The Black Dog

Some Black Dog pubs are called after some real flesh-and-blood doggie, others after someone’s heraldic emblem, but in one or two places the name refers to a ghostly or demonic Black Dog.

Uplyme, on the border of Devon and Dorset, is one example. Since the mid nineteenth century it has had a Black Dog Inn (now a Bed and Breakfast), incorporating parts of an older farmhouse, itself built on the site of a mansion destroyed in the Civil War. According to a nineteenth-century legend, every evening as the farmer sat by the fire a large black dog would appear from nowhere and lie down on the opposite side of the hearth. His neighbours reckoned it must be a demon, but he himself did not mind the uncanny beast. One night, however, the farmer came home drunk, and angry because someone had sneered at him for being too frightened of the strange dog to drive it away. Seeing it by the fire he tried to hit it with the poker, but the dog rushed upstairs, into an attic, and out through the roof. The farmer chased after it and struck the poker against the spot where it had disappeared; the ceiling was smashed, and down fell a box full of gold and silver coins from the times of Charles I. The dog must have been the ghost of whoever hid the treasure there during the Civil War. The lucky farmer used the money to turn his farm into an inn, and the dog was never seen indoors again – though some say it still runs along Hayes Lane at midnight, dragging a rattling chain.

The Black Dog Tavern which once stood near Newgate Prison in London took its name from an older and grimmer tale, recorded in 1638. This says there was a famine so severe during the reign of Henry III that Newgate prisoners began killing and eating one another. One victim was a learned magician. From then on his murderers saw him every night ‘in the shape of a black dog walking up and down the prison, ready with his ravening jaws to tear out their bowels’. Terrified, they killed a keeper and escaped, but wherever they went a black dog followed them. And it was always seen in the prison on the night before an execution.

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Jacqueline is the author of Green Men and White Swans, an enchanting guide to the stories and legends behind Britain's traditional pub names.