Folklore & legend

The Harris Woman and Her Baking

Creag Mhanuis, Harris

Undated oral tale

She found herself among a large company for whom she had to bake bread. She was told that when the small amount of meal given her was used up she could go. The more she hurried, the less the work seemed to progress, and day after day passed. At last the company left for the outer world and she was alone. She heard a groan, looked through an opening and saw a bedridden old man, who asked what had sent her. She said she had been made to come to attend a sick person, and told him about the baking. He told her to begin again and never to put the dusting meal back into the baking. She did, found her meal quickly used up, and got out and away before the others returned, to their discomfiture.

Campbell prints a Skye parallel in the same passage, in which a woman sent home after tending a patient must bake the contents of a bag of meal that never empties. The Harris tale is localised to a named rock, though Campbell gives no informant or date.

Evidence
Long-standing local tradition
Access
Access unrecorded
Location
57.850, -6.950 (Parish-level only, treat as an area)

Sources: John Gregorson Campbell, Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1900), Project Gutenberg [public-domain]

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