The Tatterfoal was a goblin horse or donkey of Lincolnshire folklore, with a particular and recurring fondness for hills, reported at several sites across the county including Spittal Hill at Freiston near Boston, Ogarth Hill at Tathwell, Kirton-in-Lindsey, South Ferriby and Boggart Lane at Roxby, a genuinely widespread tradition rather than a story confined to any single location. The name relates directly to its shaggy, ragged coat, and it belongs to the same broad family of shape-changing boggart or padfoot creatures found across northern England more generally, sometimes malicious in the stories told about them and sometimes simply mischievous rather than genuinely threatening.
Pishey Thompson's 1856 History and Antiquities of Boston assigns a boggard of exactly this kind specifically to Spittal Hill at Freiston, giving the local Tatterfoal tradition a genuinely early written record rather than relying purely on oral memory, and early twentieth-century folklorists Eliza Gutch and Mabel Peacock later collected and discussed the wider tradition in their own published work.
Peacock's own 1897 collection, Lincolnshire Tales, includes a version of the Tatterfoal story in which the supposed apparition turns out on closer investigation to be nothing more than a very human prankster deliberately frightening travellers, a useful reminder that these boggart tales often carried a knowing wink alongside the genuine fright they were designed to produce.
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