Do we really want to bring back the wolf?

Near our house on the Derbyshire-Staffordshire border is a place called Wolf Edge. It is a raven-haunted slope set to the sounds of curlew song in high spring and I visit it regularly, not least because I imagine that within the deep peat soil there is some remembrance of the site’s eponymous predator, and the thought thrills me.

A similar emotion appears to have gripped Derek Gow, and has led him to locate, over several decades, as many references to British and Irish wolves as possible. He has done a great job of researching the lore surrounding these much mythologised creatures and has unearthed plenty of arcane material – such as the role of wolves in children’s play (a schoolyard game called ‘Woof and lambs’); the millennia-long trade in their skins (738 passed through Bristol port in 1558 alone); and their bizarre links to medicine. The heart was apparently sovereign against epilepsy and dried wolf penis served as a cure for impotence.

Gow extended his search overseas, and reminds us of Dina Sanichar, the tragic wolf boy of Secundra, Uttar Pradesh, said to have been a model for Kipling’s Mowgli. He never learned to speak but made sounds similar to a wolf. Closer to home is the barely credible story of Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja. Now aged 77, he was abandoned as a child and was found after several years living with wolves in Spain’s Sierra Morena. He howled and bit his captors when first rescued, and has since claimed that his years spent with the pack were the happiest of his life.

Gow discusses one English place name that has particular resonance. Woolpit in Suffolk has no link to sheep but draws on the special excavations once used to catch wolves, reflecting an almost national fixation with ultimately exterminating the species.