Interesting Pod #1: “Bloodthirsty River”: The Bolton Strid, The most dangerous body of water on earth - The Bolton Strid, River Wharfe, Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire. “
Thalassophobics beware - today we’re talking about one of the scariest bodies of water on Earth! From the book of Genesis until today, floods have been one of humanity's greatest enemies. On August 15, 1998, Barry and Lynn Collett were married at Long Sutton Church near Hampshire, UK, before spending their wedding night at a hotel in Maiden's Green, Berkshire, and travelling north on Sunday.
By all accounts, the couple were sensible, fine people who loved each other greatly, but I can’t help but think their wedding day was marred by one of the worst United Kingdom terror incidents that happened in the twentieth century. You see, the day the Colletts were married was the same day the Real IRA a provisional splinter group of the I.R.A. (Irish Republican Army) set off a massive bomb in Omaugh (Owe-Muh), Northern Ireland, that killed 29 and injured 220. It was the deadliest Northern Ireland incident of the Troubles, and it happened because the Real IRA, who were not, in fact, the Real IRA, but just called themselves that, opposed the IRA's ceasefire and the Good Friday Agreement, signed earlier in the year. They were against peace.
So I imagine that the Collett’s had mixed feelings in August as they drove towards the Bolton Abbey area of North Yorkshire, wondering if the bomb might be an omen, or a harbinger of something worse to come. Barry was a computer guy and his new wife Lynn a student nurse…good people. They got married on a Saturday, and by Sunday night, they were near Bolton Abbey, staying in a holiday cottage in Appletreewick, a tiny village of 200 on the shores of the River Wharfe. That Sunday night, they likely huddled up in that cottage as a fierce rain storm beat down, swelling the River Wharfe to dangerous levels. Monday the 17th, the rain abated for a bit, and Barry and Lynn decided to go for a walk by the river, not overly familiar with the area, and apparently not aware of the dangers of the Strid, a stretch of river that many today call a “drowning machine.”
U.K. Officers believed the couple went into the water slightly north of Bardon Bridge near stepping stones after setting off from their honeymoon cottage at Appletreewick on Monday. They just wanted to have a bit of a nature walk and stretch their legs after a long drive, and being cooped up in their cottage during the rain. Totally understandable. Unfortunately, they were never seen alive again.
A local, Desmond Thomas, of Pembroke Dock was walking near the river that fateful Monday with his family and said: "The level, speed, and turbulence of the water looked like flood water. It rose a matter of feet in seconds.” He also apparently saw Mr. Collett, caught in the deadly current of the Strid, rush past him in a blur. "I went to the water's edge and just as I got there I saw a man's body, who I now know to be Barry, pop out of the water.
"The face popped up towards me and within a matter of seconds it disappeared." Terrifying and heart-wrenching.
What happened? Many people over the years have tried to jump across the Strid. Certainly, it’s doable - only about 6.5 feet wide in some places, but on this particular Monday, that would have been even more ill-advised than normal. The River bailiff for that stretch of the Strid - if you’re American, think of a Game Warden - was Charles Hoyle. He found Mrs Collett's jacket in the water the Tuesday after she disappeared, and he said that on the Monday the couple was lost, he personally witnessed the river rise five feet in less than 60 seconds because of the rain from the night before. This was something he said he had only seen happen about six times before.
ELEVEN LABS Superintendent Parker of the local Constabulary said, "They were a sensible couple. We do not believe they tried to jump the Strid - the water was very high and we have no reason to think they would do anything like that," We don’t know exactly what happened. We don’t know precisely how the Strid claimed those two lovely honeymooners, but it did. Somehow, someway, Barry and Lynn just got too close to what may well be the most dangerous tiny stretch of water in the world.
There were not the first victims of the Strid, and they may
not have been the 100th or even the 1000th.
