Each Uisge

The Each Uisge takes its name from the Scottish Gaelic each uisge, literally "water horse," and it has been distinguished since medieval times from the kelpie, the river-dwelling water spirit that is its cousin but not its equal. While the kelpie inhabits streams and rivers, the Each Uisge claims the sea, the sea lochs, and the deep freshwater lochs of the West Highlands and Islands, and it is widely regarded by folklorists as the fiercest and most dangerous of all the water horses. It is a shape-shifter of extraordinary power, able to appear as a fine horse or pony, a huge bird similar to the boobrie, or a handsome young man, and in every form its purpose is the same: to lure human beings to the water and destroy them. In its human shape it is almost indistinguishable from a mortal man, save for the sand, mud, and strands of water-weed that cling to its hair, and in some tales it retains its hooves even when the rest of it looks human, a detail that has linked it in Scottish Christian tradition to the devil himself.

The most chilling tale of the Each Uisge comes from Argyll, near a loch in Sunart, where nine children one day found a beautiful black horse grazing by the shore. The horse was docile and magnificent, its tack finer than anything the children had seen, and one by one they climbed upon its back. As each child mounted, the horse's back stretched and lengthened to accommodate them all, a magical expansion designed to trap as many victims as possible. The youngest child, the last to approach, touched the horse only with one finger, and the moment he did so his finger stuck fast to the creature's hide as though glued by sorcery. He tried to pull away but could not, and in a moment of terrible clarity he drew his pocket-knife and cut off his own finger to free himself. The horse, now bearing eight children, galloped into the loch and plunged to the depths. The next morning, eight small livers were found floating on the surface of the water, all that remained of the children after the Each Uisge had torn them apart and devoured every other part of their bodies.

In another famous account, recorded in the Hebrides, the Each Uisge took a blacksmith's daughter from the Isle of Raasay, dragging her into the loch and drowning her. The blacksmith and his son swore revenge. They built a forge by the water's edge and fashioned a set of enormous iron hooks, heating them in the fire until they glowed red. They then roasted a sheep over a fire and waited. At last a great mist rose from the loch and the Each Uisge emerged, seizing the roasted meat in its jaws. The blacksmith and his son leaped forward and rammed the red-hot hooks deep into the creature's flesh. After a brief and terrible struggle the monster was dead. But when the blacksmith returned at sunrise to claim his victory, he found not the carcass of a great horse but a soft greyish jelly dissolving into the earth, the star-jelly that water spirits leave behind when they are slain on land, as if the creature had never been flesh and bone at all.

On the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, the Each Uisge proved that it could take human form to bypass even the sacred laws of Highland hospitality. Two cousins, known as Fair Mary and Dark Mary, were staying in a remote shieling, a stone hut used for summer grazing, when a weary woman arrived at their door asking for shelter. The girls, following the ancient code of cairdeas, the Highland tradition of friendship and hospitality to strangers, offered her their bed. In the night Dark Mary woke to a warm trickling sensation and discovered her cousin dead beside her, her heart torn out. The "woman" had vanished, but as Dark Mary looked out the door she saw a large horse trotting away into the dawn mist. The Each Uisge had not needed to lure its victims to the water; it had come ashore, disguised itself as a helpless traveller, and entered their home to kill.

The belief in the Each Uisge was so potent in the Highlands that it persisted into the modern era. In 1870, in the Sleat district of the Isle of Skye, reports of a beast waylaying travellers near Loch nan Dubhrachan became so frequent that the local community organised a massive dragging operation with nets, and when the net snagged on something powerful beneath the surface the men dropped the ropes and fled in terror. The folklorist John Gregorson Campbell, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, recorded dozens of Each Uisge traditions from across the Highlands, and Katharine Briggs, the great English folklorist, called it "perhaps the fiercest and most dangerous of all the water-horses." Today the Each Uisge survives in the Kelpies sculptures at Falkirk, the thirty-metre horse heads that commemorate Scotland's horse-powered heritage, and in the enduring warning that every Highland child once knew: never trust a beautiful horse by the water, and never let a stranger with weeds in his hair sit too close.