Each Uisge

Also Known As: Scottish Gaelic, “water horse”; Irish each uisce, anglicised aughisky; plural eich-uisge
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Scottish Mythology, Irish Mythology, Celtic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It takes the shape of a fine riderless horse, lengthens its back to hold however many climb on, and holds them fast to its hide until it has carried them into deep water.
Role in Mythos: It is the resident danger of the lonely Highland loch, the reason a strange horse standing loose near water was a thing to walk away from.
Relation to Humans: Shackled or capped it will work a croft better than any horse the farmer owns, and it is patient enough to do so for a whole season before collecting. In man’s shape it courts women at the shieling and on the turf gable, and the ones who did not check its hair for weed did not come home.

A strange horse turns up among the farm beasts some time before winter and cannot be driven off. In the old way of things the stable door stood open and the horses went out after their straw to pick at what they could find, so nobody thinks much of it. By spring it is fat and sleek while the rest have gone lean and ragged, and it is the best animal on the place. Put the cow-shackle round its neck and it will harrow all spring and carry peat all summer without a moment’s trouble. That is the whole method of the each-uisge, and it is a patient one.

The bill falls due on the road back from the moss. Three horses or seven, creels on their backs, each roped to the tail of the one ahead, the man riding the foremost. Somewhere along the track the shackle slips. Then the animal underneath him stops being a horse and goes for the water flat out with the whole string dragged behind it. The men who lived through that ride lived by planting a foot against each pillar of a narrow gateway as they went through, or by pitching off onto the sand and jumping up to cut the halter of the hindmost beast. Next morning the entrails come ashore.

Usually it is the liver. Whatever else varies between one telling and the next, the loch gives back the same thing, floating in the shallows where nine children or four horses or one careless young man went in. Nothing else comes back.

The most celebrated of these drownings belongs to the heir of Aros in Mull, a young man of great physical activity, dissolute manners, and the settled opinion that no horse existed he could not ride. He was taken into Loch Frisa between his betrothal and his wedding, and the lament his intended bride made for him was still sung in Mull long afterwards. How he went in depends entirely on who is telling it. One account has a remarkably handsome grey mare come among his father’s horses grazing the rushes at the loch end, standing perfectly quiet until he was up. Another has him catch what he took for one of the family beasts on the hill and ride it out into the loch to be devoured by the water-horses already living there. A third has the shackle neglected after a winter of such good behaviour that nobody thought about it any more. In a fourth the other water-horses smelled a man on the animal and killed it, so that its liver came ashore instead of his. In a fifth he was taken twice, escaping the first time by the gatepost trick and losing the second with his arms locked round its neck and no way to unclasp them. The soberest version says a mare he was trying to break dragged him into Loch Frisa and drowned him, and that his body was recovered.

Its neighbours in the English folklore books are the kelpies, and the two are confused constantly. The Gaelic tradition does not support the merger. The kelpie that swells rivers in spate and carries off children belongs to streams and torrents, and the water-horse belongs to still water; later reference works stretch it out into sea lochs and salt water as well, which is where the Heisker bull eventually drove one. Nobody explains where any of them came from. There is no first water-horse and no maker. They are simply in the lochs, in ones and twos, and the only origin question the tellings care about is which loch: Frisa, Basibol, Annla, Cuaich, Assapol, the Loch of Disaster in Sunart, the Woman’s Loch under Dùn Can on Raasay.

In man’s shape it is more dangerous, because it is charming. It comes to a woman herding cattle in a sequestered part of the hill, or sitting on the turf gable of her own house, or alone at the summer shieling, and it is very amorous, and what it wants is to lay its head in her lap and sleep. The women who lived to describe it all noticed the same things. Hooves where the feet should be. Green water weed in the hair, or the gravel of the loch bottom, or plain sand. In Sutherland the woman at Loch Meudaidh spotted the sand, got clear, and looking back from a distance saw him tearing up the ground in his fury; her descendants were still being pointed out generations later.

The Heisker telling carries on past the escape. The women of that island went out in pairs to wash clothes at a loch away from the township, because of what was said to live in it, and on an old man’s advice the people reared a bull, Tarbh na Leòid, against the day it might be wanted. One year a woman went alone. It was a fine warm evening and she was tired, and she stretched out against a sunny hillock, and a handsome man came and asked to rest beside her and then to put his head in her lap. She saw the loch gravel and the water-lily leaves at the roots of his hair, looked closer, saw the hooves, and knew. He was snoring by then. She had shears in her pocket, cut her coat away around his head, eased off, and then took to the slope. She was near the houses when she heard the whinnying behind her, and she was already shouting for them to let the bull out. The two fought back and forth, first one winning and then the other, until the bull forced it backwards out into the sea and both went under. The woman went home to her bed and never rose from it again. A long time afterwards one of the bull’s horns washed up on the shore, and it served as the bar of a gate on Heisker for years, and there were men still living in the 1950s who had seen it there.

