The Kelpie and the nine children from the Highlands

A group of children was roaming around one Sunday near Lochaber in the Scottish Highlands when they saw a very large and friendly horse. There was room enough for all of them on its back, so they climbed up. When the horse took off at a gallop the frightened children tried to jump off, but they were all stuck fast. Only one, who happened to have a bible in his pocket, survived to tell the tale, and only because he was smart enough to cut off one of his fingers, glued to the horse’s mane, with his pocket-knife.

This boy supposedly saw the horse dive into a loch with his shrieking cargo. None of the children were ever seen again, but the next day searchers found some pieces of liver and guts floating on the surface of the pond.

It transpires in the tale that the horse had been a water-horse or a kelpie: a creature that likes to fool humans into thinking it is an ordinary horse – or an ordinary man (often with tell-tale sand and weed in his hair) – who will drag you underwater to your doom.

The history: The Reverend John Gregorson Campbell of Tiree in the Inner Hebrides who recounts this story in his Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland(1900), suspects that it served as a cautionary tale, made up to stop children from molesting other people’s horses when they are unsupervised on the Sabbath.

Campbell recounted many other kelpie or water-horse stories. A good number of them end with entrails floating on the water surface, or else with the protagonist’s realisation in the nick of time that it’s a kelpie they’re dealing with.

So, are folk-tales quaint survivals of a bygone age? Perhaps. But the folk-legends so deeply rooted in the British landscape also ask (and answer) profound questions: about marriage, about our relation to the natural world, about our anxieties about childbirth and child-rearing – and even about our greed for sweet and sticky puddings.