Folklore & legend

Flora the Big Man's Daughter and the Pipe

Harris (no specific place given)

Undated oral tale

Next day, long before the wish could have been known in Harris, Flora, daughter of the Big Man (that is the meaning of her name), told her friends that a pipe had been offered to her all night by the young man and that she had been anxious for a smoke from it but could not have one. Campbell sets the story beside a similar one from Tiree, in which a girl's wish that a woman had her bowl of milk was answered next day by that woman, a taibhsear or seer, saying she had spent the night keeping the bowl from her lips.

These tales belong to a group in which a wish made in jest is felt at a distance by someone with the gift. Campbell does not date the Harris incident.

Evidence
Long-standing local tradition
Access
Access unrecorded
Location
57.850, -6.900 (Parish-level only, treat as an area)

Sources: John Gregorson Campbell, Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1902), Project Gutenberg [public-domain]

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