Lavellan

Also Known As: Gaelic làbh-allan, lamhalan; also written la-mhalan and la-bhallan, the same word used in Gaelic for the water shrew, the water vole and in some districts the weasel
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Scottish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It was held to sicken and kill cattle at a distance of forty yards by its breath alone, without ever touching them.
Role in Mythos: It was the named cause behind livestock that died without a wound near the deep pools of the Caithness and Sutherland rivers.
Relation to Humans: Farmers feared it for their beasts rather than for themselves, and killed it wherever they believed they had found one. Its own body supplied the antidote, whether by boiling the head or by dipping the preserved skin in water for a sick animal to drink.

In Caithness, three centuries ago and more, a man set a pot over the fire and boiled the head of a small brown animal in it, then carried the water out to the byre and made his cattle drink. That was the cure, and it was taken seriously. The sickness it answered left no bite, no swelling, nothing a hand running over the hide of a dead beast could find. It had only a cause, and the whole parish agreed on the cause.

The oldest notice of the lavellan in print runs to four clauses of Latin. Robert Sibbald set it down in his Scotia Illustrata in 1684, at folio 11: an animal frequent in Caithness, living in the water, with a head like a wild weasel’s and of the same colour. Its breath harms beasts. The remedy is to drink water in which its head has been boiled. Sibbald was assembling a natural history of the whole country out of reports sent in by correspondents, so the lavellan reached his desk as wildlife rather than as legend. It sits among the water voles and the seals, one more animal of the north, with a line about poison attached.

What the people of Caithness and Sutherland believed about it had a terrible economy to it. The lavellan did not need to bite. It did not need to come within reach. Forty yards of open grass between the pool and the grazing was no protection, because the harm travelled on its breath, or it travelled through the water, and either way the first anyone knew of it was a cow standing stiff in the field with nothing on her to explain it.

Down in the pool the water runs the colour of strong tea and holds its chill through August. The banks are cut sheer into the moss and the deepest hollows keep their dark all day. Something small lies in there against the stones, breathing, and a mile of good pasture goes quietly wrong above it.

On the nineteenth of August 1769 a Welsh naturalist came up the coast road to ask about it. Thomas Pennant had ridden over boggy and dreary moors, his own words for them, past a headland he thought had a black and melancholy look, and through the little highland village of Ausdale, then down into a bottom thick with alder and willow and birch to Langwell, where Mr Sutherland gave him a hospitable reception and the river brought salmon almost to his door. He put the question to the country people there. They had a notion, he wrote, that the lavellan was noxious to cattle; they preserved the skin, and as a cure for their sick beasts gave them the water in which it had been dipped. Pennant suspected the whole business came down to the water shrew and said so in a marginal note. He was the first person to go and ask.

Two remedies, then, eighty-five years apart, working the same principle from opposite ends of the animal. Sibbald’s informants boiled the head. Langwell kept the hide and dipped it. Whatever poisons also cures, which is old logic and widespread, and it is very nearly the only doctrine the lavellan ever had.

What it looked like never settled. Sibbald’s weasel head was the earliest word and stayed the standard one for two hundred years. Then in 1887 James Harvie-Brown and Thomas Buckley, compiling a vertebrate fauna of Sutherland, Caithness and West Cromarty, printed the testimony of a Mr Nicholson who was living in the county and had heard the name in use. What he had been told described a different animal altogether: extremely rare, very nimble in its movements, with remarkable flashing eyes, regarded with superstitious horror, a sort of lizard, larger and brighter than the common lizard. Their own book cannot make up its mind about it. In the chapter on mammals they declare for the water shrew and say they are certain of it. In the chapter on reptiles, a hundred and seventy pages further on, they write that Nicholson’s account disposes of that identification effectually. Nobody ever produced one.