In 1875, the Craven Herald and Pioneer reports that two grappling irons - for rescue - were suspended from trees near the Strid so that people who fell in might somehow, someway, be rescued. The paper reports:
For centuries, people in that area have respected and trembled at their beautiful river, and the poet William Wordsworth, he of “I wandered Lonely as a Cloud” fame, also wrote an utterly haunting, poignant, and striking poem over 200 years ago about a young boy who also lost his life while trying to leap across the Strid. Now, I need to tell you that I wasn’t ever much of a fan of poetry or Wordsworth back in the day when I began college as an English major. Had I been exposed to this poem, however, I might have felt quite different. It’s tragic, to be sure, but in a pretty evocative way, almost like a ghost story. Let’s read a few lines of that amazing poetry, and then - after that, I’d like to preview a song about the Strid that was written and performed JUST FOR THIS EPISODE by the Bolton Bardeaters. I’ll just play a short clip of the song, but you can listen to the whole thing at the end of the episode. It’s sad, but it hits hard, and I really like it. Hope you do too!
Here’s Wordsworth’s The Force of Prayer, which revolves around a Strid disaster:
Young Romilly through Barden Woods
Is ranging high and low;
And holds a Greyhound in a leash,
To let slip upon buck or doe.
And the Pair have reached that fearful chasm,
How tempting to bestride!
For lordly Wharf is there pent in
With rocks on either side.
6:18 for 1000 words.
This Striding-place is called The Strid,
A name which it took of yore:
A thousand years hath it borne that name,
And shall, a thousand more.
And hither is young Romilly come,
And what may now forbid
That he, perhaps for the hundredth time,
Shall bound across The Strid?
He sprang in glee,—for what cared he
That the River was strong and the rocks were steep?
—But the Greyhound in the leash hung back,
And checked him in his leap.
The Boy is in the arms of Wharf,
And strangled by a merciless force;
For never more was young Romilly seen
Till he rose a lifeless corpse!
Hello, and thanks for listening. I’m Doctor Chase, a historian and writer originally from Birmingham, now living in the Monterey, California area. The song you just heard was commissioned by the podcast for this episode, and was performed by a Bolton group, the Bolton Bardeaters, an ersatz Celtic fusion heavy metal group that might be from that area. You can hear the whole song in full at the end of the episode, and the lyrics were written by friend of the show William Wordsworth over 200 years ago, with a few modern modifications.
I love history, and history is the whole focus of this podcast, but not just any history. Here, we specialize in the strange, the fascinating, the mysterious, the whimsical, the wild, the provoking, the adventurous, and, like today, the eerie. We’ll cover the topics that Dan Carlin and Hardcore History probably won’t touch, but we’ll try to do them with that kind of commitment to research and detail. I’ve got a doctoral degree in counseling, and am finishing up a PhD in history, but I never really grew up from that fifth-grade boy in Alabama that loved mysteries, urban legends, myths, and great stories. Now, with a bit of academic experience, I’d like to explore the truth of some of those fantastic tales, and I’m glad you’re willing to join me on that ride.
For a show with interesting in the title, there’s a lot of pressure to pick out a really engaging, really captivating topic for the first episode, and I think you’ll be pleased with the choice, even if most of you have never even heard of the Bolton Strid, a harrowing and deadly stretch of the Wharfe River that runs for a few hundred meters in Northern England near the picturesque village of Bolton Abbey. Locals call the Strid "the stream that swallows people" and "England's Killer Creek" but even up close it doesn't appear to be all that dangerous. Like a coral snake, it is a beautiful sight to behold, until you touch it…or it, touches you.
An 1839 article in the Manchester Guardian newspaper notes that nobody can stand beside the Strid long “without feeling a sense of its power and savage grandeur grow upon him. It is indeed a place “most tempting to bestride,” or jump across. “One slip of the foot, and the leap is into eternity.” The New York Times, in describing the Strid, writes, “The Strid is a segment of the River Wharfe, which runs past the tranquil ruins of Bolton Priory, an ancient monastery. A few yards upstream from the Strid, the river is shallow and wide, about 30 feet from bank to bank. But then the terrain squeezes the river so tightly that it is effectively turned on its side. Instead of wide and shallow, it becomes narrow and deep, a powerful wedge of water racing through a crevasse riddled with underwater caves and overhangs. This is the Bolton Strid.”
