Tradition: English Mythology
Alternative Names: The Beast of the Forest of Dean
Category: Pig

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The Myth

The Beast of Dean is a legendary animal said to inhabit the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, England, an ancient woodland bounded by the rivers Severn and Wye. Tales of the creature appear to have originated in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. It was reportedly a gigantic wild boar, so powerful that it could knock down trees and hedges, and it became the subject of local attempts to hunt and kill it.

In 1802, farmers from the village of Parkend organized an expedition to capture and kill the beast. Their search was unsuccessful, and they found no animal matching the descriptions. Nevertheless, nineteenth-century accounts describe large populations of wild boar in the forest, with vast herds apparently allowed to forage there during autumn. These reports suggest that the legend may have developed around the region’s real wild boar population, although the existence of the enormous Beast of Dean has never been scientifically established.

The Beast continued to appear in later accounts of cryptozoology, whose proponents sometimes suggested that it was a real but scientifically unknown animal. Wild boar still inhabit the Forest of Dean, but there is no scientific evidence that a creature matching the legendary descriptions ever existed. In 2007, the science-fiction television series Primeval reimagined the Beast as a living gorgonopsid, a prehistoric predator that had travelled from the Permian Period into the modern world through a wormhole.

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Sources

“Beast of Dean.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Accessed October 27, 2026.

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