After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Scotland's Darkest Folklore

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

From misty mountains to deep-sea caves, we explore the dark side of Scottish folklore. Tales of Selkies - seal folk caught between sea and shore - Kelpies - murderous water-horses -and the ancient figure of the Cailleach. Maddy and Anthony's guest today is Donald Smith, founding director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre, and a storyteller who has written and lectured widely on the folklore of Scotland.Edited by Tomos Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Maddy's book, Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Britain, is now available on paperback! See more information here.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hi, we're your hosts, Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Encounters with the Kayak Three young hunters in the depth of winter set out into Glen A, off the D Valley in the Cairngorms, after deer in the depth of

winter. They headed up the Glen, they came across three or four hinds, they took a first shot, they wounded a hind but didn't kill it and the hinds turned up into the mountains and they followed and soon they hit hard weather. The snow came down, darkness set in and they were lost. Still they could see the spore of blood, they kept going but soon they had no idea where they were, how to get back towards the D Valley, whether they'd strayed off Glenay. They spent that night in freezing conditions, huddled up against a big rock just trying to survive to keep warm. And when a weak sun came up the next morning, there beside them was a bothy, an old bothy with

some smoke coming out of it. They went to the door. The door opened and there was an old woman in there, weathered face, deep blue eyes, long white hair tied back. Come in she said as if she were expecting them. Come in she said there's food here and there's some warmth and she fed them but then she turned to them. What did you do she said to my children? Your children? The deer she said. You shot that deer wounded but not killed. You should never hunt in that way. You should never take more deer than you need because they are my children.

They belong to me. And they were terrified. They realized that this was the Kayak, the old Mither, the mother of the dear people. But soon they fell asleep, and when they came to in the morning, the snow had passed, the light came up, but they were lying on open ground, and below them was the ruined remains of a bothy, roofless, nobody there, nobody in sight. They found their way back down Glenay, down to the D, but they never, ever went hunting

deer in Glenay again. What a treat that we get to sit back and listen to a story on this episode. Hello and welcome to After Dark. My name's Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And this month we are going to have four episodes and in each episode we're going to be looking at the dark side of folklore from across Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England. Now, as you might have guessed, we're starting with the dark side of Scottish folklore today

and tales of the Kayak, Kelpies and Selkies. Our guest who you've just heard introducing the Kayak is Donald Smith. And Donald has been at the very heart of Scottish storytelling traditions for decades. He is the founding director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre, which is, if you've been to Scotland and been to Edinburgh, a landmark on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. He is a storyteller and he has written and lectured widely on the folklore of Scotland. Donald, thank you for joining us on After Dark. Great to be here. Great to meet everybody.

We're extremely excited to have you as a storyteller because that is such a big part of what we do here on the podcast, Donald. Let's start with the kayak then because you gave a flavor of her at the opening of this episode. But can you tell us a little bit more about who or what she is? Sure. So the kayak is the most pervasive piece and yet little recognized piece of Scottish folklore. It's very, very old because the kayak, Carlin and Scott's kayak in Gaelic, seems to be some form of background weather goddess, a creator, the woman who stirs the powers of nature, who harnesses and creates the forces of the weather and the seasons. And she is remembered in endless place names and little

local traditions. But I think for a long time she was shoved into the background because it kind of smacked of sort of fertility goddesses or power of nature. So that wasn't approved by the churches or by the schools. But her stories have persisted and are remembered in so many parts when they all have this kind of edge of this liminal thing where you go over this slight edge and you experience something that's beyond the natural and yet in some way is connected with the powers of nature. And you mentioned there, Donald, that this is quite an old tradition. Do we have any idea how long the kayak has been around for? Paul I think it's our oldest piece of folklore, and is certainly prehistoric. One of the signs of that is that a lot of the really old folklore

is about the making of the landscape. So the kayak, all the time there's these little stories, you know, she forgets to put the lid on the well and the next moment we've got Loch Ó, she uses the Corrievreckan whirlpool to do her washing. That's the third biggest whirlpool in the world between the islands of Scarba and Dura and Scotland's west coast. So she's associated with all these things. And then she's part of the change of the seasons because the lore, and this is remembered in many places, is that the kayak imprisons her daughter, Bride, who is the goddess of spring to prevent spring coming. And she unleashes the forces of storm and hurricane and all the rest of it,

