Well, I wrote it myself, based on rough stories that we have read about in the Yorkshire area. All old villages and towns in Europe have folklore tales of spirits and dark beings and fairies and things like that. And I had heard several different stories about large, black dogs, crawling the moors of Yorkshire... And I thought: "Well, we live in Yorkshire and we never really looked at our own heritage before in My Dying Bride lyrics. Let us look at this and see if we could invent our own story, our own Yorkshire folklore." And so I wrote a story called 'The Barghest O’Whitby' about a large black dog which, at first, it seems to crawl the moor land randomly killing people, but it does not. The lyrics tell a story of why this dog is doing what it is doing and its final victim is waiting up in the old sea town, the old fishing town of Whitby. That is where the final confrontation takes place and it is a story of revenge...

According to Stainthorpe, the artwork pictures the band's guitarist's Hamish Glencross' dog which he "embellished... a little bit in Photoshop. It is all my kind of artwork, pushed together to give a visual interpretation of what you might see in the lyrics. It is quite nice, no high art, but it is just an interpretation of what you are going to get inside the music".

...
Wikipedia