Boobrie

On a cold February morning a man walked out into a moor loch in Argyllshire until the water closed over his shoulders, and stood there holding a gun. Eighty-five yards off, something sat on the surface that he had come a long way to kill. It went under before he could fire. He held his ground for three quarters of an hour, waded back with his clothes freezing on him, and sat on the bank another five and a half hours watching a flat sheet of water that never broke. That is the founding document of the Boobrie: one man, one loch, and a great deal of patience wasted.

He came home with measurements. In form and colour the bird was very like a great northern diver, except that it had none of the diver’s white about the neck and breast, so that the whole of it was dark on dark water. Its neck was two feet eleven inches long and twenty-three inches around. Its bill was seventeen inches, black, about eleven inches in girth at the root, straight for the first twelve inches and then hooked over like an eagle’s. Its wings were built for driving it under the surface rather than lifting it off. Its legs were short and black and appallingly strong, the feet webbed almost to the toes, where the webbing gave out and the claws took over. Someone measured a footprint in the mud at the end of the lake and reported that it covered the ground you could span with a wide pair of red deer’s antlers. In body, said the informant, it was larger than seventeen of the biggest eagles put together.

Not one of those numbers is possible. Campbell of Islay, who collected the account, said so in his own dry way: if the eyewitness had brought his long bow instead of his gun, he might have got a specimen. What stopped Campbell dismissing the thing entirely was that he kept meeting the Boobrie in the mouths of people who had never spoken to that man, and so, he decided, it had a real existence in the popular mind. He had heard of it in the fresh water and sea lochs of Argyllshire and nowhere else.

The fuller account came to him from one correspondent, John Campbell of Kilberry, and it is Kilberry’s letters that give the creature its three shapes. Within living memory, Kilberry wrote, the animal had been common enough through Upper Lochaber and Argyll, and was now gone entirely, the blame lying with heather burning, since very long heather was where it lay up and sheltered. It could take at pleasure the form of an enormous and ferocious water bird, of a water horse, or of a water bull. The bird was the one it preferred.

What it did with the shape was mostly eat. Its favourite food was the flesh of calves, and failing calves it took sheep or lambs off the shore, carried them to the largest loch within reach, swam out to the deepest part and went down with them, and fed there at the bottom before coming back up when it suited. It had a particular appetite for otters, which it swallowed in great numbers and with obvious enthusiasm. The noise it made was the noise of a bull in a very bad temper, only much louder. Around sixty years before the letter was written, one of them settled in Loch Leathan in the west of Argyllshire and put the whole district in a panic. The parish minister and his servant Sandy, riding home late in the dark, went over one another in a burn, and each spent a bad moment convinced the other was the Boobrie. Sandy maintained ever afterwards that they had been glamoured. This is the sum of the creature’s recorded wickedness, and Campbell’s remark that it must therefore belong to the powers of evil was a joke that has been quoted straight ever since.

The horse shape is where the stories turn cruel. A tenant on Loch Freisa in Mull was ploughing ground so hard he needed four horses on the plough, and early one day a horse cast a shoe with the smithy nine miles off. His son saw one grazing beside the loch and suggested borrowing it, since they did not know whose it was. The strange horse went into harness as if it had done nothing else, drawing steadily uphill and down, until they brought the team round at the end of the furrow nearest the water. It baulked. The whip touched it lightly. It became on the instant an enormous Boobrie, gave a shout that seemed to shake the ground, and went into the loch with the wooden plough and the three other horses behind it. The tenant and his son had the sense to let go. They watched it swim to the middle, dive, and take its pleasure of them on the bottom, and then they lay behind a stone for seven hours hoping one horse would come ashore. None did.

The bull is a different animal wearing the same name. Kilberry introduced it by saying that the received belief made this shape the lodging of a spirit doing penance, condemned for breaking some ordinance of the greater spirits, and that in the bull form it was often friendly and sometimes actively kind. The proof he offered is a love story. On the west bank of Loch nan Dobhran, one winter, a young man called Eachann found a huge black bull lying down and groaning, apparently dying, and fed it. The following summer his sweetheart Phemie was at the shieling by the same loch, uneasy because a shadow kept crossing the water in a shape that reminded her of the suitor she had refused. One evening the shadow was Murdoch himself. He had his plaid over her head and her hands tied before she could scream. Then the water bull came tearing up the bank, crushed him into the ground, knelt, and let her climb on, and she was at her mother’s door as fast as thinking. The bull was gone in a moment, and a voice went up out of the air: aid came to me from a gentle youth, and to a maiden I gave aid; after three hundred years of hard bondage, set me free without delay. It has not been seen since.

