobgoblin, boggart, bu-man, goblin, devil, boggle-bo, boggle-de-boo, bargheist, ghost, apparition. spirit, brag, swath, swarf, wraith, wauf, the fetch, barguest, capelthwaite, bogie… and so the list goes on. Such cataloguing reveals the deep belief in these creatures.

I have put together a Google map of our more famous boggles for anyone who wishes to come boggle-hunting one weekend. Another 19th century writer, Robert Anderson, has this advice – and warning – for boggle hunters:

” Its favourite haunts are dark and secluded lonnings, the ruins of old castles, and dilapidated mansion houses. It loves darkness and never appears till those hours which Shakespeare calls the ‘witching time of night’. Like other spectres it is generally silent but when it does break silence its unearthly cries ‘make night hideous’ and operate so much on the fears of the poor benighted rustie that he hastens home with precipitated steps sometimes leaving his clogs in the flight.”

Hold on to your clogs, boggle hunters!

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