Kelpie and each-uisge

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• Scotland: the kelpie in the north-east and Shetland, the each-uisge in the Gaelic Highlands and Islands · Scots and Scottish Gaelic

  Kelpie and each-uisge

  waterkelpie (Scots) · each-uisge, water-horse (Scottish Gaelic)

  Spirits of place

  

  Walter Gregor (1881) describes the waterkelpie of north-east Scotland as living in the deep pools of rivers and streams, commonly as a black horse, coaxing travellers at fords onto its back and carrying them to their death in its pool; caught with a bridle marked with the sign of the cross, it could be set to carrying stones for a mill. John Gregorson Campbell (1900) describes the Gaelic each-uisge as haunting lonely freshwater lochs, looking like an ordinary horse and taking anyone who touched or mounted it into the loch to be devoured; it could also come as a young man. Campbell insisted the two are distinct, the water-horse haunting lochs and the kelpie streams and torrents, and wrote that belief in the water-horse was by then generally a thing of the past.

  Earliest written source not verified

  John Gregorson Campbell, Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1900)

  Tradition · not evidence