His family home, the Jacobean manor house of Lew Trenchard, near Okehampton, Devon, has been preserved with the alterations he made and is a hotel.

[3] He was the eldest son and heir of Edward Baring-Gould (1804–1872), lord of the manor of Lew Trenchard, a Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lieutenant of Devon, formerly a lieutenant in the Madras Light Cavalry (resigned 1830), by his first wife, Sophia Charlotte Bond, daughter of Admiral Francis Godolphin Bond, Royal Navy.

The Gould family was descended from a certain John Gold, a crusader present at the siege of Damietta in 1217 who for his valour, was granted in 1220 by Ralph de Vallibus, an estate at Seaborough in Somerset.

[4] Margaret Gould was the wife of Charles Baring (1742–1829) of Courtland in the parish of Exmouth, Devon, whose monument survives in Lympstone Church.

[9] While there, he was responsible for several subjects, especially languages and science, and he also designed the ironwork of the bookcases in the boys' library, as well as painting the window jambs with scenes from the Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene.

His vicar, John Sharp, arranged for Grace to live for two years with relatives in York to learn middle-class manners.

In 1872, his father died and he inherited the 3,000-acre (1,200 ha) family estates of Lewtrenchard in Devon, which included the gift of the living of Lew Trenchard parish.

Baring-Gould regarded his principal achievement to be the collection of folk songs that he made with the help of the ordinary people of Cornwall and Devon.

The musical editor for this collection was Henry Fleetwood Sheppard, though some of the songs included were noted by Baring-Gould's other collaborator Frederick Bussell.

Sheppard had died in 1901, and so the folk song collector Cecil Sharp was invited to undertake the musical editorship for the new edition.

Baring-Gould gave the fair copies of the folk songs he collected, together with the notebooks he used for gathering information in the field, to Plymouth Public Library in 1914.

In 2011 the complete collection of his folk-song manuscripts, including two notebooks not in the microfiche edition, were digitised and published online by the Devon Tradition Project managed by Wren Music[14] in association with the English Folk Dance and Song Society as part of the "Take Six" project undertaken by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.

Baring-Gould wrote many novels, including The Broom-Squire set in the Devil's Punch Bowl (1896), Mehalah: a story of the salt marshes (1880),[15] Guavas the Tinner (1897),[16] the 16-volume The Lives of the Saints, and the biography of the eccentric poet-vicar of Morwenstow, Robert Stephen Hawker.

[19] H. P. Lovecraft termed it "that curious body of medieval lore which the late Mr. Baring-Gould so effectively assembled in book form.

"[20] He wrote much about the West Country: his works of this topic include: Baring-Gould served as president of the Royal Institution of Cornwall for ten years from 1897.