Author name: John G

She is not the creature you have seen on the side of a coffee cup or painted on the wall

She was old before the mountains were young. That is not a poetic exaggeration. In the mythology of the Scottish

Before you see him, you hear him. A rattling, clattering sound from somewhere along the riverbank, or out in the

He does not knock. He does not scratch at the window or rattle the door or announce himself in any

The stretch of water between the Outer Hebrides and the Scottish mainland is not a sea that forgives mistakes. The

There is a particular kind of grief that runs through Selkie stories. Not the sharp, sudden grief of violence or

The mermaids of popular imagination are gentle things. Beautiful, curious, tragic perhaps, but essentially passive. They sit on rocks and

Lock the west-facing windows. That was the instruction, passed down through generations of Scottish Gaelic households with the quiet seriousness