the wild shaggy goats of the storm, the stories say, but eventually the spring keeps coming back and eventually wins over. And then the kayak, they say, becomes bride in the next cycle. It's very deeply rooted and it's in all the languages and in every part of Scotland. It certainly goes back into prehistory. It's so interesting to be done up because as an English outsider, this is not a character,

a figure in the landscape that I'd ever come across. And it's so fascinating because you say she's so pervasive and that she's been around for so many centuries, if not millennia, and that she possibly at various points fell out of favour. I'm thinking in particular, your reference there to her being tied to fertility and the seasons and things like that and how that might have been seen, I suppose, as a sort of enemy of Christianity. But do we have a sense of her appearance, what she looks like when she does manifest in front of people? And does that change over time? Yeah, so you have met the kayak, absolutely and definitely you've been in Scotland because kayak is Gallic for a veiled one, and that word is later used for a nun.

And the veiling refers to, so in our sort of landscape and climate, you look to the mountain tops to see where the weather's coming from. So they say the kayak, she's making the weather. So when the weather changes, as it often does, and the mist and the rain rolls in over the hills, that's the kayak. So it's in that encounter with these natural forces, storm, flood, snow, wind,

and the seasonal changes that we encounter the kayak. And I think the universality of the lore is because of that connection with the world of nature. There's an aspect of the kayak sometimes called the Gair Carlin in the Scots side and Bera where she's depicted as a hag. She's the hag of winter and is quite a horrifying and savage kind of creature. But then that's slightly balanced as in so much of folklore, the dark and the light is kind of intertwined and balanced because of this cyclical thing that the old kayak or the mother, and you know the Laura, she takes some drops from the water of the Well of Life and that ensures that she then returns as the

maiden, as bride, the maiden of spring in the next seasonal cycle. And is she worshipped explicitly Donald in the past and today as well? I mean, you talk about her being sort of tied to these cyclical celebrations throughout the year and these are celebrations that survive, you know, we mark the beginning of spring, we mark the beginning of the autumn and winter. And do people still think about and talk about her in this terms? Sam So there's two bits to that. There's much older archaeology. We have, for example, the Bala Hulish goddess, who's an image of a Celtic goddess or pre-Celtic goddess,

who clearly is somehow connected with the Kayak lore. But then the kind of folklore, as opposed to perhaps a kind of, you know, neo-pagan celebration of the goddess, and that happens, and you can see that as an aspect of feminism in some ways. Folklore takes things a little bit more phlegmatically, and my first personal encounter with this kayak lore was working on a farm in the Oakle Hills in Stirlingshire and Clatt Mannenshire, and you used to be able to look across the valley towards what they called the Lomond Gap,

towards Ben Lomond and Loch Lomond, and that was where the weather came from. If you wanted to know whether you should be turning the hay or leaving it alone, you had to look through that gap. And the old farm workers, they used to say, aye, aye, well, hey, to look at Maggie's hole, Maggie's hole, they said, and Maggie's vagina, the kayak, the old Carlin's, that was where the weather was coming through. So there was a kind of, there's a certain sort of matter of factness about recognising that power of nature as something that people had to live with day in and day out. And we're learning that lesson again, the hard way, you know? KAEMPF Tell me about Janet Boiman and how the kayak feeds into her story. Because I think it gives,

as a really good example, you know, this is going back to the 16th century, and obviously the kayak goes further back again, but it just situates us in a different period of time than our own and gives people an insight into that history. Sure. So Janet Boilman's a story I've always felt very connected with because it's set in the old town of Edinburgh, very close to where the Storytelling Centre is now. And she was a healer, a wise woman. And in the time post the Protestant Reformation, the church had fallen out with the king and he decided to throw them a scrap and he gave them the power of trying and condemning witches. And Janet was the first to fall under this really terrible edict.