Legend claims the Bolton Strid is the most dangerous stretch of water in the entire world. They say, and have said for decades if not centuries, that the Strid has a 100 percent fatality rate for those who fall in it. There’s no escape, and no rescue. But to look at it, it’s just a rapidly flowing, but not terrifying stream, about 45 minutes northwest of Leeds and a little over an hour west of York, England in the middle of a wide patch of beautiful fields. The Strid is in Northern England, and just a hair under 2 hours drive from Gretna Green in Scotland, so that means the water is COLD. If you’re American, or from pretty much anywhere other than Northern England, you’re probably wondering what in the world a “strid” is, anyway.
The Strid itself is not a river…but a part of a river. Just north of the tiny village of Bolton Abbey, there is a short but potent stretch of the River Wharfe that has been called The Strid for hundreds of years. Its name comes from an Old English word stryth, which means 'turmoil'. This was later corrupted to Strid, like stride, and it referred to the possibility - the dangerous possibility - of striding across the river. More accurately, we might say bounding or leaping across the river, because the narrowest point of the Strid is only about 6.5 feet/2 meters wide, which is a pretty large stride for all but the Goliath’s and Victor Wimbanyana’s among us at normal walking speed. Usain Bolt’s stride at the height of his speeding powers, sprinting like a madman, was 2.8 metres, over 9 feet!
So the Strid is a portion of the River Wharfe in Yorkshire, England. The Wharfe is a beautiful river that flows through stunning countryside, beginning around Beckermonds and Oughtershaw OUTERSHAW in Central Northwest England, and flowing southeast for 65 miles to where it ends just above Leeds. It’s a great place for flyfishing, and you can catch grayling or brown trout there. It’s also a wonderful river for birdwatching, and well over 200 species of birds have been seen along the River Wharfe. It’s not the longest river in the U.K. not even the twentieth longest, but it is remarkable for its beauty and mixture of serenity and kayabakle rapids…until you get near the Bolton Abbey Estates, when things drastically change.
For most of the river’s 65 miles, the depth is pretty modest, usually 10 feet or less. There’s a couple of places where it gets up to 24 feet deep, but those spots are few and far between. The river is never very wide either, maybe 90 or so feet at its maximum, but something weird happens along that stretch they call the Strid. It’s like the river just kind of turns sideways - upside down even. Instead of being moderately wide and shallow, it becomes quite narrow, but perilously deep.
What makes the River Wharfe stretch known as the Strid so dangerous? Carolyn Roberts, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and Former Frank Jackson Professor of the Environment at Gresham College, London explains: 'Beautiful rivers can certainly be dangerous to humans – the Nile has lots of crocodiles, the Zambesi will push you over the Victoria Falls, and beware of swallowing water from the lower reaches of the Colorado. 'Whilst the Strid is also beautiful, and looks innocuous, it’s similarly deadly. It kills because of its geomorphology – the form of the channel, which is influenced by the nature of the rocks over which it tumbles. 'Rather than carving a stately way through silt, it twists and turns through flat and overhanging rocks falling over the edge of a limestone formation. Vortices in the flow will trap bodies under the water close to the bed or the sides, whilst the turbulence will render someone unconscious very quickly. It’s not a good place to play.”
With the Strid portion of the river being so narrow…often around six or seven feet, one wonders about the depth. Nobody knows exactly how deep, but a Youtuber named Jack a Snacks went and measured the depth of the Strid in 2021 using sonar, and he came up with a depth of over 216 feet. Imagine that - not even ten feet wide, rushing, pulsing waters, and OVER 200 feet deep. There’s even one section where he measures the depth of the river at a place that looks no more than six feet across, and the depth measures well over 100 feet deep. It’s crazy!! And watching his video, I gotta tell you, that river just looks so innocent and pretty, right up until you get to the Strid part… then it's just angry, and surrounded by what looks like moss-covered rocks. Some have disputed those sonar findings, so we aren’t one hundred percent sure about the depth there, but it is deep enough to cause big trouble.
