Coire nan Uriskin — The Corrie of the Urisks

Falls of Falloch, Stirlingshire, Scotland

On the slopes of Ben Venue above Loch Katrine, a corrie takes its name from the urisks said to gather there — goat-legged, solitary spirits that Walter Scott wrote into the landscape of the Trossachs.

Coire nan Uriskin — the Corrie of the Urisks, also recorded as Coire nan Uruiskean, the Cove of the Goblins — lies on the flank of Ben Venue, overlooking Loch Katrine in the Trossachs, and takes its name directly from the creatures Highland tradition placed there. Urisks are solitary, brownie-like spirits of Highland folklore, described as goat-legged and shaggy, closer in form to a satyr than to the more domestic brownies attached to individual households and farms. Unlike household brownies, urisks were understood to be genuinely wild, living apart from human settlement in remote corries and glens, and Coire nan Uriskin was remembered specifically as one of their principal gathering places — a location where the creatures were said to assemble rather than merely wander through. The corrie's name and reputation were carried into wider literary circulation by Sir Walter Scott, who set The Lady of the Lake at Loch Katrine and used the surrounding landscape, including Coire nan Uriskin, as part of the poem's Highland setting — one of several instances where Scott's writing did as much to fix a piece of local folklore in the national imagination as centuries of oral retelling had done before him. The corrie's atmosphere clearly struck more than one visitor over the following century: J.M.W. Turner sketched and painted the scene in 1831, in a work now held by the Tate, testament to a landscape that had already, by his time, become as much a literary destination as a geographical one.