Folklore & legend

The Buggane of Gob-ny-Scuit

Also known as: Gob ny Scuit waterfall

Gob-ny-Scuit, on the slopes of North Barrule, Maughold

Around the 1840s

For a long time people in Maughold would not go near Gob-ny-Scuit after dark. A buggane lived there, and on certain nights its wailing carried across the hillside, dreadful enough to be heard far off. Walter Gill, writing in the 1930s, gives the local picture of it: a gigantic man smeared and dripping with blood, with horns like a bullock and eyes of flame, who walked by day and night but could only be seen after dark. For all that, Gill says, it never actually hurt anyone.

People tried to be rid of it. Moore says even the great fairy doctor of Ballawhane, Teare, whose charms were trusted all over the north of the island, could do nothing.

The buggane was beaten in the end by a man Moore calls a scientific Manxman. He noticed that the howling only came when the wind was in a particular direction. He went and looked, and found a narrow cleft in the rock below the waterfall through which that wind whistled. Once the source of the noise was known, the fear went out of it. As Moore puts it, "Thus was the Buggane disposed of!"

The exact waterfall has not been pinned down; North Barrule has open access land and public paths.
Evidence
Long-standing local tradition
Access
Access unrecorded
Location
54.279, -4.391 (Parish-level only, treat as an area)

Sources: A.W. Moore, "The Folk-Lore of the Isle of Man" (1891), ch. IV Hobgoblins, Monsters, Giants, Mermaids, Apparitions (Manx Note Book transcription) [public-domain]; W. Walter Gill, "A Second Manx Scrapbook" (1932), ch. VI section 3, Other Spirits and Apparitions (Manx Note Book transcription) [other]

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