The last time I was stuck on a story, I took my socks off. It was the final scene of Cost of Living, my post-apocalyptic Troon story, and I’d circled it for three days. I walked barefoot up the garden in the rain (rain being Ayrshire’s factory setting) and came back with wet feet and a way to move forwards.
That walk represents most of what I know about how to overcome writer’s block. To a psychologist, writer’s block is a loop between five things: your situation, your thoughts, your emotions, your body and your behaviour. Change any one of them and the others loosen. This guide is for fiction writers stuck mid-draft or stuck before page one, and it contains a worksheet you can copy.
Key takeaways
To overcome writer’s block, treat it as a loop across five linked areas: situation, thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and behaviour.
You only need to change one area to loosen the rest. Behaviour and the situation are usually the quickest to move.
Write your blocking thought down word for word. It often turns out to be a rigid rule, such as ‘Chapter one has to open with a bang.’
Use the five areas worksheet below to find which box you’re stuck in before you pick a fix to beat your writer’s block.
Contents
What is writer’s block?
Writer’s block is a stretch of time when you want to write and know how, yet the next sentence won’t come. It can last an afternoon or several years. For fiction writers it tends to occur in two places: the blank first page, and the middle of a draft where the plot stops flowing.
You might have experienced the middle version. The cursor blinks after a sentence you’ve rewritten eleven times, and each rewrite is a little worse than the one before.
The name Writer’s Block is a relatively new term. The psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler coined ‘writer’s block’ in New York in 1947, and blamed it on oral masochism and a ‘milk-denying mother’, according to a 2014 review in the American Journal of Neuroradiology. Psychology has moved on since then, which mothers everywhere will be glad to hear.
The best-known paper on the subject came out in 1974. The psychologist Dennis Upper published ‘The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of “Writer’s Block”’ in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, and the page under the title is blank. The reviewer’s note says they examined it with lemon juice and X-rays and found no flaw. In 2007 a team led by Robert Didden repeated the study across several countries, with equally blank pages.
It’s a good joke with a serious point inside it. A blank page tells you nothing about why it’s blank. The next section here does.
What causes writer’s block? A psychologist’s answer
Writer’s block comes from how you perceive the task in front of you, more than from the task itself. Two writers can face the same unfinished chapter. One reads it as a puzzle, the other reads it as a verdict on their talent. The second writer’s thoughts, mood, body and behaviour all follow that reading, and the page stays blank.
Perception sat at the centre of my PhD at Coventry University, which looked at how perception, emotion and behaviour connect. Two people can live through the same event and come away changed in different ways, because what matters is how each of them sees it. That perception shapes how much the event hurts, then everything that follows: thoughts, moods, behaviour and even the body’s response.
The writing researcher Mike Rose found a version of this at UCLA in 1980. He interviewed ten skilled student writers, five of whom had writer’s block, and found the blocked group working from rigid rules and inflexible plans. One of their rules held that a good essay must grab the reader’s attention at once. The fluent writers held looser rules and bent them when they got in the way.
The fiction version of that rule crossed my desk for years when I was Editor-in-Chief of an independent publishing house, reading over 100 submissions a year. Writers are told to open mid-action, so plenty did. The openings I liked best did the opposite: they opened in a voice that could only belong to that narrator.
If ‘chapter one must open with a bang’ is the rule in your head, it may be what’s keeping chapter one empty.
The five areas model, explained for writers
The five areas model is a cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) tool, developed by Professor Chris Williams at the University of Glasgow, that maps a problem across five linked areas: the situation, your thoughts, your emotions, your physical sensations and your behaviour. Because the areas are linked, a helpful change in one tends to ease the others.
Williams wrote the model in plain English for self-help, and it sits behind the Living Life to the Full course, which NHS Wales offers free. I study and use it, and it suits writer’s block better than any writing tip I know, because it shows you where you’re stuck before it tells you what to do.
Here’s what each area looks like when a writer is blocked.
Area
What it means
What it looks like when you’re blocked
Situation
Where you are and what you’re working on
Chapter 14, 9pm, a deadline on Friday, the same chair as yesterday
Thoughts
The sentences running in your head about the task
‘This is rubbish.’ ‘Real writers don’t get stuck.’