Other Youtubers have immersed their waterproof go-pro style cameras into the Strid, and several cameras have likely been lost in this process. Some of the footage I’ve seen shows really turbulent waters as well as a genuinely scary ledge of stone a few feet below the surface where the river kind of expands underwater, which demonstrates one of the likely mechanisms for the danger - people can slip or fall into the seemingy shallow water, and then get yanked under those ledges far too quickly to get rescued or immerse somewhere else with their head above water.
Barry and Lynn Collett’s story, which we led off with, reminds me of an incident with my family when we first moved to Monterey, except, by grace, our story ended much better. Monastery beach/Mortuary beach.
Water is dangerous, and the Strid is reputedly one of the most dangerous bodies of water on Earth. Is this just hype? Is it An urban legend magnified by Wordsworth’s poetry and 19th-century horror stories like Gertrude Atherton's 'The Striding Place'? Great story, by the way, perfect for spooky season, and despite the fact that it was written in the 1800s, that last line punches above its weight. Read it…if you dare. In that story, Atherton describes the Strid writing, “There was no lonelier spot in England nor one which had the right to claim so many ghosts, if ghosts there were.”
As the Times reports, an old English rhyme also points out the hazards of the Strid and the Wharfe river that holds it, “Wharfe is clear, and Aire is lithe;
Where Aire kills one, Wharfe kills five.” The River Aire, though 30 miles longer and wider, is far less dangerous than the River Wharfe.
A recent popular YouTube video from around two years ago is titled, “THEY didn’t listen and the Strid MURDERED them” With murdered in all caps. Has the danger of this river been blown out of all proportion?
It’s a good question, and of the many websites and Youtube videos that mention the Strid, it’s hard to find anybody that’s done real research into this place, but that’s what we’re going to do now.
It’s Time Machine time…let’s go back into the past and see if the Strid is as dangerous as it’s cracked up to be!
Newspaper reports brim with recent casualties all along the Wharfe River near the Strid. The Wharfe river - not the Strid section - is popular for swimming during the summer, even though the water itself is quite cold. It also has swifter current than one might realize - even in the non-Strid sections - and lots of unpredictable dips and depth changes. In fact, less than a week ago at the time of this recording in July of 2025, a man dove into the Wharfe - not the Strid portion - near the Bolton Abbey to save his daughter from distress in the water - and succeeded in doing so - but the coldness of the water caused him to go into cardiac arrest, and he was only saved due to the diligence and lifesaving skills of two local men who rescued him and performed CPR until the air ambulance arrived. The Strid itself in modernity is surrounded by warning signs, but no fences. The signs warn: “The Strid is dangerous and has claimed lives in the past. Please stand well back and beware slippery rocks.” The signs keep most people away from the water, at least, and nobody seems to swim there…but they do fall in from time to time.
In 2010, eight-year-old Aaron Page, from Pontefract, drowned after he slipped from a rock. Someone nearby quickly reached out and grabbed him but the young guy was dragged beneath the surface.
The Strid also took the life of an artist who painted her and admired her beauty, the watercolour painter Arthur Reginald Smith. He fell in and drowned while on a trip to paint the river in 1934. As the Times also reports, “He was 63 at the time and many people were baffled as to why he had ended up in the water, as they believed he was too old to have attempted to jump across it.”
The above four deaths are pretty much the only ones you can find on the internet attributed to the Strid. Most of the sites that warn of the horrors of the Strid mention those four deaths, and allude to hundreds of others. The Snopes website, which gives a “True” rating to the dangers of the Strid adds another death from The August 14, 1877 Leeds Mercury reported that a man named Samuel Naylor from Pudsey in Leeds drowned while trying to jump across the Strid.
Now, five deaths are horrible and a tragedy, but it is not by any means enough to earn the Strid many of the dark accolades it has received. Have others drowned there, or is this just a question of an amplified reputation for danger? One wannabe intrepid web reporter, Daniel Piggot, posting on the website Travelmademedoit.com, put on his myth-busting cap, and basically spat in the face of the river and its lore, writing:
“Despite its infamy as a place of death, there is no official death toll at The Strid. Although a couple honeymooning in the area in 1998 was reported missing in the news, there is no proof that anyone has ever died at The Strid. The deathly reputation doesn’t come from any actual deaths it seems but from a cautionary tale!” Later in his article, Daniel, though warning readers to be careful, writes, “Anyway, let’s look into how you can visit this immensely beautiful (not deadly) place. Let’s start by looking at its exact location.” The location of the Strid is certainly not hidden, but is Piggott right? Is this really just an inflated cautionary tale?
