Dartmoor Tales: The Hounds of Buckfastleigh

The Hounds of Buckfastleigh

The second novel in the new Dartmoor Tales series (they can all be read independently and in any order)

Warning: does include some “choice” language used by 19 year old teenagers…

Across Dartmoor, old tales tell of the Wild Hunt—a ghostly hunt racing through the darkness, accompanied by the terrifying Wisht Hounds, great black spectral dogs whose cries were once feared across the moor.

Some said the Hunt was led by the Devil himself.

At Buckfastleigh, those ancient stories became entwined with the legend of Squire Richard Cabell, a cruel seventeenth-century landowner and huntsman said to have sold his soul to the Devil. When Cabell died, the hounds supposedly came for him, and his strange tomb beside the ruined Holy Trinity Church remains at the heart of the legend today.

But what if the stories became confused over the centuries?

What if the Wild Hunt was already ancient when Cabell was alive? What if the Wisht Hounds served something far older than the Devil of Christian tradition?

And what if Richard Cabell didn’t escape the Hunt at all?

On Halloween night, nineteen-year-old friends Kian, Josh and Toby decide to put the old legend to the test. After breaking into Cabell’s tomb and disturbing what lies within, they discover that some Dartmoor tales were never meant simply to frighten children.

Something has awakened in the churchyard.

The hounds are running once more.

And this time, the Wild Hunt has three young men in its sights.

The Hounds of Buckfastleigh is a dark new reimagining of one of Dartmoor’s most chilling legends—a supernatural tale of friendship, guilt, judgement and an ancient Hunt that has never truly ended.

This is the second in my new Dartmoor Tales series, re-telling and re-imagining old legends of Dartmoor and bringing in a modern day story and twist or two.