Emotions
The mood those thoughts bring
Frustration, shame, boredom, irritation
Physical sensations
What your body is doing
Tight shoulders, a heavy head, restless legs, yawning
Behaviour
What you do, or stop doing
Rereading old chapters, checking email, ‘research’, tidying the desk
Williams and Anne Garland’s paper on the model treats the five areas as interdependent, and the course materials point to thoughts and behaviour as the two we control most. For writers, I’d add that we can control the situation too. You can change your chair faster than you can change your mind.
A worked example from my own desk
Here’s one of my own blocks, run through the five areas.
Area
What it looked like
Situation
The final scene of Cost of Living, at my desk, mid-afternoon, three days running
Thoughts
‘This ending has to land, or the whole story falls flat.’
Emotions
Frustration, about 7 out of 10
Physical sensations
Tight shoulders and a headache behind my eyes
Behaviour
Rereading the first three pages, then tidying the desk
Then I took my socks off.
Walking barefoot up the garden changed three boxes at once. My situation was now the garden instead of the desk. Wet grass under my bare feet replaced the tight shoulders as the loudest thing my body was reporting. My behaviour switched to walking instead of rereading. The thought eased by itself, because the other four boxes had stopped feeding it. By the time I reached the back door again, I had the last line.
I do this rain or shine. You don’t need to go full Bear Grylls. The back step works, and so does a lap of the block in shoes.
How to overcome writer’s block in five steps
To overcome writer’s block with the five areas model, fill in each box for the block you have right now, then change the one box that’s easiest to move. I’d start with behaviour or the situation, because they’re the quickest. Small changes count, such as a new room, a ten-minute timer, a deliberately bad sentence, or a skipped scene.
Name the situation exactly. Write down the scene, the chapter, the time of day and today’s word count. ‘Stuck on the book’ is too vague to fix; ‘stuck on the argument in chapter 14, after 200 words, at 9pm’ is a problem you can work on. What goes wrong: writers list the whole novel. Fix: shrink it to the next scene.
Catch the thought, word for word. Write the sentence your head keeps saying, inside quotation marks. Then check it for a hidden rule, like the ones Rose found in his blocked students: always, never, must, has to. What goes wrong: you write a summary (‘I’m anxious about it’) instead of the thought. Fix: write what you’d say out loud if a friend asked why you’d stopped.
Name the emotion and score it. Use one word, then a number out of ten. Frustration at 8 needs a different fix from boredom at 4. What goes wrong: thoughts and emotions get mixed up. Fix: a thought is a sentence; an emotion is one word.
Check your body. Shoulders, breathing, hunger, energy. A writer who’s been at the desk since breakfast and skipped lunch has a body problem they’re mistaking for a talent problem. What goes wrong: this box gets skipped because it seems to have nothing to do with writing. Fix: deal with it first. Eat lunch, or step outside. (I finished my first book, Mysteries and Misadventures, writing sixteen hours a day during the 2020 lockdown, so I’m the last person to lecture anyone about breaks. The body box still gets filled in, whether you look at it or not.)
Look at what you’re doing instead, then change one box. Behaviour is the easiest box to fool yourself about. Rereading chapter one for the sixth time counts as avoidance. So does research that stopped producing notes an hour ago. Pick the box that’s easiest to change today, make one small change, then go back to the situation you named in step 1 and write one sentence. What goes wrong: changing everything at once. Fix: one box per attempt, so you learn what works for you.
The five areas worksheet for writer’s block (copy this)
Copy this table into a notebook, or print the page.
Area
Ask yourself
Situation
Which scene, which chapter, what time, where am I sitting?
Thoughts
What sentence keeps running in my head? (Write it in quotation marks.)
Emotions
What one word names the mood, and what’s its score out of 10?
Physical sensations
What is my body doing right now?
Behaviour
What am I doing instead of writing?
Then add two columns of your own: My answer, which you fill in for all five areas, and One small change, which you fill in for one area only.
Keep your filled-in sheets. After three or four, your own pattern shows up: some writers always block in the thoughts box, others in the body.