The name is not a monster’s name. Làbh-allan and lamhalan are ordinary Gaelic, and Alexander Forbes, gathering up the Gaelic names of beasts in 1905, found the word doing duty for the water shrew, for the water vole and in some places for the weasel. It keeps company with dallag, the blind one, and with luch shith, the fairy mouse, a name the little animal earned by its reputation for bewitching. There is a patch of ground called Dallagan fhraoich, the shrews’ heather, turned into English as Shrewfield. The word came first and it was always wider than the beast that the English speakers of the far north made out of it.

There is no story. The lavellan has no origin, no parentage, no first appearance, no meeting with a hero or a saint and no death. It never spoke and never changed its shape, which sets it apart from the water horses working the same rivers. The nearest it came to literature was a joke at somebody’s expense. Rob Donn, the Durness poet who spent his life among cattle in eighteenth-century Sutherland, worked it into a satire on a man’s breeches, Briogais ‘Ic Ruairidh: let him not go away from the houses, to moss or wood, lest the lavellan come and smite him. A creature you can threaten a neighbour with is a creature everyone already knows.

Its power begins and ends with reach. It killed at a distance, in silence, through air or through water, and it chose cattle, which in that country was the difference between a hard year and a ruined one. No source gives it malice or a motive. It lay in the pool and the beasts above it died.

Against that, the limits are real, and most of them come from being a small animal in a cold river. It could be killed, and it was, on sight, which is not the record of anything unstoppable. Its own carcass was the antidote to its own work, so every dead lavellan was a medicine chest. It had no power on dry land and no reach past the field nearest the water. And it could never be found by anyone who went out deliberately to look for it.

Nicholson, who had the stories from people who believed them, came down on the sensible side and then complicated it. He thought the lavellan partly mythical, and thought the name was applied to several species as individual belief or fancy dictated, which is as near a definition as the creature has ever been given. The animal Pennant nominated turned out to deserve a little of the reputation. The water shrew is one of the very few venomous mammals, its bite carrying a real toxin that stills the frogs and small fish it hunts. In late October 1872 the Wick river came down in a great spate in harvest time, rolling hay and sheaves and whole stooks of corn towards the sea, and a man named Reid stood watching the wreckage go by and noticed small black shapes riding on top of the floating heaps. He got down the bank at some risk of a ducking and caught one and carried it home. It lived a few days and then died, he supposed for want of its proper food.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the lavellan?

The lavellan is a small water creature from the folklore of Caithness and Sutherland in the far north of Scotland, believed to poison cattle from a distance without touching them. It was first recorded in print by Robert Sibbald in 1684, who described it as an animal common in Caithness that lived in water and harmed beasts with its breath. The Gaelic form of the name, làbh-allan, is also an ordinary word for the water shrew and the water vole.

What did the lavellan do to cattle?

The lavellan was blamed for sickening and killing cattle at a range of about forty yards, with no bite and no physical contact of any kind. Some accounts put the harm down to its breath, others held that its presence in a river pool was enough to poison animals watering nearby. The deaths it explained were the ones that left no mark on the carcass.

How did people cure a beast the lavellan had harmed?

The cure came from the lavellan’s own body. Sibbald recorded in 1684 that the sick animal should drink water in which a lavellan’s head had been boiled, while the people Thomas Pennant questioned at Langwell in 1769 preserved the skin instead and gave their cattle the water it had been dipped in. Both remedies assume that whatever carried the poison also carried the antidote.

Is the lavellan a real animal?

Pennant suspected in 1769 that the lavellan was really the water shrew, and that identification has been generally accepted since. The water shrew is genuinely venomous, one of a small number of venomous mammals, which gives the belief a footing in fact. A Caithness informant in the 1880s named a different creature altogether and thought the name was applied to several species according to individual fancy.

What does the lavellan look like?

The sources contradict each other. Sibbald gave it the head and colouring of a wild weasel, while Mr Nicholson, questioned in Caithness in the 1880s, described a sort of lizard, larger and brighter than the common lizard, very nimble, with remarkable flashing eyes. No specimen of a lavellan was ever produced for anyone to examine.