The Tower on the Moor, as it is known, is all that remains of an elaborate fifteenth-century hunting lodge. You can visit by pre-arranged tour (more information at https://www.woodhallspagolf.com/tower_on_the_moor). In Victorian times, a man known as Tabshag apparently lived close to it (with his characteristically unnamed wife), on what was a wild tract of moor – now the edge of a golf course.

J. Conway Walter, in Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood (1899), writes: ‘In the writer’s youth […] Old Dawson, or “Tabshag,” the soubriquet by which he was more commonly known, lived with his wife the rather wild existence of a squatter, on the waste, under sufferance from the owner. He kept a pig, and was wont to boast that he possessed the highest pigsty and the lowest barn in the country, because the sty was a structure of his own erection, in the old brick tower, above the level of the surrounding ground; while his straw was stored in an excavation (still existing) several feet below. At that time between the Tower and Bracken Wood there was a stretch of waste land, several acres in extent, consisting of bog, interspersed with tussocks of coarse grass, and straggling alders and birches, still known by the name of “The Bog’s Nook,” or corner. On this ground the common green plover—Vanellus cristatus—then commonly called the “Pyewipe,” bred in large numbers; the eggs were, as they are still, regarded as a delicacy, and old “Tabshag” used to make a considerable sum of money every year by sending hampers of these eggs by coach up to London for sale. So familiar he was said to be with the habits of the bird that he could tell by its cry how many eggs were in the nest. This land is now under cultivation, and the plaintive cry of the plover is heard no more, or only seldom.’ 

The two-piece band Homity recorded a fictional encounter with him in their song ‘Tabshag’ (2023), which you can listen to here:

He was apparently regarded by some as a kind of bogle, or was at least treated as suspicious, and the song makes much of this.

We are grateful to David Start for drawing our attention to this tale, and to the song.

Words by RORY WATERMAN