The Clos du Valle was a place apart until the early 1800s. At high tide the Braye du Valle filled with sea and the Clos became an island, reached by rough stone bridges over the mud. It kept its own stories, and Le Chien Bôdu was one of the grimmest. Unlike the chained Bête de la Tour in town, the Chien Bôdu seems not to have done anything much. It was simply seen, and the seeing was the warning.
MacCulloch's guess that it belonged to the Ville Bôdu, the monks' slaughterhouse, is characteristic of his method: he looked for a place-name and a history to explain a belief. Métivier, as usual, went further back, to "the German Bohdu, and Gaulish Bodu, which mean the Abyss", and made it a hound of the underworld. Edith Carey compared it to a nocturnal hunt called La Chasse à Bôdet, described in central France, which howled across the sky.
The belief outlived both men. Island Families' guide to Guernsey legends names the "Tchen Bodu" as a black hound seen on L'Ancresse Common and in the Clos du Valle, "seen as a death omen for either the witness or someone close to them". No dated sighting has been published, so this record is tagged as tradition. The map point sits in the Clos du Valle, where the common and its dolmens make a suitably bleak setting after dark.
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