Neet boggarts

I enjoyed the features on boggarts in FT416. I’m not sure how I missed Simon Young’s Census. However, having been born in 1955 in Preston, Lancashire, and brought up five miles further south in Leyland, I long associated boggarts with bridges – I don’t know how I got this idea, but maybe because of this I always thought of the wolf under the bridge in the folk tale “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” as some kind of boggart.

I always associated my family background solely with Preston until sometime in the 1990s. My father (born in Preston in 1924) told me that his father (born 1902) had told him that we Darwens (pronounced “Darren” by older people in Preston back in the 1960s and 1970s, to my knowledge) are “neet boggarts from t’ Brig” – a neet boggart being a kind of ghost – that is, a boggart that comes out at night, and from Bamber Bridge (or t’ Brig), a few miles south of where the family lived on Preston’s New Hall Lane. The inference was that we were “dirty stop outs” – my translation, which my older sister agrees with, though while I felt there was some suggestion of getting up to mischief, my sister says she felt it meant that they had a good time while they were out, most likely at the pub. She heard him say it on at least two occasions, but not the time he said it to me. My dad didn’t explain any further, but then went on to talk about an uncle he had in Bamber Bridge we’d never previously heard of.

Now, if there’s a neet boggart, are there day boggarts as well? Norman Darwen

Bolton, Lancashire