The Wansdyke & District Forums

A question that has nagged me, because the Wild Hunt is everywhere in the books but I cannot pin down a properly local Wiltshire telling. The Hunt, for those who do not know it: a spectral chase that rides across the sky or the high downs on wild nights, hounds and horses and a terrible huntsman, and to see it is an omen, and to be caught up in it is to be carried off. It is all over the north and the West Country. Woden leads it in some tellings, which sits oddly well with our Woden's dyke. Does anyone have it from their own family, locally, rather than from a book? I would dearly like to know if the Hunt was ever told on these downs, or whether I am importing it.

My grandmother had something like it, though she never called it the Wild Hunt. She called it the Gabriel hounds, or the sky-yelpers, and it was the sound of them she spoke of, not the sight: a yelping and a baying passing over high up on a wild night, going west, and you were to come in off the down and shut the door and not look up. She was frightened of it in a way she was frightened of very little. I heard it once myself as a girl, geese most likely, going over in the dark, but my blood ran cold because of how she had spoken of it. The fear came down the family even when the belief had thinned.

That is gold, Nancy, thank you, and exactly what I hoped for. The Gabriel hounds, the sky-yelpers: that is the genuine local article, and far better than any book. The detail that you must not look up is the old one, the same as do not watch the smith, do not look back. And that it goes west. The dead go west, the sun goes west, the old country of the lost goes west under the sea. Your grandmother was carrying something very old without needing to know what it was.

And note that it rides on the wild nights of the turning year, around the solstice and the twelve days, when the boundary is thin and the dead and the other folk are abroad. Every culture that has the Hunt puts it at the same season. They were not comparing notes. They were all standing under the same sky on the same nights, hearing the same thing pass over, going west, and shutting the door.