Here’s where we have to do actual historical research and dive into some archives. But first, I need to say that the way Daniel sort of dismissed the deaths of the honeymooning couple that disappeared and said “there’s no proof that anyone has ever died at the Strid.” Is just patently ridiclous. Both Barry and Collett disappeared in the river at a time when it rose 5 feet in under five minutes. Barry was seen in the river actually drowning by an eyewitness and both of their bodies were discovered downstream of the Strid.
Were those deaths and the other deaths already mentioned simply anomalies? Unfortunately and tragically, the record is grim. The Strid is all it's cracked up to be, and maybe more. And Mr. Piggott, swell guy that he might be, apparently did not do enough journalism or research before declaring a very deadly stretch of river “not deadly.”
The July 22, 1966 Craven Herald and Pioneer reports on the drowning death in the Strid of young Neville Cudbertson of Hazelwood orphanage, who was at the Strid on a school outing, with teachers walking behind the students, instead of directly with them, a factor which the coroner said contributed to the death of Neville, who simply slipped into the water and was whisked away.
In 1961, the Guardian reports that 17-year-old Peter Gunning of Allerton fell in and drowned trying to jump over the gorge. The paper notes, “Many people have died trying to jump the Strid, or stride. The spot where a stride is possible is marked by a huge rounded stone in mid-channel, a few yards below the fall. It is possible to jump to the stone, but a slip means little chance of survival, for there are no handholds and the current runs under rocks which are hollowed out.” How utterly awful. The July 21 1951, Manchester Guardian further reports on another drowning of a 70 year old David Hughes, formerly of Grafton Villas near Leeds. The June 9, 1932 Guardian again reports on the drowning death of a young 23-year old Mormon missionary named Lawrence T. Heath who drowned at the Strid. His friends report that he jumped across the Strid to a boulder in the river to take a photograph….”He was proceeding from the boulder to the other side when he slipped and fell into the stream.” He clung to a rock for a few seconds, and his friends went to look for a lifebelt/life jacket, but when they returned, the young man had just lost his handhold on the rock, and he was struggling in the water. Tragically, people have been losing their lives for dramatic photographs for well over one hundred years.
A few years earlier, the Manchester Guardian also reports on the death of an athletic and relatively fit man, an engineer named William Taylor. The paper reports that Taylor had successfully jumped the Strid multiple times, but then “He attempted the leap at a point where it had never yet been known to be successfully accomplished…He jumped across, but over-balanced and turned a somersault backwards into the rapids and drowned before the eyes of his father and mother, despite the efforts of his friends to rescue him. He was a married man.” What a gut-wrenching article, and what a cautionary tale. Such an empty death - trying to prove you can make a jump nobody else can - for a guy who seemed to be so well-loved and valued. Life is precious, and should be treated as such.
Here’s another photograph related death. June, 1951 - Father and Son drowned. Mr Frank Johnson, 45 and his son Derek, 18. Surprisingly, it was dad, Mr. Frank, who was taking a picture near the Strid, and his foot slipped on a moss-covered rock - all around the river - and he fell backwards into the river. The 18 year old Derek heroically tried to rescue his dad, and managed to get to him, but they were both swept away and under the water by the strong undercurrent. Have mercy.
Do you want me to recount all of the drownings? We’d be here for a long, long time, and I’m sure it wouldn’t do either of us much good mentally or emotionally, so let me just fly through some of the headlines:
May 1869, Lady Firth, wife of Sir Charles Firth, falls into the Strid accidentally on a walk.
September, 1870, a young man named P.A. Browne attempted to jump across the Strid, but fell short, falling in as his mother watched. Though people tried to help, he was lost quickly. The paper reports his brother was “unable to render any help, the rush of water being so strong.”
