Shellycoat

The voice came off the water on a black night above the Ettrick, and it said one word twice. Lost. Lost. Two men heard it and did what anyone would have done, because it had the exact sound of somebody drowning: they went towards it. The cry moved upstream. They followed it upstream. All night, in bad weather, they worked their way along the bank towards the head of the river, and when they reached the springs at the top of the hill the voice was already on the far side of the mountain and descending. They gave up there, soaked and finished. That was when the laughter started behind them.

Sir Walter Scott set that story down in the first volume of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802, in the pages where he sorted the Border spirits into their families, and he filed Shellycoat with the bogles: a spirit who lives in the water and who has given his name to many a rock and stone on the Scottish coast. When he appeared, Scott wrote, he seemed decked with marine productions, and in particular with shells, whose clattering announced his approach. Read that twice and notice what is missing. No face. No height. No colour of eye. The oldest description of this creature is a description of a noise.

A spirit whose approach is announced by its own clothing is not built for ambush, and the record bears that out: what Shellycoat does is waste your time. The old accounts put him on the upland burns of Liddesdale and Eskdale, and Scott names one address in particular, the old house of Gorinberry on the Hermitage Water, which is a bleak enough stretch of country to keep a bogle in business. He is not a drowner. He does not bargain, curse, or demand anything. He gets you out of bed, walks you up a river in the rain for six hours, and laughs.

The name is older than the Minstrelsy by a full century, which matters, because Scott collected a great many things and is sometimes suspected of improving them. In March 1700 the kirk session at Cramond recorded a quarrel in which James Walker called another man a shellie coat, and the man objected on the grounds that he did not care to be likened to an ill spirit. An insult only lands if both parties already know the reference. By 1720 Alexander Pennecuik was rhyming about no Shellicoat goblin nor elf on the green, and in 1725 Allan Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd had a woman flee as if from a shelly-coated kow, the kow being the Scots bogey that shares the creature’s shell coat and half its names. Two centuries of Scots writing keep the word alive in that register: a thing you frighten people with, casually, the way you would now mention a burglar alarm.

The Scots record is not tidy about how many of him there are. A Dumfriesshire poet in 1848 wrote of shelly-coats in the plural, scaly old men whose homes were the lakes and the fens and the wells, which turns a single named sprite into a whole damp species. A piece in the Scots Magazine in 1823 remembered something worse: a human being under a spell, transformed into a ferocious demon whose cruelty was insatiable and whose power could not be resisted. That is not the creature who shouts Lost from the Ettrick. Nobody has ever reconciled the two, and it is more honest to leave them side by side than to blend them into one obliging monster.

The second Shellycoat belonged to the coast, and specifically to Leith. James Grant, writing up the old town in Old and New Edinburgh, records a large rock lying near the citadel that was held to be the seat of a demon of that name, and describes him as a gigantic and undefinable fiend of nearly infinite power who never attempted anything he failed to accomplish, and who delighted in blood and devastation. He was, Grant adds, long the bugbear of the urchins of Leith, which is the detail that gives the whole thing away. The rock was a dare. Children ran three times round the stone at dusk and chanted at it: Shellycoat, Shellycoat, gang awa hame, I cry na yer mercy, I fear na yer name. In the local telling the coat itself lay under the boulder through the daylight hours, and without it he was as mortal as anyone.

William Hutchison, gathering the tales and antiquities of Leith in 1865, preserved the best of the shore stories. An eighteenth-century man known as English Dick, descended from Cromwell’s garrison at the citadel, refused to believe a word of it and wagered a gallon of wine that he could perform the ceremony at the stone and walk away. His friends came as far as the sands with him and then went to a tavern instead. They found him at first light at the foot of the rock, cut and battered and barely alive, and it was months before he would say what had happened. When he did, he described a sound like every shell in the world lifted by a gale and flung together, a giant coming out of the sea and crossing the beach in one stride, and a voice of singular softness asking him why he had been called.

The shells attracted scholars, too. Jacob Grimm, hunting cognates across the North Sea, identified the Scottish Shellycoat with the German Schellenrock, the bell-coat, and pointed at the tinkling parti-coloured coat that a house-spirit in a Mecklenburg monastery is said to have asked for as his only wage. Thomas Keightley followed him and filed Shellycoat among the domestic spirits, cousin to the brownie, admitting the origin was uncertain. It is a neat argument and it may even be right about the word. It is not what the Scots sources say. They put him in the water, every time, from 1700 onward, and a nineteenth-century etymology is a poor reason to move a creature indoors.

His powers are all of a piece with his habits. He throws his voice, and the voice carries the specific pathos of a person about to go under. He can hold a sound ahead of a pursuer for an entire night and up the length of a river, and in the Leith version he travels by air, carries a grown man off under his coat, and puts him down on an island in the Forth. Nothing in the record suggests he can be bargained with, and nothing suggests he wants anything.

His limits are just as plain. The coat is the whole of him: it is his name, his warning, his weapon, and in the Leith story the thing he has to hide under a rock by day in order to be safe. He cannot approach quietly, which rules out most of what a malevolent spirit would want to do. He has no power at all over a person who declines to follow the noise, and the Border tale ends the moment the two men stop walking. By 1912 an old woman in Fife was invoking him to keep a child out of the garden peas, and Perthshire had reduced him to a figure of speech for doing something at elf-like speed. The last thing that happens to a frightening spirit is that he becomes useful.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Shellycoat?

A Shellycoat is a water bogle of Scottish folklore, a man-shaped spirit wearing a coat of shells that rattles whenever he moves. He haunts rivers, burns and coastal rocks, chiefly in the Scottish Borders and along the Firth of Forth. Sir Walter Scott grouped him with the bogles in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802, and the word appears in Scots records a century earlier.

Is the Shellycoat dangerous?

In the Border accounts he is not. The Shellycoat misleads travellers with false cries and then laughs at them, but he does not drown, curse or injure anyone, which makes him unusually harmless among Scottish water spirits. The Leith coastal tradition is the exception: there he is remembered as a giant and violent fiend who carried at least one man off across the water.

Where does the Shellycoat live?

Scott places him on the Border streams of Liddesdale and Eskdale, and names the old house of Gorinberry on the Hermitage Water as a particular haunt. He was also said to have given his name to numerous rocks and stones along the Scottish coast. The best known of these was a boulder on the Leith shore, under which he was said to keep his coat during the day.

How do you summon or drive off a Shellycoat?

Children in Leith ran three times around his stone at dusk chanting “Shellycoat, Shellycoat, gang awa hame, I cry na yer mercy, I fear na yer name.” The rhyme worked as both a dare and a challenge. Against the Border Shellycoat there is a simpler defence, which is to stop following the voice, because his trick only works on someone willing to chase it.

Why is the Shellycoat called that?

The name is Scots and means exactly what it says: a coat of shells. The clattering of those shells announced his arrival, and the sound is the oldest and most consistent detail in the record. Jacob Grimm later linked the name to the German Schellenrock, or bell-coat, though that identification is a nineteenth-century philological argument rather than anything the Scottish sources claim.

Related Entries

Bogle, Kelpie, Each Uisge, Nuckelavee, Tangie, Fuath, Ceasg, Redcap, Brownie, Bodach, Boggart, Grindylow, Nix