Beasts & cryptids

The Nyugl of Delting

Delting

Undated; recorded 1882

Karl Blind recorded this in 1882 from the recitation of an old man in Delting. There were great stories about the Nyugl when he was young. The Nyugl would stop the water mills by grabbing the feathers of the tirl. People would slip fire down the lightning-tree hole or stick a knife into the groti, the wooden bushing in the understone through which the spindle comes up, and as soon as the knife went in the Nyugl slipped away and fled.

They would see him too, in daylight, like a horse, grey or some colour like that. If they were going along a loch he would come to them and go the same way, and some were fool enough to ride him. If they did, he ran out over the loch with them and they got a ducking. If they said the name of God he would vanish, and he always vanished in a fire.

The account is a spoken memory, in dialect, of belief held in living memory in the nineteenth century. Delting parish is given and no mill. The pin is at Voe.

Evidence
Single witness account
Access
Open ground
Location
60.355, -1.268 (Parish-level only, treat as an area)

Sources: G. F. Black and N. W. Thomas, Examples of Printed Folk-Lore concerning the Orkney and Shetland Islands (Folk-Lore Society, 1903) [public-domain]

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