Читать книгу Superstitions of the Highlands & Islands of Scotland - John Gregorson Campbell - Страница 20

Table of Contents

Everywhere in the Highlands, the red-deer are associated with the Fairies, and in some districts, as Lochaber and Mull, are said to be their only cattle. This association is sufficiently accounted for by the Fairy-like appearance and habits of the deer. In its native haunts, in remote and misty corries, where solitude has her most undisturbed abode, its beauty and grace of form, combined with its dislike to the presence of man, and even of the animals man has tamed, amply entitle it to the name of sìth. Timid and easily startled by every appearance and noise, it is said to be unmoved by the presence of the Fairies. Popular belief also says that no deer is found dead with age, and that its horns, which it sheds every year, are not found, because hid by the Fairies. In their transformations it was peculiar for the Fairy women to assume the shape of the red-deer, and in that guise they were often encountered by the hunter. The elves have a particular dislike to those who kill the hinds, and, on finding them in lonely places, delight in throwing elf-bolts at them. When a dead deer is carried home at night the Fairies lay their weight on the bearer’s back, till he feels as if he had a house for a burden. On a penknife, however, being stuck in the deer it becomes very light. There are occasional allusions to the Fairy women having herds of deer. The Carlin Wife of the Spotted Hill (Cailleach Beinne Bhric horò), who, according to a popular rhyme, was ‘large and broad and tall,’ had a herd which she would not allow to descend to the beach, and which ‘loved the water-cresses by the fountain high in the hills better than the black weeds of the shore.’ The old women of Ben-y-Ghloe, in Perthshire, and of Clibrich, in Sutherlandshire,10 seem to have been sìth women of the same sort. ‘I never,’ said an old man (he was upwards of eighty years of age) in the Island of Mull, questioned some years ago on the subject, ‘heard of the Fairies having cows, but I always heard that deer were their cattle.’

In other parts of the Highlands, as in Skye, though the Fairies are said to keep company with the deer, they have cows like those of men. When one of them appears among a herd of cattle the whole fold of them grows frantic, and follows lowing wildly. The strange animal disappears by entering a rock or knoll, and the others, unless intercepted, follow and are never more seen. The Fairy cow is dun (odhar) and ‘hummel,’ or hornless. In Skye, however, Fairy cattle are said to be speckled and red (crodh breac ruadh), and to be able to cross the sea. It is not on every place that they graze. There were not above ten such spots in all Skye. The field of Annat (achadh na h-annaid), in the Braes of Portree, is one. When the cattle came home at night from pasture, the following were the words used by the Fairy woman, standing on Dun Gerra-sheddar (Dùn Ghearra-seadar), near Portree, as she counted her charge:

“Crooked one, dun one,

Little wing grizzled,

Black cow, white cow,

Little bull black-head,

My milch kine have come home,

O dear! that the herdsman would come!”