The Nine Maidens of Strathmartine

Tay Estuary, Dundee, Scotland

Nine sisters were sent one by one to fetch water and killed, each in turn, by the serpent guarding the well — the killer's trail is still written into the place-names between Pitempton and Martin's Stone.

Near Dundee, in the Strathmartine area, an old family legend explains a chain of local place-names through the story of nine sisters and the serpent that killed them. The daughters of a farmer at Pitempton Farm were sent, one at a time, to fetch water from a nearby well. Each in turn failed to return. A dragon or great serpent guarding the well had been killing them one by one as they arrived, until finally one daughter's lover — a blacksmith named Martin — went looking for the missing sisters himself, discovered what had happened, and tracked the creature down, killing it in the chase that followed. The legend survives in an unusually literal way: through the place-names of the chase itself, remembered in the traditional rhyme that the sisters were "tempted at Pitempton, draiglet [dragged] at Baldragon, stricken at Strike-Martin, and killed at Martin's Stone" — each name marking a stage of the pursuit across the landscape between the well and the serpent's death. Martin's Stone survives today as a real monument in a field near Bridgefoot, north of Dundee — not a memorial erected after the fact, but a genuine Pictish symbol stone, carved with a cross, two mounted horsemen, and a serpent entwined around a Z-rod symbol. Most folklorists now believe the carving came first, and that the Nine Maidens legend grew up over generations as an explanation for the serpent already carved into the stone — the story built backward from the image rather than the image commemorating the story.