The Girt Dog of Ennerdale was a real terror of the Cumberland fells in 1810, but one that passed swiftly into legend. From May to September a single elusive animal killed between three and four hundred sheep across the high ground around Ennerdale, and what unnerved the dalesmen was its manner: it drained its victims of blood, ate only the choicest parts, and slew far more than it could eat, sometimes eight sheep in a night.
The story
A reward was posted and great hunts were mounted — on one July day two hundred men with hounds combed the Kinniside fells — but the creature evaded them all, seeming to vanish and reappear at will. It was finally shot in September 1810 by a man named John Steel; the carcass weighed over a hundredweight and was stuffed and displayed in a Keswick museum. Its strange habits — the blood-draining, the taste for soft organs — have led some to wonder, fancifully, whether it was an escaped thylacine; in the dales it simply became the 'Girt Dog', a flesh-and-blood beast that hunted like a phantom.