The Girt Dog of Ennerdale

Cumberland, 1810. The valleys west of the Lakeland fells lived on sheep. John Russell, a Whitehaven brewery owner, ran about 3,000 acres of sheep farm in Ennerdale alone.

On or about the 10th May, 1810. Mr. Mossop of Thornholme, between Ennerdale and Calderbridge, saw a dog and "noticed him as a stranger." It was "a smooth-haired dog of a tawny mouse-colour, with dark streaks in tiger-fashion over his hide." It appeared to be a cross between mastiff and greyhound.

Then the flocks began to fall. The dog "would sometimes wantonly destroy seven or eight sheep in one night." It was not known to have fed on anything but living mutton. In one kill the flesh had been torn from the ribs behind the shoulder, and "the still beating heart was laid bare and visible." No one ever heard it bark or growl.

Russell offered ale to the watchers and a reward of ten pounds, dead or alive. Willy Jackson of Swinside got within about 30 yards. His untrusty flint gun missed fire. Away sped the fugitive. Anthony Atkinson loaded swan shot and crept up while the dog rested. Three of his pellets stuck harmlessly in its side.

The animal ranged from Kinniside Fell to Seascale and Drigg, from Lamplugh to Workington and St Bees. It glided from one cornfield to another, where the hunters would not go in to injure the growing crops. It ran across the vale of Ennerdale and through Loweswater, and was "lost in the mist and night." One chase ran nearly twenty miles to the Derwent. At the Ehen, it was seen "quietly taking a cold bath in the river, with the hounds as quietly looking on."

In July about 200 men with hounds hunted Kinniside all day. Nothing. Once the hunt passed Ennerdale church during service. The male part of the congregation ran out and followed.

12 September 1810. Jonathan Patrickson saw the dog go into a cornfield and wounded it in the hindquarters. It headed off this way and that until it became exhausted. At Eskat Woods, John Steel of Asby fired the fatal discharge. The destroyer fell to rise no more. Steel took the £10 reward.

The carcass weighed eight imperial stones. It was shown at the inn at Ennerdale Bridge, then stuffed and exhibited in Hutton's Museum at Keswick. A collar round its neck named it the destroyer of nearly three hundred sheep and lambs in five months. The skin has since been lost.

The account reprinted in 1864, signed "D.", judged it a mastiff and greyhound cross, perhaps escaped from a Romani camp. Others looked further afield. Futility Closet raised a thylacine escaped from a travelling menagerie. John Knifton tested the idea against Wombwell's menagerie and rejected it, since Europeans had only described the thylacine in 1805. Another writer suggested a hyena, if the stripes were real. G. M. Eberhart filed the case under "Alien Big Dog."

The retellings grew. Three hundred to four hundred sheep. Blood drunk from the jugular. A beast eight feet long. Will Rothery called it lion-like. Knifton set it beside the Beast of Gévaudan. Walkers' guides still carry the story across the fells, under the name the newspapers of 1810 gave it: the Worrying Dog of Ennerdale.