J. Jinx's Blog

Scotland doesn’t really do werewolves. Witches, water horses, urisks, yes — but wolf-men, not so much. Ireland is crawling with werewolves, France too, but here the stories thin to almost nothing.

Almost, because in Gaelic tradition there survives a dark little fragment called An Tuarisgeal, recorded in the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness back in the 1920s. The versions differ in detail — as they should, passed mouth to mouth across the years — but if you gather up the strongest and the strangest bits, the story goes something like this.

A king had four sons. By curse or enchantment, three of them were turned into wolves. The fourth was caught up in the same magic, but worse: he not only bore the beast’s shape, he bore its hunger. In the wild nights that followed, he killed and ate his brothers. His ears were torn away when he changed, so that even in wolf-form he carried the mark of shame. He eventually becomes the pet wolf to a king. Now, it’s not difficult to spot that this is not going to be a great plan.

So comes the crime. A child of the king was found missing, blood on the floor. The wolf-man was blamed. To seal the case against him, blood of a puppy, or a kitten, was smeared on his mouth — making him wear the guilt like a mask.

Dragged before the court, he was threatened, tortured, forced to speak. And at last, cornered, he produced proof. From the shadows he brought the stolen child, still alive. And with it, the claw-hand that had truly done the deed.

For a moment the hall fell silent. He was no murderer of the king’s heir. He is transformed back into a man by the Queen - but still with no ears …. oh, and minus some brothers! The story does not end with vindication and release though.

Instead, the tale takes its darker turn. In some tellings, the ex-wolf, now an old man and a king himself, was seized and put to the question. They burned him until he gave up the story of his curse, of the brothers he had eaten, of the nights he prowled with torn ears and bloodied muzzle. And when the confession was forced from him, they burned him altogether — the man and the beast both — until nothing was left but ash.

It’s a cheery little tale! Transformation, betrayal, hunger, false accusation, torture — it has all the right bones of a European werewolf story, like Bisclavret, but twisted and ending without redemption. Perfect future material for a writer, especially one who likes to send the two main characters into nasty, supernatural places!

Why is it that there are so few stories like this in Scottish lore. Witches turn themselves into hares or dogs, certainly; spectral black hounds thunder through our night roads. But the classic werewolf — the man caught between human loyalty and beastly hunger — barely pads through our tradition.

Why is that? Wolves once roamed these glens, so the raw material was there. Maybe witches and faeries claimed the imaginative ground instead. Maybe the stories were told, but no collector thought them worth the ink. Maybe Scotland simply likes monsters to appear from the watery depths.

Still — in the half-told fragments of An Tuarisgeal, you can hear a howl that almost was.

Anyone have any more Scottish werewolf stories?

— J. Jinx

Aberfeldy is a lovely small town not far from Fortingall, and was home to the Urisk of Moness Burn. The urisk, or Peallaidh, was a shaggy spirit said to haunt the waterfalls above Aberfeldy. Mischievous but not malicious, he explained the gorge’s uncanny power: why the air felt charged, why voices echoed strangely, why water was both beautiful and dangerous. Even Aberfeldy’s name has been linked to him: Obar Pheallaidh, “the place of Peallaidh.”

Highland Perthshire is a place where landscape and story are inseparable. One of the richest glimpses into this world comes from Tales from Highland Perthshire, collected in the 19th century byEvelyn Stewart Murray. These stories preserve fragments of a much older oral tradition.

What unites these stories is not just imagination but a worldview. The Celtic scholar, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, suggested that the world was once understood as being populated by supernatural beings who were co-owners of the earth. Humanity won its domain from them by force or by the more subtle violence of magic, and with them it maintained a shifting relationship of rivalry — sometimes friendly, sometimes not.

Water-spirits, urisks, fairies, and figures like the Cailleach inhabited burns, glens, and stones. These were not poetic inventions but presences that explained storms, sudden deaths, or the eerie quality of certain places. Yet a boundary always remained: humans might brush against the supernatural, but they never belonged fully to its world. Folklore reminded listeners of that distance, and of the dangers of crossing it.

For this reason, alongside these otherworldly beings, people also created heroes. Stretched to the extreme limits of humanity, the hero often lived outwith human society, closer to the supernatural world in order to protect the human world.

In Gaelic tradition, humans were never separate from the land and chiefs and clan leaders were believed to carry direct responsibility for fertility. When a chief thrived, the land prospered; when he faltered, fields and herds withered. In Omen D.D. Book 1: The Yew Tree, this tradition is resurrected when the sacrificed body is found in the roots of Fortingall’s ancient yew tree.

Seen in this light, old tales were not idle fancies. They were serious attempts to understand a world that was both generous and terrifying. In our current world we turn to science to explain everything, and the vast knowledge we have gained has benefitted us beyond anything our ancestors could have imagined. The problem is that whilst we understand more, we are still often left powerless to make change.