And in her testimony, she said she was dealing with this very difficult case, this guy who had this terrible fever and couldn't break. And she went to the wells on Arthur's seat to consult Arthur and his queen at the well. And of course, this is fascinating because the Arthur lore, Arthur's seat, Arthur's a giant in the original lore, but and his queen, and she was given, there was this manifestation at the well, and she was told to take the man's shirt

and to dip it three times into the icy water and then to put it straight on him. So that was like a feb refuge and the fever was broken. And of course there was lots of talk about this remarkable cure because this guy had been given up for loss and it resulted in her being put in trial and executed. So she was the first under that statute to be executed as a witch. So it's interesting that that witchcraft thing, the connection with the older fertility and nature wisdom and all the rest of it, there's this sort of connection between the two and a kind of denigration of that older tradition. Yeah, that's so interesting, isn't it? We often think about women, particularly women,

but men as well, accused of witchcraft in the early modern period as operating or being seen to operate outside of the church and that paternalistic form of religion. Here it's so explicit and it's being tied to those more ancient ideas. Donald, I'm interested in the fact that the kayak in this situation is sort of being likened to King Arthur's Queen because of course we know that King Arthur's Queen is Guinevere. Why is she being interwoven with these other mythologies? So there's this whole sense of the Queen of the Faerie realm linking with, so that whole lore about the idea of a Faerie people is that then connection with the older background

sense of a female force of nature. Of course the female Queen of the Faerie is an even more ambivalent figure in the lore though, you know? So there's this kind of dark and from the misty hills of the kayak and we'll go into the dark waters of the lochs in and around Scotland. I want to know because I lived in Edinburgh for two years and one of the things that you pass very, very regularly are the heads of two giant horses, which locals will tell you are the Kelpies. And I didn't know what a Kelpie was.

So for listeners who don't, could you tell us what a Kelpie is and why, well, why we should fear them, I suppose? Kelpie is a water horse, an inhabitant of deep pools or rivers or lochs, and not often a sea creature, and very sinister, very dangerous, because the Kelpie is an alluring, usually male, but occasionally female, is an alluring figure who seeks to draw in and attract young men or young women and to draw them down into the depths of the loch and drown them. So it's really thoroughly sinister and nasty. And I can't help feeling that the Andy Scott sculpted Kelpies there at Falkirk and the

River Forth have been misnamed. Those are not really dark, horrible, sinister creatures. They're much more the horses that are associated with Manon, the god of the sea, the racing horses. And that area is surrounded by places, clack, manon, slam, manon. So I think the folklore has got a wee bit crossed wires there. The Kelpies really are seriously nasty. Those marvellous horse sculptures are quite inspiring, I think. That's one of the things that I love though about folklore is how it kind of shapeshifts

over time and how people use it for their own meanings, I suppose, and their own interpretations. And that's the thing that, for me anyway, keeps it alive. But I am curious, Donald, about first of all, what horses are doing in water at all. I mean, they're not a natural creature that you would find under the waves. But also how exactly it is that they drown people because they are predatory monsters in most of the stories told of them, aren't they? So once you're on the back of a Kelpie, you can't get off. You're attracted and of course, the Kelpies often in the stories, they have these beautiful bridles, beautiful, intricate bridles. And it's just the people want to get on the horse and have the bridle.

And then before they realize, they're being dragged, galloping straight into the loch and down into the deep. And you just, you can't get off once you're on. You can't get off. And I think that that has to have a connection with the fact that water is very misleading in Scotland. You know, people say, oh, look at that beautiful water. I did this myself as a youngster.

Let's plunge in there and have a beautiful bath, the sun shining down. And you get about five or six yards out and suddenly the temperature plummets because that is very, very deep, dark water. I think the Kelpie lore had a kind of purpose to scare people off these dark and deep waters, of which we have so many, so many. Like Loch Ness, which contains as much water as all the lochs and lakes of England and Wales put together. And you mentioned Loch Ness there. Do you think there's any mythical crossover between the Loch Ness story and the story of the Kelpies?