Underneath the English name is an older Gaelic one. The word is tarbh boibhre, and the second half has been spelt half a dozen ways by transcribers who could not agree, some of them varying it inside a single page. It may mean cow-giver. The Irish glossary of O’Davoren takes it back to a phrase meaning behaviour like a cow’s, and the being it describes was thought of as neither one sex nor the other, drawn to graze at the loch side among the cattle. Its calves were recognisable: any beast born strange, or with short ears, was put down to that stock, exactly as the Manx said of a calf got by a tarroo-ushtey. Dwelly’s dictionary is blunter than any of the stories, glossing tarbh-boidhre as monster, demon, and a god capable of changing himself into many forms, a man, a horse, a bull, with supernatural powers.

Its powers all come out of the water and stop at the edge of it. It can be a bird, a horse or a bull because it is none of them; it swims better than it flies, because those wings were never meant for air; it is strong enough to drag a plough team under and patient enough to wait on the bottom for hours. The limits follow just as neatly. It has to come to the shore to feed, which is the only reason anyone ever saw one. It can be waited out, since the man in the February water stood there six hours and lost nothing but the feeling in his legs. It burned out of Argyll along with the heather it hid in. And in the shape people feared least, it turned out to be serving a sentence and wanting someone to end it.

There is a plainer creature standing behind all this, and Gaelic knew it by a name of the same family. The word bubaire is one of the Gaelic names for the common bittern, a marsh bird that stands motionless all day with its bill in the air looking like a tuft of dead leaves, feeds at night, and in the breeding season produces a hollow booming that carries across reed beds and sounds like cattle lowing in the dark. Scots called it the bull o’ the bog. French calls it the ox of the marsh. Its Latin name, Botaurus, may itself be an old Celtic compound of cow and bull. It grew rare in Scotland, and rarity did the rest: at Loch Bruiach in Inverness-shire, within living memory of the last century, people who heard that booming across the water at night called the thing making it the tarbh boidhre.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Boobrie?

The Boobrie is a monstrous water bird from the folklore of Argyllshire in the Scottish Highlands, said to inhabit the region’s fresh water and sea lochs. It was described as resembling an enormous great northern diver without the diver’s white neck and breast, with a hooked black bill seventeen inches long and clawed webbed feet. It took calves, sheep, lambs and otters, and it was also said to be able to appear as a water horse or a water bull.

What did the Boobrie eat?

Calves were the Boobrie’s favourite food, and when it could not get calves it took sheep or lambs from the shore. It carried the animal out to the deepest part of the nearest large moor loch, dived with it, and fed on the bottom. It was also reported to be extremely fond of otters, which it swallowed in large numbers.

Is the Boobrie evil?

The Boobrie’s reputation for evil rests on very little. John Francis Campbell of Islay recorded that it had frightened a minister badly and remarked that it must therefore belong to the powers of evil, which was a joke that later writers repeated as a verdict. In its water bull shape the creature was actually held to be a spirit doing penance, and was thought friendly and sometimes helpful to people.

Why is the Boobrie no longer seen?

The account collected by John Campbell of Kilberry says the Boobrie had become extinct in Upper Lochaber and Argyll, and blames the widespread burning of heather in those districts. Very long heather was where the creature rested and sheltered on land, and once it was burned off there was nowhere for it to lie up.

What is the Boobrie called in Gaelic?

The Gaelic name is tarbh boibhre, also written boidhbhre, with tarbh-aoidhre used in the northern counties and tarbh eithre recorded in Skye. Transcribers spelt the second element in many different ways and did not agree on its meaning, though it has been read as “cow-giver”. Edward Dwelly’s dictionary defines tarbh-boidhre as a monster or demon, and as a god able to change himself into many forms.

Related Entries

Each Uisge, Kelpie, Tangie, Cirein cròin, Lavellan, Fuath, Glaistig, Nuckelavee, Blue Men of the Minch, Loch Ness Monster, Dobhar-chu, Bogle, Glashtyn, Donn Cúailnge (The Brown Bull of Cooley), Afanc