The hill country around Wooler, close to the old Anglo-Scottish border reiving territory, holds a scattered set of minor folklore traditions quite distinct from its more famous castles and battle sites, smaller and stranger stories that survive mainly through local memory rather than any grander historical record. One of these describes a phantom horse, dun in colour, said to haunt a cave in the Cockenheugh Hills as well as Fowberry Bridge and, less often, a nearby tower standing in the same general area.
The story attached to the horse is uncertain even in its own telling: some versions describe the spirit behind it as a Border reiver, one of the mounted raiders who fought and stole cattle across this violent frontier for centuries, while others describe someone who died by suicide, and some versions combine both possibilities into a single figure without ever fully resolving the contradiction between them.
What is consistent across the various tellings is the horse's underlying purpose: it is said to scour the area searching for treasure it lost, or perhaps deliberately hid, at some point during its own lifetime. As with much of this kind of very local folklore, no fuller narrative survives explaining exactly who the rider was, when he lived, or what treasure is actually meant, which suggests a fragment of a once-fuller story that has been reduced over generations of retelling to its core, recognisable image of a ghostly horse moving across the hillside.
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