What is a gargoyle? What it does, what it symbolises, the difference from a grotesque, the legend of the dragon, and the best ones to see

Architecture · 4 September 2026

A gargoyle is a water spout carved in stone that projects from the roof gutter of a building and throws rainwater clear of the wall, so that it does not run down the masonry and wash out the mortar; the word is from the Old French gargouille, "throat", the same root as "gargle", and a true gargoyle has a channel cut through it and water coming out of its mouth. Medieval masons carved them from about 1200 as animals, monsters, devils and people, hundreds on a great church, and the meanings given since range from frightening off evil spirits and showing the damned outside the walls of salvation to sermons in stone for those who could not read and, often enough, jokes by the men who carved them. Gargoyles are older than Gothic, going back to the lion-head spouts of Greek temples and Egypt, and the most famous "gargoyles" of all, the brooding chimeras on the towers of Notre-Dame de Paris, are neither gargoyles, since they carry no water, nor medieval, being Viollet-le-Duc's of the 1850s. Below: what it does, the word, why monsters, the meanings, gargoyle versus grotesque and chimera, the history, the ones to see, and the myths, with the buildings in Gothic architecture.

What a gargoyle does

A stone building is destroyed by water: rain running down a wall soaks into the joints, dissolves the lime mortar, freezes and splits the stone, and rots the foundations, and a roof of any size collects tons of it in a storm. The Gothic cathedral, with its high roofs and its walls of thin stone and glass, had to get the rain off fast, and the system was a gutter along the top of the wall or the flying buttress, draining to spouts that projected a metre or more from the face so that the water fell clear; the longer the spout, the farther the water landed. The spout was a block of stone with a channel cut in its top or a hole bored through its length, set in the gutter with its far end hanging in space, and the mason carved the block, since it was there, into a creature whose open mouth was the outlet. On Notre-Dame and Chartres the gargoyles are on every buttress and every level; when lead pipes and downspouts came in the 16th century the gargoyles stopped being needed and became ornament, and most gargoyles now spit nothing. Gargoyle.

Why monsters, and what they were said to mean

• Apotropaic. The oldest explanation: a frightening face at the edge of the building frightens away evil, the demon on the roof keeping other demons off, as the lion heads on Greek temples and the masks on Roman roofs did; the church was a fortress of God and the gargoyles its garrison.
• The damned outside. Inside the church are the saints in glass and the Virgin over the door; outside, on the gutters, the beasts, devils and sinners, cast out, showing where sin belongs and what waits for those who stay outside.
• Sermons in stone. The medieval church taught a population that could not read by images, and the gargoyles, with their monkeys, dogs, wolves, and men with their mouths pulled open, were the vices, gluttony, lust, avarice, the wolf as the devil, the monkey as folly, the dog as fidelity or as greed.
• Pagan survivals. The green man, the wild man, the dragon and the beasts of the bestiaries, half remembered from the world before the church and given a job on its roof.
• Jokes. A gargoyle of a man showing his backside, a monk with a wineskin, a woman scolding, a gargoyle picking its nose, a mason's enemy or his bishop with a spout in his mouth: the carvers were paid by the day and no one looked closely, and St Bernard of Clairvaux complained in 1125 of "ridiculous monsters" that distracted the monks from their prayers, which is the best evidence that the monsters were there for their own sake.

No medieval text explains the gargoyles; all of the above are modern readings, and probably all are partly true.

Gargoyle, grotesque, chimera

• Gargoyle. A carved spout that carries water; if no water comes out, it is not a gargoyle, strictly.
• Grotesque. Any carved fantastic figure on a building that does not carry water, from the Italian grottesco, the painted monsters found in the buried rooms of Nero's Golden House in the 1480s; a "chimera" is a grotesque that combines several animals. Grotesques sit on parapets, corbels, pinnacles and label stops, and most of what people call gargoyles are grotesques.
• Notre-Dame's chimeras. The horned, winged, tongue-out creatures on the towers of Notre-Dame, the Stryge with its head in its hands looking over Paris, are grotesques of 1849–54 by Viollet-le-Duc, carved by Victor Pyanet from the architect's drawings, on a medieval building that had only plain spouts; they are the most photographed gargoyles in the world and are neither.
• Hunky punk. The Somerset word for a squatting grotesque on a church tower; "boss", "corbel head" and "label stop" are other places the monsters live.