In her collection, Lady Murray has the story of the Earl of Atholl and the Laird of Glenlyon betting their estates on a brose eating competition! Hardly the chiefs caring for the land and their people. Perhaps then our ancestors turning to magic is understandable, because it promised the possibility, of controlling the dangers around them.

That is why collecting and retelling these tales matters today. Folklore is not just cultural decoration; it is a record of how people once understood their place in the world. In Highland Perthshire, stories preserve the memory of a landscape where human life, natural forces, and unseen powers were bound together in a living whole. To listen to them now is to hear not only echoes of the past, but also a reminder that place, people, and imagination remain inseparable.

Omen D.D. Book 1: The Yew Treeis available now as a download or paperback.

Fortingall is the setting for the first book in my new series of supernatural thrillers rooted in Scotland - Omen D.D. Book 1: The Yew Tree . The village’s quiet lanes and the great, ancient yew, mirror the novel’s two lead characters: Omen and Crowley. Omen lives, uneasily perhaps, with an acceptance of the unseen and the uncanny. Crowley, a psychologist, trusts measurement, evidence and scientific methods. Where better then, to begin their uneasy partnership than Fortingall, a place where myth sits alongside scientific experiment, where fairy-lore shares a skyline with the mountain Schiehallion and where the hum of modern hydro schemes runs beneath stories that have been told for centuries. Fortingall, in other words, is the perfect crossroads of their truths.

When I first visited Fortingall as a child, the village felt like it had settled into its own time and space. Whitewashed cottages, narrow lanes and the great yew tree gave the place an air of timelessness. Decades later the face of the village has scarcely changed, yet beneath that quiet surface lies a layered history of legend, science, clan conflict and modern industry — all watched over by one of Europe’s oldest living things.

The Fortingall Yew is said to be thousands of years old, perhaps as many as five millennia. It has sheltered pagan rites, early Christian worship, clan burials and countless curious visitors. It is a living thread that binds generations and a poignant symbol for a story where past and present, superstition and science, meet.

Fortingall’s charm is its seeming refusal to hurry. Walking through it now, you will still find the cottages and lanes I remember from childhood. The place feels unchanged, but the stories keep growing, and Omen D.D. is just a new addition to these. In the novel, Crowley herself tells us that she had read of the local tradition claiming Pontius Pilate was born there. Ok, pretty unlikely, but does it matter if it’s true or not? Perhaps not, because that is Fortingall’s gift. The story is what matters.

To the north, Schiehallion, the “Fairy Hill of the Caledonians,” overlooks Glen Lyon. Folklore imagines gatherings of the Good People on its ridges and strange lights along its slopes. Yet Schiehallion also staged a key scientific moment: in the 1770s it was used to help calculate the mass of the Earth. Here, as in the book, myth and measurement sit side by side.

Place-names in these parts help to keep memory alive. Just along the glen is the village of Dull. It takes its name from the Pictish dol — a riverside meadow or haugh. Folklore adds another layer, Local tradition says the coffin-straps (duls) of St Adomnán snapped as mourners carried his body down Glen Lyon, and that spot became holy ground. What does make me smile is that Dull is twinned with Boring, Oregon.

American links run deep. Dull was also the home of a piper by the name of MacGregor who died at the Alamo with Davy Crockett! We don’t need to travel as far as Texas though, in an effort to find MacGregor's in blood and battles.

7 February 1603, was the nearby Battle of Glen Fruin, which saw the MacGregors clash with the Colquhouns. The MacGregors won the field but paid dearly for it. King James VI proscribed the name MacGregor, forcing many families to adopt other surnames for generations. The glen remembers the victors and the outlaws alike.

The twentieth century brought a different kind of transformation. Between 1951 and 1961, the Breadalbane Hydro-Electric Scheme reshaped rivers and lochs across Perthshire: dams, reservoirs, tunnels and power stations were carved into the hills, changing both the look and the economy of the glens. The tunnelling and construction were brutal work — much of it done by the so-called Tunnel Tigers, skilled, hard-working men from Scotland, Ireland and other parts of Europe, who blasted, bored and lined the great tunnels. Their labour is the hidden architecture of the hills. Beneath the old myths now run the hum of the turbines that helped modernise Scotland.

Even with all that engineering, folklore did not vanish. In Glen Lyon, hydro infrastructure and fairy lore sit together; bother are achievements of human ingenuity, and both have contributed in there own way to making sense of the landscape and a human’s place in the world. Both are part of the glen’s identity.

All of these stories, saints, outlaws, scientists, tunnellers, have unfolded under the watch of the Fortingall Yew. It is a living symbol of continuity - change layered upon tradition, memory alongside progress. In the novel, Omen’s acceptance of the unseen world and Crowley’s reliance on the measurable are two ways of reading the same landscape. One listens for voices in the branches, the other measures the roots.

Visiting Fortingall is stepping into a conversation between past and present. Under the Fortingall Yew, all these threads — myth, science, memory and industry — are drawn together.