This, the Highland water-horse, is perhaps the fiercest and most dangerous of all the water-horses, although the Cabyll Ushtey runs it close. It differs from the Kelpie in haunting the sea and lochs, while the Kelpie belongs to running water. It seems also to transform itself more readily. Its most usual form is that of a sleek and handsome horse, which almost offers itself to be ridden, but if anyone is so rash as to mount it, he is carried at headlong speed into the lake and devoured. Only his liver is rejected, and floats to shore. It is said that its skin is adhesive, and the rider cannot tear himself off it. It also appears sometimes as a gigantic bird and sometimes as a handsome young man (for a story about this transformation, see crodh mara). J.F.Campbell has a long passage devoted to the Each Uisge in Popular Tales of the West Highlands" (Vol.IV, pp.304-307). When we come to Each Uisge in his horse form, it is hard to select among the stories about him. A wide-spread tale which is possibly cautionary in origin is of several little girls being carried away by him. A good version is told of a small lochan near Aberfeldy. Seven little girls and a little boy were going for a walk on a Sunday afternoon when they saw a pretty little pony grazing beside the loch. One of the little girls mounted him, and then another and another until all seven were seated on his back. The little boy was more canny, and he noticed that the pony grew longer to accommodate each new rider. So he took refuge among the high rough rocks at the end of the loch. Suddenly the pony turned its head and noticed him. 'Come on little scabby-head', it cried, 'get on my back!' The boy stayed in shelter and the pony rushed towards him, the little girls screaming, but unable to pull their hands from its back. To and fro they dodged among the rocks, but the pony could not reach the boy, and at length it tired of trying, and plunged into the loch with its sevenfold prey on its back. Next morning the livers of the seven children were washed up on the shore.

The tale of the killing of a water-horse is told in McKay's More West Highland Tales (Vol.II). There was a smith in Raasay. He had a herd of cattle and his own family herded it. One night his daughter did not return, and in the morning they found her heart and lungs on the loch side known to be haunted by the Each Uisge. The smith was heartbroken, and determined to destroy the monster. He set up a forge by the loch and he and his boy forged great iron hooks and made them red-hot in the fire. They roasted a sheep on the fire and the scent of it went out over the water. A steaming mist arose, and the water-horse, like an ugly, shaggy yearling, rose out of the loch. It seized the sheep and they grappled it with the hooks and killed it there. But in the morning there were no bones nor hide, only a heap of what looked like star-shine (star-shine is a jelly-like substance found on the shore, probably the remnants of stranded jellyfish, but supposed by the Highlanders to be all that is left of a fallen star). And that was the end of the Water-Horse of Raasay. A similar story is told by Walter Gill of the Cabyll Ushtey.

[Motifs: B184.1.3; F401.3.1; F420.1.3.3; G302.3.2; G303.3.3.1.3]