The Kelpies

John Graham of Morphie wanted a better house. Morphie lay near St Cyrus, close to the River North Esk, and the laird apparently felt that his position in life deserved something grander than the home he already had. There was only the small matter of transporting the enormous quantity of stone required to build it, which might have been a serious obstacle had Ponnage Pool not possessed a kelpie.

According to the story preserved by the University of Aberdeen’s Elphinstone Institute, the creature appeared as a beautiful black horse and had exactly the kind of supernatural strength a man hoping to avoid ordinary limitations might find useful. Graham consulted a local woman about capturing it and was told that the bridle was the key. If he could cut it away using cold iron and keep it from the kelpie, the creature would fall under his control.

His wife covered the doors and windows of their house with rowan branches tied with red thread while Graham went down to the pool carrying a heavy dagger. He found the horse beside the water, crept close enough to strike and cut off the bridle before it could recover.

The kelpie was furious, but Graham made it home with the bridle and, once safely behind the protection his wife had prepared, had what he wanted: a supernatural labourer.

Over the following weeks, he forced the creature to haul huge granite stones for the new house. The story says it became thin, exhausted and filthy while Graham continued working it until the building was complete, only then returning the bridle.

The kelpie left him with a curse.

Sair back an sair banes,

Carryin the laird o Morphie’s stanes!

The rest promised that the Laird of Morphie would never thrive while the kelpie remained alive, and the tale goes on to connect Graham’s later misfortune with that curse. His fortunes failed, his family left and the grand house itself eventually fell into ruin.

For a creature usually cast as the villain, I feel it has a fairly reasonable grievance here.

THE NAME HAS BECOME MESSIER THAN THE FOLKLORE WAS

Ask most people in Scotland what a kelpie is and the answer will probably be some variation of a supernatural horse that lives in water and drowns people. That is not wrong, exactly, but the older traditions are more complicated.

In Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, published in 1900 from material collected orally, John Gregorson Campbell was quite firm that the kelpie and the Gaelic each-uisge were not the same creature. His distinction placed the each-uisge in lochs while kelpies belonged more particularly to streams, rivers and torrents, and he noted that writers were already confusing the two.

The distinction did not remain tidy everywhere. Later retellings mixed the traditions so thoroughly that some of the stories now routinely described as kelpie tales were originally recorded as stories about the each-uisge. Folklore rarely behaves like a filing cabinet, particularly once stories move between Gaelic, Scots and English-speaking communities, but the familiar shape survives the muddle: water, a horse and the overwhelming sense that getting on its back is a terrible idea.

THE HORSE DID NOT NEED TO LOOK FRIGHTENING

That was rather the point. The water horse could appear beside a loch or river looking like an ordinary animal, sometimes an exceptionally fine one, apparently tame and conveniently available to ride. Later versions occasionally gave it clues such as a permanently wet coat or waterweed tangled through its mane, but these were not always especially useful until somebody was already standing much closer than I would recommend.

Once a person climbed on, leaving became considerably more difficult. Riders might find themselves stuck fast to the animal while it turned towards the water and plunged in. Historic Environment Scotland records this familiar pattern and notes that stories like these had an obvious practical use in warning children away from dangerous stretches of water.

Scottish folklore could perhaps have achieved the same result with a sign saying DO NOT TOUCH THE SUSPICIOUS HORSE, but apparently, we preferred narrative.

I cannot say I object.

THEN THERE ARE THE CHILDREN

One of the darkest water-horse stories concerns a group of children who find a horse beside a loch and begin climbing onto its back. Somehow there is room for all of them because the animal simply lengthens as each new child gets on.

One boy refuses to join them. In the version recorded by John Gregorson Campbell, he reaches out and touches the horse with a finger, only to discover that he cannot pull himself free. He escapes by cutting the finger off while the others are carried into the water.

Campbell associated that particular story with the water-horse rather than the kelpie, which is another good example of how thoroughly the names became tangled later. Whatever we call the creature, the warning is not subtle.

