The Fairy Pools of Glen Brittle

Fairy Pools, Glen Brittle, Isle of Skye, Scotland

A chain of waterfall plunge-pools beneath the Black Cuillin, said to be the bathing place of the daughters of the Sìthichean. Swimmers who do not strip silently are followed home by them.

The Fairy Pools are a chain of small waterfalls and clear plunge-pools on the Allt Coir' a' Mhadaidh, the burn that drains the western flank of the Black Cuillin. The water is glacial-blue from suspended fine particles, painfully cold in any month, and the pools step down from the Cuillin in a sequence that looks deliberate — as though landscaped. The Gaelic name for the place is Allt nam Bantraichean — the Stream of the Widows. The fairy interpretation came later, possibly Victorian. The older story is darker: the pools were where the women of widow-clans gathered to wash on the day after a battle in the Cuillin pass, the water carrying the blood of their men down off the mountain. The clearness of the water was taken as proof of the dead's sanctity — a stained pool meant the man had died unforgiven. The fairy story overlaid this. The daughters of the Sìthichean — the Highland fairy-folk — were said to bathe in the highest pool at dawn and dusk on summer days. They tolerated humans only on the condition that swimmers strip silently and never speak their own name in or near the water. Those who did were followed home by an unseen presence that took form only at the threshold of the house. Modern wild-swimmers still observe the custom of approaching the upper pool without speaking. The cold of the water itself is enough to enforce silence: most cannot draw breath to make a sound.