Your Personal Guide to the North Highlands
The folklore of the North Highlands is a way we can reach into the lives of the ordinary folk who lived and loved in the long past.
While the tales may not ring true or plausible today, they reveal to us how those who came before interpreted the mysterious world around them.
Every country has had its prophets: Greece its Cassandra, Rome its Sybils, England its Nixon, Wales its Robin Ddu, and the Highlands their Kenneth Oaur … The predictions, say the good wives, have been fulfilled, and not a single breach in the oracular effusions of Kenneth Oaur. The words of the English writer Thomas Pennant …
About a kilometre west of Wick in Caithness, between the railway and the river, stands a small mound marked on the Ordnance Survey map as the Fairy Hill. On the other side of the river to the north goes the old track to Sibster and Loch Watten, then eventually to Thurso. In the early evening …
The story of the Loch Ness Monster goes back to the days when the Picts lived around Loch Ness. In around 565 AD, the missionary Columba arrived and landed in Inverness. He started to walk the drovers’ road along the River Ness with his companions to bring Christianity to the locals. They had not gone …
There once was a young fisherman from Castletown who was wandering down by the shore one day when he heard musical laughter coming from behind the rocks that formed a barrier to the next bay. His curiosity aroused, he climbed in over the rocks and was surprised to espy a group of beautiful young women …