The legend of La Gargouille

In the 7th century, the story goes, a dragon called La Gargouille lived on the Seine below Rouen, with a long neck and membranous wings, and burned the country and swallowed ships, until St Romanus, the bishop of Rouen, went out to it with a condemned prisoner as his only companion, subdued it with the sign of the cross, led it back to the town on his stole, and burned it on the square; the body burned but the head and neck, tempered by the dragon's own fire, would not, and were mounted on the church wall to carry off the rain and to warn other dragons. The archbishops of Rouen had the right, until 1790, to pardon one prisoner every year on Ascension Day in memory of the prisoner who went with Romanus, and the story is the folk etymology of the word, which in fact means "throat" and was applied to spouts in the 13th century. It is told on every tour and is the best story about a drainpipe there is.

The history

• Egypt. Lion-headed spouts of stone on the temples, at Dendera and elsewhere, from the New Kingdom; the lion for the Nile flood.
• Greece and Rome. Lion-head spouts along the gutters of temples from the 6th century BC, at Himera in Sicily 60 of them; in Rome, terracotta and marble spouts and the antefixes, masks at the ends of roof tiles, of Gorgons and satyrs, to frighten and to drain.
• Romanesque. Spouts appear on churches of the 12th century as plain blocks or simple beasts.
• Gothic, 1200–1500. The great age: Laon's oxen on the towers, Chartres, Reims, Paris, Amiens, Rouen, Cologne, Freiburg, Milan's 150, Oxford's colleges and Westminster, Burgos, Batalha, hundreds per building in every kind, the carvers travelling from site to site with their pattern books.
• After 1500. Lead downpipes made spouts unnecessary; the Renaissance dropped the monsters as barbaric; the Gothic Revival of the 19th century brought them back, at Notre-Dame, in Oxford and Cambridge, and in America.
• America. The Woolworth Building's bats, the Chrysler Building's eagles (stainless steel, and spouting nothing), Princeton and Yale's collegiate Gothic, the University of Chicago, and Washington National Cathedral, 1907–90, with 112 gargoyles and more than a thousand grotesques including, since 1986, Darth Vader, carved by Jay Hall Carpenter from a child's competition drawing, on the north tower, visible with binoculars.

The best to see

• Notre-Dame de Paris. The chimeras of the towers' gallery, reopened with the towers, and the true gargoyles on the flying buttresses of the choir.
• Chartres, Reims, Amiens, Laon. Medieval gargoyles in hundreds, the oxen of Laon looking out of the towers in memory of the beasts that hauled the stone.
• Rouen. The cathedral and the Palais de Justice, and the dragon legend.
• Freiburg Minster. The gargoyle showing its backside toward the town council that, the story says, did not pay.
• Milan Cathedral. 150 gargoyles and 3,400 statues on the roof, which can be walked.
• Oxford. Magdalen, New College and the Bodleian, with the 20th-century heads of dons and college servants.
• Washington National Cathedral. The Darth Vader, a hippie, a crooked politician, a raccoon and 1,000 others, on the tour with binoculars.
• Chrysler Building. The steel eagles of the 61st floor, the gargoyle as Art Deco.

Versions and theories

• Gargoyles come alive at night. A tradition of the 20th century, from Disney's "Hunchback" and the "Gargoyles" cartoon; the medieval creatures were never said to move, only to stare.
• Gargoyles are demons. Some are; more are animals, people and hybrids, and the church put them on the outside on purpose, whichever reading one prefers.
• The Notre-Dame gargoyles are medieval. The chimeras are 1850s; the medieval spouts were plain and are gone. Victor Hugo's Quasimodo of 1831 sat among gargoyles that were, at that date, mostly Viollet-le-Duc's future.
• Gargoyles were painted. The whole facade of a cathedral was, in colour, and the spouts too; traces survive at Amiens and Notre-Dame.
• Gargoyles are Gothic. The word and the monsters, yes; the spout is Egyptian and Greek, and the Gothic Revival made more gargoyles than the Middle Ages.
• The Darth Vader is a gargoyle. It is a grotesque, on a pinnacle, carrying no water; the cathedral calls it one anyway.

The buttresses the gargoyles drain are in what is a flying buttress, and the cathedral's whole story in Notre-Dame Cathedral history.

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