The 1883 West Yorkshire Weekly Examiner reports on the drowning death of 46 or 19 year old George Benton, of Leeds, who attempted to jump across the Strid as so many others have, slipped, and fell to his death. He immediately surfaced once, but went under quickly, and though grappling irons were used, nobody could get to him. Apparently there is some discrepancy in which Benton died - the father, or the son, as the Lancaster Gazette reports the death of the father.
September 11, 1894…Mr. George Henry Ashworth, a church organist went to the Strid on a fishing holiday, plunged in, never to be seen again.
In 1898, the Liverpool Mercury reported on the sad death of 4 year old Margery Harrison, who had apparently wandered away from her mother and fallen in.
August, 1922, young Malcolm Ellison of Harrowgate, a middle school boy visiting the Strid in the company of about 200 classmates and 10 teachers, lost his life in the Strid while the teachers were eating. His young friend, Harold Hitchin made a valiant attempt to save Malcolm, but just missed him.
October 1927, Winifred May Hodgson, 29, Lept into the surging river…possibly intentionally.
1928 - Girl’s Leap into Torrent. Young 27 year old Miss Lily Baines lost her life in the Strid. The Craven Herald and Pioneer reports that Miss Baines was the second Strid victim in the past two months, and the Ramsbottom Observer claims she was the third victim.
August, 1928, Mr. G.E. Thackeray, a retired bank manager somehow fell in. The paper notes that “Several people have been drowned there lately,” which leads one to believe that not every drowning has been reported in the papers.
In June of 1937, Alec J. Towley, a gardener from River View disappeared with his overcoat right next to the Strid, and almost certainly drowned therein, as reported by the Craven Herald and Pioneer.
July, 1939, the Craven Herald and Pioneer reports the Strid-related drowning death of Stanley Horrell, a prominent Leeds businessman and former member of that city’s council.
December 1958, Margaret Crabtree, in her mid 30s, drowned in the Strid. Her husband, school-teacher Selwyn, reports that “He did not think he had pushed her deliberately” when she fell into the Strid,” which might be the most suspicious statement ever. To be fair to Selwyn, however, the paper does report that he slipped and put out his arm to catch himself, and accidentally pushed his wife.
The Craven Herald and Pioneer also reports on the 1964 death of Edward Robertshaw Wright, a 53 year old mill director from Halifax
Those are an awful lot of drownings for one narrow and short length of river, and there are probably many more, but that sample should more than suffice. Quite certainly, this thin stretch of river, really is something of a killing machine.
But did it really take the life of a potential future king of Scotland in the 1100s? We will have to travel further back in time to answer that one!
I’ll close this first episode of the Pod with these poetic words from the May 19, 1859 edition of the Bradford Observer in an article entitled, “Pilgrimage to the Valley of Desolation: (Just like Boiling Lake, 4,100 miles away.)
On the next episode, which should be out the same day as episode one, we will read some of the earliest historical coverage about The Strid, smash some myths, definitively prove whether or not the Strid has a legit 100% fatality rate AND tell you about the ACTUAL most deadly and dangerous body of water to fall into in the world, and - as a hint, it’s not the Strid. It’s much, much worse.
One more thing - as an outro, please enjoy the new song, “The Merciless Strid” by the Bolton Bardeaters, commissioned just for this episode!! We’ll hear more about the song in episode #2.
Sources:
https://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/8074114.well-take-them-home-together/
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bolton-strid/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/217851.stm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJFQXT6PIP8
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/world/what-in-the-world/six-feet-across-and-full-of-peril-englands-killer-creek.html#:~:text=The%20Strid%20is%20a%20segment,fails%20to%20leap%20the%20stream.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3588584/Is-world-s-dangerous-stretch-water-innocent-looking-river-Yorkshire-Strid-s-currents-pulverise-falls-in.html
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Early_Yorkshire_Charters_Volume_7_The_Ho/PGnetE9YIc0C?hl=en
https://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/24230864.search-stranger-1996-saved-child-drowning-wharfe/
