In a footnote to his account of Border fairies, Scott describes Shellycoat as a spirit that lives in the water and has given its name to rocks and stones on the Scottish coast. It belongs to the class of bogles. When it appeared it seemed decked with marine growth and shells, whose clattering announced it, and it usually ended its pranks with a horse laugh.
The prank he tells took place on a very dark night. Two men approaching the banks of the Ettrick heard a doleful voice in the water crying, "Lost! lost!" They took it for a drowning person and followed the sound, which to their astonishment kept going upstream. They followed it through a stormy night to the very source of the river, where the voice began to descend the far side of the mountain. When the tired travellers gave up, they heard Shellycoat applauding his own roguery with bursts of laughter. Scott adds that the spirit was supposed particularly to haunt the old house of Gorrinberry, on the Hermitage, in Liddesdale.
The Ettrick is in Selkirkshire and Gorrenberry is in Liddesdale, some miles apart, so the record fixes only the Gorrenberry association. The pin is placed loosely on the Hermitage Water, and is approximate.
Comments