Its powers run in a single direction. It can be a horse, a boy, a handsome young man, a ring, or a tuft of wool lying in the grass, and the later reference books add an enormous bird. Its back grows to fit whatever number of riders climb aboard. Harnessed it is tireless and outworks everything in the parish. Above all, whoever touches it stays touched, and that alone would be enough. A group of children went out on a Sunday to amuse themselves near the Loch of Disaster in Sunart, found a pony, and mounted it one after another as its back stretched to take them. The only one who got away had a Bible in his pocket and had laid a single finger on the animal, and he cut the finger off. Nine children went into the loch, and one liver came ashore the next day. The same tale is told of a group of girls near Aberfeldy in Perthshire, whose livers surfaced in a lochan the following morning. John Gregorson Campbell, who took the Sunart version down from oral telling, called it plainly a pious fraud for keeping children away from lonely water on the Sabbath, and he was almost certainly right, which does not appear to have improved anyone’s opinion of the loch.

Against all of that, the things that stop it are oddly domestic. A cow-shackle round the neck or a cap on the head subdues it completely. Dogs will drive it off: a man working the fields at Caolas in Tiree ran from one and lost only his coat, which it tore into shreds while the dogs came out of the house at it. A woman alone in her kitchen with one kept telling it that courting time would come when the little clay pot boiled, drawing the answer out as long as she could, and when the water was scalding she threw it between his legs and he went out of the house roaring. On Raasay a smith built a hut beside the Woman’s Loch with a vent facing the water, waited for the right wind, roasted a wether sheep so the smell blew down to the loch, and killed the thing with the irons out of his own fire when it came in for the meat. They called him Alastair of the Monster ever after. What lay on the floor when they looked at it properly was not a horse at all, but grey turves, or a soft mass like a jellyfish.

At Loch Cuaich, some thirty years before all this was written down, an army deserter living on a half-acre islet used to watch one out in the middle of the water, lying over on its side, making a film of itself and making itself into a salmon, sporting about and then going under. One stormy night something rattled hard at his door and stood there in the shape of a man. He fired twice and it did not move. He called to his wife for a silver coin, loaded the gun with it, and the figure went away and was heard plunging into the loch. The people round the shore heard three shots from the islet that night. They agreed on the shots. On the cause they did not.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the each uisge?

The each uisge is the water horse of Scottish Gaelic folklore, a shapeshifting creature that lives in lochs and appears as a fine loose horse, a young man, a boy, a ring or a tuft of wool. Anyone who mounts it in horse form sticks to its hide and is carried into the water and eaten. It is recorded across the Highlands and Islands, especially in Mull, Tiree, Skye, Raasay and the Uists.

How do you tell an each uisge from a real horse or a real man?

In horse shape it is nearly impossible, which is the point of the stories; it looks like an ordinary grey or black horse with a long mane and tail, though Skye accounts give it a sharp bill or a narrow brown slippery snout. In human shape it gives itself away by its feet and its hair. Witnesses in the tales notice horse hooves instead of feet, and green water weed, loch gravel or sand at the roots of the hair.

How can an each uisge be escaped or killed?

Breaking contact is the only reliable escape, and the tales are literal about the cost: riders threw themselves off in narrow gateways, a woman cut her own skirt away from under its sleeping head with shears, and a boy in Sunart cut off the finger he had touched it with. A cow-shackle round its neck or a cap on its head subdues it entirely. Dogs drove one off in Tiree, a bull fought one into the sea at Heisker, a woman scalded one with boiling water, and a smith on Raasay killed one with hot irons after luring it with a roasted sheep.

What is the difference between the each uisge and the kelpie?

They are separate creatures in the Gaelic tradition, though English-language writing often merges them. The kelpie belongs to running water, swelling streams and torrents and drowning those who cross them, and the nineteenth-century Highland collectors held that it had no real counterpart in Gaelic belief at all. The each uisge belongs to standing water, the freshwater lochs, and in later reference works to sea lochs and salt water too.

Why do livers wash ashore in each uisge stories?

The liver is the fixed detail of the tradition: after the water horse has taken and eaten its riders, the liver, or sometimes the lungs, comes ashore the next day, and nothing else does. It appears in the Mull tales of the heir of Aros, in the Sunart story of the nine children and in the Aberfeldy version told of a group of girls. It functions as the proof in the story, the one thing the loch gives back.