Each-uisge
Pronounced ekh-OOSH-kyuh — [ɛxˈɯʃkʲə]
The Fiercest of the Water-Horses
“A beautiful horse on the shore whose skin will not let you go.”
The each-uisge — Gaelic for 'water horse' — is the deadliest of the Highland shapeshifters, a predator haunting the sea lochs and freshwater lochs of Scotland while its cousin the kelpie keeps to running rivers. Folklorist Katharine Briggs called it 'perhaps the fiercest and most dangerous of all the water-horses', and the tradition earns the billing: this is a creature that hunts people by inviting them to ride.
It surfaces as a fine horse grazing by the shore, or walks abroad as a handsome young man betrayed only by the water weed and sand tangled in his hair. Whoever mounts the horse is safe while it keeps inland — but at the merest glimpse or smell of water its skin turns adhesive, and it plunges for the deepest part of the loch with its rider held fast. Of the drowned, tradition says, nothing comes ashore again but the liver.
The Legend
The defining tale is set on Raasay. An each-uisge took a young girl, and her father, the island's blacksmith, resolved on revenge. He and his son forged great iron hooks, heated them red-hot in a fire by the loch, and roasted a sheep whose smell drew the creature up from the water. When it seized the bait they set the hooks in its flesh and killed it — and by morning nothing remained on the shore but a jelly-like mass, as if the monster had no true body at all.
In its human shape the creature courted women, and the stories double as survival manuals. One young woman, sitting beside a sleeping suitor, saw hooves where feet should be and fled; a boy whose finger stuck fast to the beast's hide saved himself by severing the finger. On the Isle of Lewis, at the hill still called Cnoc-na-Beist — the Hill of the Beast — a brother is said to have slain an each-uisge that came seducing his sister.
The Record
The tradition was written down at the height of the fairy-faith collecting era. John Gregorson Campbell's Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1900) preserved a whole dossier of water-horse tales, among them 'The Nine Children at Sunart' and the killing of the Raasay beast, and noted grimly of its human disguise that 'any woman upon whom it set its mark was certain at last to become its victim'.
Malcolm MacPhail gathered Hebridean accounts in 'Folklore from the Hebrides' (1896); Affleck Gray's Legends of the Cairngorms (1987) records two water-horses of the River Spey, the white An t-Each Ban among them, one said to prefer married couples as prey; and Katharine Briggs fixed the creature's place in the scholarly canon in her fairy encyclopedia of 1976. Few beings in British folklore are so consistently documented as killers.
The Lore
The lore keeps careful taxonomy. The kelpie haunts rivers and streams; the each-uisge owns the sea lochs and standing water, and is by far the worse to meet. Ireland knows it as the aughisky, which can be bridled and makes a magnificent mount — provided it never again glimpses the ocean — and the Isle of Man's cabbyl-ushtey is said to have taken first a farmer's cow and then his daughter from the banks of the Awin Dhoo, the Black River.
There were countermeasures. A woman who slipped the creature's rich bridle from its head and replaced it with a cow-shackle was said to win lifelong command of the beast, and the stolen bridle brought good fortune. Ordinary shot would not bite; one Highland freebooter drove off a water-horse in man's form only after loading his gun with a silver coin. The rules are the point — the each-uisge is the loch's danger given a shape you could almost trust.
Field Notes
- ✦ Distinguished from the kelpie by haunting sea lochs and standing water rather than rivers.
- ✦ Safe to ride only inland — the merest glimpse or smell of water turns its skin adhesive.
- ✦ Of its drowned victims, only the liver was said to wash ashore.
- ✦ The blacksmith of Raasay avenged his daughter with red-hot iron hooks; dawn found only a jelly-like mass.
- ✦ In human form it is betrayed by the water weed and sand tangled in its hair.
Case File
- Classification
- Shapeshifting Water Horse
- Category
- Shapeshifter
- Territory
- Lochs and sea inlets of the Scottish Highlands
- First Sighted
- Ancient Scottish Highland folklore
- Habitat
- Sea lochs and freshwater lochs
- Reported Size
- Appears as a fine horse or handsome man; horse-sized
- Also Known As
- Water Horse · Kelpie · Aughisky