Dozmary Pool. Nr. Bolventor. Bodmin Moor. Cornwall.
FROM HAUNTED HOUSES OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND BY RICHARD JONES. CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE A SIGNED COPY
There is a strange and awesome desolation about the wild wilderness of Bodmin Moor. To traipse across its bleak expanse is to feel that you have strayed into a nether region, a timeless limbo where the souls of previous ages hover precariously close to the present. Celtic crosses lean wearily against the unforgiving terrain. Mysterious stone circles huddle together, jealously guarding their ancient secrets. Long-abandoned mine buildings stand gaunt against the skyline, their dark silhouettes often enveloped in thick mists that lend them a ghostly air. And at the heart of the moor, stands Dozmary pool, a grim expanse of still, leaden water surrounded by low, brown, treeless hills where a legion of legends come marching from a mist-shrouded past.
It was to the rock strewn banks of this melancholic pool that Sir Bedivere is said to have brought the dying King Arthur, who instructed him to cast Excalibur into the sullen waters. It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to picture Bedivere trudging down to the reed-fringed banks where he found himself unable to dispose of so beautiful a sword. Twice he returned to his dying King who knew from the answers to his questions that his wish had not been carried out. On the third occasion, however, the loyal knight had reluctantly complied with Arthur’s wishes and thus when questioned was, according to Tennyson, able to reply:-
“… With both hands I flung him, wheeling him;
But when I looked again, behold an arm,
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
That caught him by the hilt, and brandish’d him
Three times, and drew him under in the mere”
Arthurian epics aside, the pool has several other legends to fire the imagination of even the most jaded city dweller. At night a dark spirit is said to sit by the lifeless waters its despairing cries clearly discernable over even the wildest of autumn gales. He is known locally as Jan Tregeagle and his dreadful spectre has, it is whispered, been doomed to eternal torment for the dreadful atrocities he committed in life.
Jan Tregeagle lived in the early 1600’s and was a none too popular local magistrate said to have used his position to make himself very wealthy. Local tradition holds that he murdered his wife and children, seized an orphan’s estates and even sold his soul to the devil. That an unsympathetic and unpopular magistrate named Tregeagle existed is historic fact. Whether he ever sold his soul to the devil, murdered his wife and children or seized the estates of orphans to swell his own coffers, as is claimed, is doubtful. But such was the low esteem in which he was held that, when he died, it was said that he had to bribe the clergy to allow his body to lie in the consecrated ground of St Breock’s churchyard.
But a few years after his death, a land dispute arose between two Bodmin families, one of who had once employed Jan Tregeagle as their lawyer, and had subsequently been defrauded by him when he forged certain documents to make it appear that he was the legal owner of the disputed lands. When both sides had presented their cases and the judge was ready to sum up, the defendant asked if he could call one final witness. Suddenly the air turned cold, a blast of wind howled through the courtroom and suddenly the spirit of Jan Tregeagle, was standing in the witness box. He was forced, under oath, to admit that the defendant had been a victim of his fraud upon hearing which, the jury brought in a unanimous verdict in the man’s favour. Arguing that the business of bringing Tregeagle from the grave had been an onerous and frightful task, the victorious defendant ignored the judge’s command to remove the fearsome spectre from the room and thanking the jury, left the phantom in the care of the court.
The assistance of the clergy was duly called upon and they decided that it
was their moral
duty to attempt to save Tregeagle’s troubled soul. So they
set him a task that, they hoped, would keep him busy for the rest of
eternity. Thus he was brought to the boggy banks of Dozmary pool and
condemned to empty its bottomless depths with a perforated limpet shell.
And, to ensure that he kept hard at his task, they cast spells and summoned
forth a pack of headless demon hounds to snap at his heels, should he ever
falter in his impossible and endless task. Many is the late night wanderer
who has mistaken his anguished shrieks of frustrated rage for nothing more
than the innocent howling of the wind!
FROM HAUNTED HOUSES OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND BY RICHARD JONES. CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE A SIGNED COPY
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