Fideal

Also Known As: Scottish Gaelic an Fhideal, a feminine noun; also written Fìdeal; her home is Loch na Fideil, “Loch of the Fideal”, in Gairloch parish, Wester Ross
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Scottish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: The Fideal is a dangerous female water being bound to one small Highland loch, strong enough to match a strong man step for step and to kill him even as she dies.
Role in Mythos: She is the haunter of Loch na Fideil above Talladale on Loch Maree, known from a single recorded encounter in which a man named Eoghainn fought her and both were killed.
Relation to Humans: The record calls her dangerous and gives her a loch that people had to pass, and later writers add that she lured men and pulled them under. The one human who is named in her story went out to meet her, killed her, and did not come home.

Half a mile behind the old hotel at Talladale, where the hill ground rises from the shore of Loch Maree, a burn comes down out of Gleann Airidh Chomhaich and pauses in a small dark loch before it runs on to the big water. The surface is peat-brown and still. Reeds stand in the shallows, and the margin gives underfoot like a wet sponge. On the map it is Loch na Fideil, the Loch of the Fideal, and for a long time that name was the only warning anyone was given.

Nearly everything known about her comes from one man. William J. Watson, a Gaelic scholar from Easter Ross, published *Place-Names of Ross and Cromarty* in Inverness in 1904. His entry for the loch, on page 239, runs to a single line: Loch of the Fideal, a certain dangerous water monster, near Loch Maree Hotel. Then, in the corrections at the back of the book, on page 281, he added what somebody in the district had evidently told him afterwards. It is a few sentences of Gaelic and their translation. That is the whole record.

The Fideal haunted the loch. In the end a strong man named Eoghainn, Ewen in English, went to meet her. Watson’s Gaelic gives the fight as an exchange of taunts. “A step on your step, Ewen,” says the Fideal, closing on him. “A step on your step, Fideal,” says Ewen, and presses her back just as hard. Neither gives ground. The story then finishes in one line, balanced like a proverb: Ewen killed the Fideal, and the Fideal killed Ewen.

Watson closed his note with a remark in brackets. The Fideal, he pointed out, is feminine. The Gaelic says “she” as she advances on the man. So the monster of the loch was a female thing, and that is all the description she gets. Nobody says whether she was the height of a woman or the length of a boat, whether she had hands or hair, whether she came out of the water or was the water. She speaks, she steps forward, she kills. It is very little to go on.

The loch itself was on paper before her story was. When the Ordnance Survey’s name collectors worked through Gairloch parish in the nineteenth century, two Talladale men, P. Sinclair and J. McLean, gave them the name Loch na Fideil for the small loch south-east of the hotel. The surveyors wrote down the spelling and the position. They left the meaning blank.

Later writers built on Watson’s lines. Donald A. Mackenzie, in *Scottish Folk-Lore and Folk Life* in 1935, proposed that the Fideal was the loch’s own tangle given a name: the bog grass and water weed that wrap a swimmer’s legs and hold them. Katharine Briggs took that reading into her *Dictionary of Fairies* in 1976, where the Fideal appears among the evil water demons of the Highlands and is said to draw men in and drag them under, and from there she entered the lists of the fuath, the Gaelic family of hostile water spirits. These are interpretations, and good ones. A cold hill loch with a weedy floor does kill people, quietly and without a mark on them. But the weeds are Mackenzie’s idea, and the luring belongs to the later tellings. The story Watson was given has no drowning in it at all. It has a duel.

What the duel shows of her strength is plain enough. She could hold a loch against a whole district until a champion came, and she could match the strongest man the place had, pace for pace, without yielding. Her limit is just as plain. She could be killed, by a mortal, with no charm or blessed iron mentioned, simply by someone willing to keep stepping forward. And she seems to have been one of a kind. Once Ewen had done his work there was no second Fideal, in that loch or any other.

No origin is recorded for her. Nothing says how Ewen died, where he was buried, or when any of it was supposed to have happened. The burn still runs through the loch on its way down to Talladale.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Fideal in Scottish folklore?

The Fideal is a dangerous female water being from the Scottish Highlands, said to haunt Loch na Fideil near Talladale on Loch Maree in Wester Ross. She is recorded in W. J. Watson’s Place-Names of Ross and Cromarty (1904), which calls her a dangerous water monster. Later writers class her with the fuath, the hostile water spirits of Gaelic tradition.

Where is Loch na Fideil?

Loch na Fideil is a small hill loch in Gairloch parish, Wester Ross, about half a mile south-east of the old Loch Maree Hotel at Talladale. A burn from Gleann Airidh Chomhaich runs through it and down into Loch Maree. The name means Loch of the Fideal.

Who killed the Fideal?

A strong man named Eoghainn, or Ewen, killed the Fideal. In the story Watson recorded, the two advance on each other trading the same taunt, and the fight ends with both dead: Ewen killed the Fideal, and the Fideal killed Ewen. Nothing more is recorded about Ewen.

What does the Fideal look like?

No source describes the Fideal’s appearance. The only detail recorded is that the Fideal is female, which Watson noted because the Gaelic word is feminine. In 1935 Donald A. Mackenzie suggested she was a personification of the bog grass and water weeds that entangle swimmers, but that is his interpretation and not part of the original story.

Is the Fideal a kind of fuath?

The Fideal is listed among the fuath in later reference works, following Katharine Briggs’s Dictionary of Fairies (1976). The original 1904 record does not use the word fuath and simply calls her a dangerous water monster. The classification is a later grouping of Highland water demons.