The same five boxes work on characters, too. If a character reads flat on the page, fill in her five areas and see which one you’ve left empty. There’s more on bringing characters to life in my guide on how to describe people in writing.
Which writer’s block fix works for which box
The standard writer’s block tips do work when you match them to the right box.
If you try one, make it permission to write badly, because it goes straight at the rule in the thoughts box. A first draft only has to exist. Words on the page can be fixed later. An unwritten page can’t be fixed at all.
How to beat writer’s block in the middle of a novel
Writer’s block in the middle of a novel is often a plot problem wearing an emotion’s clothes. The thoughts box says ‘this book is rubbish’; the situation box, filled in honestly, says ‘I don’t know what she wants in chapter 14.’ Answer that question, or skip to a scene you can see, and the mood usually follows.
Skipping ahead is allowed. Leave a note in square brackets where the missing scene goes and write the next scene you can picture. Come back to the gap later. I keep a list of these bracketed gaps at the top of every draft.
Deadlines make the middle worse. When I taught Academic Writing at Coventry University, the most common mistake among my students was leaving work to the last minute. A deadline loads every box at once. The situation shrinks and the thoughts get louder. My advice to students was: ‘Given enough time, we can accomplish anything.’ For a novelist, that means starting the hard scene on Monday, while Friday still looks far away.
If the block comes from not knowing where the whole book is going, my guide on how to write a book, story or novel covers the wider process.
When writer’s block is a sign of more
Writer’s block and low mood can look alike from the outside, and sometimes one feeds the other. If the frustration follows you away from the desk and stays for weeks, talk to your GP. Living Life to the Full, the free course built on Chris Williams’ five areas approach, is a good place to start alongside that.
Writer’s block FAQs
How long does writer’s block last?
Writer’s block has no fixed length; it can last an afternoon or several years. Short blocks usually lift once one of the five areas changes, such as a new room or a looser rule. For a block that drags on for months, fill in the worksheet every week to see which box keeps it going.
Is writer’s block real?
Writer’s block is a real experience and a non-medical condition. The term only dates from 1947, and researchers have since found it in writers working in English, Chinese and Spanish. Treating writer’s block as linked thoughts, emotions, sensations and behaviours makes it easier to change than treating it as a curse that strikes at random.
Should I stop writing when I have writer’s block?
Stop for a short, planned break, then come back. A walk or a meal changes the situation and the physical sensations, which often loosens the thoughts. Stopping with no plan to return can turn avoidance into a habit, so set the time you’ll sit back down before you get up.
Does freewriting cure writer’s block?
Freewriting helps most when the thoughts box is the problem, because writing nonstop for ten minutes gives the inner critic no gap to speak into. It helps less when the block comes from tiredness or an unsolved plot problem. Match the fix to the box: fill in the worksheet first, then choose.
What’s the fastest way to overcome writer’s block?
The fastest way to overcome writer’s block is to change the easiest of the five areas first, usually your situation or your behaviour. Move to a different room, or write one deliberately bad sentence. Quick changes loosen thoughts.
Overcome writer’s block one box at a time
I’d love to know which of the five boxes catches you most often, and what got you moving again. Tell me in the comments; the best answers will go into the next update of this guide.
Dennis Upper’s page stayed blank on purpose. Yours doesn’t have to. Pick one box and change it. Then let the next sentence catch up.
And if the box you pick is your feet, mind the slugs.
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How to describe people is the question every storyteller eventually faces, usually right when a new character steps on stage and the scene begs for details. When you know how to describe people in stories, you create clearer imagery, stronger emotional pull, and characters who feel like they are truly alive. Writers need this skill because character descriptions shape tone, mood, and reader connection.
Do you dream of writing your own book but feel overwhelmed by the process? Whether you want to learn how to write a novel, how to write a story, or simply improve your writing skills, this creative writing guide will show you exactly how to write a book and turn your ideas into compelling fiction that readers love.
There’s something magnetic about true crime books. You tell yourself you’ll read one chapter before bed. Then suddenly it’s 2am, four murders in, tea gone cold, and you’re side-eyeing your quiet neighbour with the dodgy smile.