No, I don't actually. I was just illustrating the depth of the water. I think that Loch Nesting is more connected with the idea of some kind of primeval dragon-like serpent not fitting with the Kelpie model. Well, talking of occupied and spooky bodies of water, I want to talk to you, Donald, about selkies, not Kelpies, but selkies, because I think these are possibly my favourite folkloric monster being ever. Yeah, me too, I think. For anyone who hasn't heard of a Selkie, Donald, tell us what these beings are, because they're really fascinating and quite complicated, I think. So Selkies are creatures who can move between seal and human form. And the way in which that metamorphosis or

transformation happens is often in some quite dramatic encounter between the human world and the natural world. So there is a dark side. Some people say that the Kelpies are the fairy folk of the sea, and that you can be lured into that underwater world to join those who have drowned, who only have an existence now below the sea in the kingdom of the Selkies. But there's also another aspect to it where there's love that springs up between the seal

and the cumin and that that love endures beyond these metamorphosis and transformations. So there becomes a kind of tragic love story element to it. So it's very, very rich mythology. It's very old, I think it's a mythology, and it's loved in Ireland and Scotland very distinctively, rather than mermaid stories, for example. And people are very engaged with that lore and the stories. I think it might be difficult for people to imagine these seal people as it is. Give us a description, Donald, of what, if you're encountering a selkie, what are you seeing? It's a complete change to human form so that the selkie can remove their

skin and then they are completely human. And classically you get the situation that the selkies come onto shore and they take off their skins and they can dance by the shore. Beautiful young women selkies dancing by the shore. And of course, some human comes and chances on this and falls in hopeless love and desire for one of these beautiful creatures. And to try and trap them and keep them in the shore, they steal the skin. That's the start of what is sometimes a tragic outcome,

where they end up separated, because eventually the woman finds the skin, resumes it and leaves. Or sometimes in these stories, eventually the human goes to the sea and transforms into a seal person and becomes a selkie. But the thing is, look in the eyes of a seal. Just look in a seal's eyes and you realise immediately where this closeness with humanity, these are mammals and they have these gorgeous liquid brown eyes and

you think, I have a connection with those creatures. I think that that's where the basis of it comes from. I suppose the thing with seals as well is that they pop up quite unexpectedly and they're quite curious creatures, aren't they? And I suppose what I'm about to say suggests that I've been at sea for many years and that is absolutely not the case, but that they will gravitate towards fishing boats and things like that. They are quite playful. People often compare them to dogs, dogs of the sea. I wonder if there's something in that proximity between man and animal, Donald, that has bred this kind of story. We've talked so much in this episode about proximity to the landscape, relationship between man

and nature, and especially these sort of cyclical powers and forces that are beyond our control. And I wonder if that's what's happening here with people living particularly along the Scottish coast that it's a way of explaining and I suppose elevating as well something of that relationship. Yeah, I think that's absolutely it. And both the people and the seals are trying to live from the fish. And that thing about a seal suddenly popping its head up and engaging with you is such a common experience. And of course, the seal population is growing again in many parts and thriving. But then there's also a conflict side to that as well. Where so a lot of the Selkies stories have violence in it,

where the humans are hunting the Selkies. And that's endured to modern times, where have these awful cowls of seal pups where they're clubbed to death. And it's just a massacre, essentially. That's not legal any longer in Scotland and not allowed. So there's definitely this close relationship through nature and living on the shore and the sea. And that has a connecting side and also an aspect of conflict and violence, where again I think that element of potential darkness can come

into these selkie tales. As the founding director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre, I'm really intrigued, Donald, to hear what you, what and where you think you sit in the continuation of these traditions, because they are so incredibly important to national identity and to linking people with their past. And I also, in the same breath, I'm wondering if there's anybody in particular that inspired you in hearing these stories that you have now taken up that mantle and move forward with them. So I think the continuing of the telling of these stories in the emotional engagement and the way

in which people go on evolving and changing the stories in relation to our present circumstances, I think these stories feel to many people more relevant than ever. But the great storyteller and folklorist that inspired me was the Scottish traveller Stanley Robertson. Came from the North East of Scotland, the Scottish travelling people being not Romani, although there's been a bit of intermarriage with Romani families and communities. The travellers are an indigenous Scottish and Irish tradition. And the thing was that they, even to this day,