A child might ignore an instruction to stay away from deep water. A story in which a group of children climb onto an unnatural horse, discover they cannot get off and disappear beneath a loch while the only survivor loses a finger has rather more staying power.

Maybe they should lead with that.

SOMETIMES IT LOOKED HUMAN

Horse form was only part of the problem. Water spirits in these traditions could also appear as people, often attractive ones.

Accounts of the each-uisge describe handsome young men whose connection to the water becomes apparent only when sand or waterweed is discovered in their hair, while wider kelpie tradition contains similar human disguises.

There is something unfair about this. You have correctly avoided the unexplained horse beside the water, congratulated yourself on excellent judgement, and then an attractive stranger appears with pond weed in his hair.

Scottish folklore remains committed to testing you.

The disguise also tells us something useful about the stories. These creatures were dangerous precisely because they did not initially look dangerous. They appeared as something inviting, useful or beautiful, and the threat only became obvious once somebody was already close enough for the water to matter.

THE BRIDLE WAS A SERIOUS VULNERABILITY

For all their strength, kelpies had rules, and one of the strangest concerned the bridle.

The Laird of Morphie story uses it to enslave the creature, while another nineteenth-century tale tells of a Macgregor who encounters a great black water horse near Loch Slochd. Knowing what he is dealing with, he manages to seize its bridle, after which the kelpie takes human form and demands its return.

Macgregor declines.

The creature curses him, declaring that he and the bridle will never enter his house together, and then chases him home. Macgregor solves the problem by throwing the bridle through an open window to his wife before entering through the door himself.

The wording of the curse had not covered administrative ingenuity.

Sir Thomas Dick Lauder included the tale in Legendary Tales of the Highlands, and the bridle remains with Macgregor’s family after the kelpie disappears. I enjoy folklore like this because the threat can be enormous, ancient and quite capable of killing you, yet somewhere along the line somebody discovers that it can still be defeated on a technicality.

WATER DID NOT NEED MUCH HELP BEING FRIGHTENING

It would be easy to decide that kelpies were invented purely to keep children away from rivers and lochs, particularly because that warning function is obvious in many of the stories, but I think that explanation is too small on its own.

Water was part of ordinary life. People crossed rivers, worked beside them, fished them and travelled over lochs, while drownings, sudden floods and dangerous currents were real possibilities. A calm surface could conceal depth, movement and danger that was invisible from the bank.

Giving that uncertainty a body makes sense.

The horse looks harmless until it moves, and the river looks harmless until it changes. In the story, they become versions of the same thing.

AND THEN FALKIRK MADE THEM THIRTY METRES HIGH

The modern Kelpies at The Helix are considerably easier to identify.

Designed by Andy Scott, the two steel horse heads stand around thirty metres high beside the Forth & Clyde Canal near Falkirk. They were inspired not only by the old water-horse folklore but by the working horses that powered Scottish industry and pulled barges along the canals, and the sculptures were modelled on two Clydesdales called Duke and Baron.

I see them fairly often because I live nearby, and they are genuinely magnificent. They also have the unfortunate ability to make people forget they are driving. Traffic slows, heads turn and everyone needs another look at the enormous silver horses they have already been able to see for the previous thirty seconds.

The irony is excellent because for generations the advice surrounding kelpies was essentially do not become distracted by the beautiful horse.

We built two beside a road.

I WOULD STILL KEEP MY DISTANCE

The old kelpie is better when we leave some of its unpleasantness intact. It was not a decorative magical horse, but something tied to rivers, pools and dangerous crossings, capable of deceiving people and dragging them into water, while humans occasionally responded by capturing it and forcing it into labour.

The stories changed from one part of Scotland to another, and even the boundary between kelpie and each-uisge became blurred. That untidiness is part of what makes folklore interesting. Nobody sat down and designed the creature; people beside different waters told different versions until the horse became familiar enough to survive them all.

So, if I ever come across an unexplained horse standing alone beside a Scottish loch, I will not be checking whether its mane is wet, examining its hooves or trying to establish which branch of water-horse folklore it belongs to.

I will admire it from a sensible distance, possibly from the car with the engine running.