I’ve been there. It’s partly why I wrote 25 Scottish true crime stories and gathered them into one book, Scottish Killers: 25 True Crime Stories.
If you want to know what’s inside before you buy, this page shows you. It covers which killers are in it, the psychology behind each chapter, who the book suits (and who it doesn’t), and which Scottish true crime books to read next.
Scottish True Crime Stories
Scottish Killers retells 25 real cases, from Peter Manuel to Archibald Hall, each analysed by a psychologist.
Every case leads into a psychological theme: narcissism, hitmen, poisoners, insanity pleas, hiding a body, and why men and women kill differently.
It’s built for readers who want the why, not just the what. It’s not for anyone chasing gore.
It runs to over 300 pages and 50 chapters, out now in paperback and on Kindle.
Contents
What is Scottish Killers: 25 True Crime Stories?
Scottish Killers: 25 True Crime Stories is a nonfiction book by psychologist Dr Aaron Mullins. It retells 25 real Scottish murder cases, from serial killers to crimes of passion. Each case is paired with an analysis of the killer’s psychology and of how Scots law judged them. It’s available in paperback and on Kindle.
The book runs to over 300 pages across 50 chapters: 25 case chapters, each followed by a chapter on the criminal psychology behind it. It was published in May 2025.
I didn’t write it just to shock or entertain, though if it keeps you up into the wee hours, I’ll take that as a win. What I really wanted was to explore criminal psychology, to uncover the why behind the what:
Why do people kill?
What snaps inside the mind that turns a friend or neighbour into a killer?
Why do some people choose poison?
And the question that haunted me most: could any of us do the same, given the right (or wrong) circumstances? It stayed with me through every chapter.
Which Scottish killers are in the book?
Scottish Killers covers 25 cases. They include Peter Manuel, the “Beast of Birkenshaw”; Glasgow-born butler Archibald Hall; Dennis Nilsen, born in Fraserburgh; Glasgow-born Ian Brady; and Peter Tobin. Every killer in the book has Scottish roots or crimes linked to Scotland. Alongside the famous names are lesser-known killers whose stories rarely make the lists: the quiet ones who lived among us.
Every one of the cases in this Scottish true crime book left behind victims and families who were far more than a footnote. Their stories deserve to be told with honesty and respect, not just to understand why these murders happened, but to learn how we might prevent the next one.
It’s a deeply human exploration of the circumstances, motives and consequences behind some of the most infamous true crimes in Scotland’s history.
What psychology does the book explore?
Each case in Scottish Killers leads into a chapter on one psychological theme. They cover hitmen who kill without blinking, narcissists who destroy for control, and people who kill to belong, whether to a lover, a gang or an ideology. Others look at poisoners, diminished responsibility, insanity pleas, hiding a body, accidental killings, and why men and women kill for different reasons.
Across the book you’ll find:
Detailed case histories, giving the context, background and analysis behind each crime.
Psychological insight into the mental states and likely motives of each killer, drawn from my training as a psychologist.
The justice system on trial. Some cases show it at its best, while others expose its failures.
Stories of redemption. Not every case ends in darkness, and a few challenge what we think we know about criminal behaviour.
Scots law matters here, because it draws its lines in its own places. Culpable homicide is the Scots law term for an unlawful killing that falls short of murder, roughly equivalent to manslaughter in England. Diminished responsibility is a plea that an abnormality of mind substantially impaired a person’s ability to control their actions, which can reduce murder to culpable homicide.
Why I wrote Scottish Killers
When I started writing this book, I didn’t expect the emotional rollercoaster it became. As a psychologist, I’d spent years exploring the human mind, but nothing quite prepared me for the depths of these stories.
I remember sitting in my writing study, surrounded by notes, feeling the weight of each case. There were moments I had to step away. It’s one thing to read about a crime. It’s another to immerse yourself in it, try to understand the mind behind it, and then get those insights down on paper.
By the end, every case pointed to the same uncomfortable question. It became the book’s final chapter: Could any of us kill?
Each case draws on real case histories, and each is followed by a chapter that turns a psychologist’s lens on it. Why do women kill? How do hitmen kill without emotion? How does criminal profiling work? What goes through the mind of someone trying to hide a body?