do not attend school to the same number of weeks. And of course, in the past, attended school not at all. So this oral tradition of songs and stories was their form of culture and education. So they have this very powerful sense of it. And Stanley had all that, he had a whole family network of singers and storytellers and he encompassed all that but he had that capacity to engage with a fresh contemporary public and he was a master of the supernatural of the dark side. He could draw you in and scare the shit out

of you if you're permitted to say that on this August channel. But then he could also just turn on a sixpence and bring humour into it. You've answered so brilliantly the next question that I was going to ask about the power, I suppose, of storytelling. We are going to get Donald to tell us one final story before we go. Donald, we'd love to hear a final story about the Selkie, so take it away. A Selkie hunter, a skillful hunter of the Seals, lived on a remote coast in the west of Scotland. And this one day he was a careful hunter. He did not shoot, he did not damage the skins of the seals. He crept up carefully and he plunged his knife into the shoulder, the neck and shoulder, to kill the selkie there and cause least damage to the precious skin.

And on this day, he had crept up behind a big bull seal, he had thrust the knife into the seal's neck, but the seal, although a large creature, had incredible strength and rapidity of movement, and the seal pulled itself away and plunged into the sea of escape, taking the knife with him. Now that night a stranger came to the seal hunter's door and asked him to come to meet a friend on the cliff tops where he said, this friend would like to purchase seal skins from you. So the seal hunter agreed to go,

and he went up onto the cliff top, and he's looking around, where is your friend that we're going to meet? And at this point, this figure, dark clothes and a dark coat with a shadowy face, seized him round the shoulders, squeezed him tight, breathed into his mouth and jumped off the cliff, taking him down, down, down underwater. The seal hunter's losing his

breath, a strange glow, a tunnel he's pulled in and drawn into an underground cavern and taken there to a side chamber in which this old, old man is lying with a dagger thrust into his neck and shoulder. And the dark stranger points to the man and says, draw the knife and kiss the wound for he who makes the wound must heal it. And the seal hunter goes forward and very nervously draws out the knife and kisses the wound, the puckered wound which is full of pus and muck and when he kisses it, it begins to close up and heal and that old man then stands and recovers and is able again to be a seal by sea, a human by land or in this deep undersea

world. Now that's a fairly typical story of an encounter between the seal people and humankind. And in that story the seal hunter has a good ending. He's taken back by the dark stranger again. The stranger breathes into his lungs to give him air to burst through the surface of the water and return to his home. But then there's an added contemporary bit to that story, that the seal hunter never hunts seals again and decides to establish a sanctuary for seals

and spends the rest of his life looking after and caring for the seal people. So it's interesting, I think that's not a traditional end to that story, I think that's an ending that's been added to show this relationship with its darks and its lights between humanity and the natural world, the Seal people and the people of the land goes on evolving and changing and communicated and shared the emotional experience of it through storytelling. That's a perfect story to end on, Donald, for so many reasons. I think one of the big takeaways that I've had from this conversation actually is the ecological focus of so many of these folk tales and the interest in and the moralizing of that relationship between

human beings and the land, the sea, the weather, nature itself. And I think that's what I'm going to take from this, that actually, the stories that we tell can serve different purposes, and how I suppose, universal messages in them, but also messages that do change over time and we can make of them what we will. So thank you so very much for that. Anthony, are you similarly enthralled by the story of the Selkie or is it Kelpie's all the way for you? No, it's Selkie. I think I'm I think the Selkie gets my vote. I think that's the takeaway. I'll be going from this episode. But Donald, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to be taken on these stories for myself for some of the first times I'm hearing some of these stories. So thank

you so much for sharing them with us. Not at all. As the storyteller says, it's good to talk. If you've enjoyed this episode, you can get in touch with the podcast at afterdark at historyhit.com. And don't forget to leave us a five star review, please and thank you wherever you listen to your podcast.