The man-eating water horse of Scotland
Kelpie is the Lowland Scots name for the water horse that haunts rivers and fords; its Highland Gaelic cousin, the each-uisge of the sea lochs and great lakes, is reckoned fiercer still. Its favourite ruse is to graze by the waterside as a fine, unusually docile horse, saddled and bridled. When a traveller or a pack of children climbs on, the hide holds them fast like glue and the beast wheels into deep water. The tales are precise about the horror: in one, a last child touches the horse with a single finger and saves himself only by cutting the finger off, and next morning the loch gives back nothing of his companions but their livers, the one part the water horse will not eat.
The kelpie also walks as a handsome young man, betrayed only by waterweed tangled in his hair. Mastery runs through the bridle: a kelpie wearing a man-made halter is bound to obey, and stories tell of lairds who worked a captive water horse hauling stone for their castles. Teaching children to recognise the too-friendly horse by the waterside was practical schooling in the danger of deep water, which is the plain core of the legend. Robert Burns already lists water-kelpies among the night's uncanny company in his 1786 poem Address to the Deil, and the folklorist Walter Gregor gathered the oral tradition across north-east Scotland in 1881.
In 2013 Andy Scott's thirty-metre steel horse heads, The Kelpies, were raised at Falkirk, returning the name to the centre of Scotland's public imagination.