At one of my author talks, someone asked me, “Don’t you worry that true crime stories feed our obsession with murder?”
Fair question. I paused and thought about it, and then said, “People don’t read these stories because they love murder. They read them because they want to understand it.”
I stand by that. The more we understand criminal psychology, the better we can protect ourselves and our communities, and perhaps even prevent future tragedies. That’s what understanding gives us: hope.
Scottish Killers suits readers who want to understand why people kill, not just how. If you enjoy criminal psychology, Scottish history or true crime podcasts that dig into motive, start here. If you want graphic forensic detail, or one case told at full length, a book devoted to a single case will suit you better.
It’s also not for the faint-hearted. The stories are raw, unfiltered and at times deeply unsettling. But they’re real, they happened, and I believe they deserve to be told with honesty and respect.
And if you prefer your Scottish crime made up, Ayrshire Stories is my collection of crime, ghost and mystery fiction set on the west coast.
Press and reader response
Readers sent Scottish Killers to the top of the Amazon bestseller charts in its launch week in May 2025, as the John O’Groat Journal reported in its feature on how the book explains why ordinary people kill.
More Scottish true crime books to read next
No single book covers all of Scotland’s dark history. Each of these does something mine doesn’t.
Blood on the Thistleby Douglas Skelton. A casebook of 20 twentieth-century Scottish murders by a Glasgow journalist, including Peter Manuel and Bible John. Read it for a reporter’s eye on how each killer was caught, not just what they did.
Scottish Murder Storiesby Molly Whittington-Egan. It deliberately avoids serial and psychopathic killers in favour of Gothic whodunnits from the 1740s to the 1960s. Read it for atmosphere: the perfect contrast to my book.
The World’s End Murders: The Inside Storyby Tom Wood. An inside account of the 1977 Edinburgh killings of Christine Eadie and Helen Scott, for which Angus Sinclair was finally convicted in 2014. Read it to see how a case that stayed open for 37 years was finally closed.
Peter Manuel, Serial Killerby Hector MacLeod and Malcolm McLeod. The full-length book on Manuel, if his chapter leaves you wanting more. Read it for the whole story of the Beast of Birkenshaw.
Even in the darkest moments, we must strive to understand, to heal and to ensure that history does not repeat itself.
Scottish True Crime Stories FAQ
Are the stories in Scottish Killers true?
Yes. All 25 stories in Scottish Killers are real cases with Scottish roots or Scottish links. Each is drawn from real case histories. Where facts are disputed, such as victim counts or motives, the book says so rather than picking the most dramatic version.
Is Scottish Killers graphic?
Scottish Killers is honest rather than gory. It describes what happened clearly enough to understand each crime, but it focuses on motive, psychology and justice rather than on lingering over violence. Some cases involve children and sexual violence, so readers sensitive to those themes should take care.
Was Dennis Nilsen Scottish?
Yes. Dennis Nilsen was born in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, though he committed his murders in north London. He’s believed to have killed as many as 15 young men in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was jailed for life in 1983, and died in prison in 2018.
Who was Scotland’s first serial killer?
Peter Manuel is often called Scotland’s first known serial killer, for murders committed between 1956 and 1958. Burke and Hare came long before him, though, committing at least 17 murders in Edinburgh in 1828 to sell bodies for dissection. Which name you give depends on how you define a serial killer.
What did “not proven” mean in Scottish murder trials?
“Not proven” was Scotland’s third verdict, an acquittal with the same legal effect as not guilty. It was abolished for all new criminal trials from 1 January 2026 under the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Act 2025. Many historic Scottish true crime cases were decided while it still existed.
Where can I buy Scottish Killers?
Scottish Killers: 25 True Crime Stories is available in paperback and on Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon US. Readers elsewhere can find it on their local Amazon store.
Scottish True Crime Stories
Scottish Killers: 25 True Crime Stories is out now. I hope it grabs you, disturbs you and maybe, just maybe, makes you think differently about the people around you. Because here’s the truth I came back to over and over:
Given enough pressure, loss or rage, any one of us could be capable of something awful.
And if that doesn’t send a chill down your spine, maybe you’re the one I should be writing about next.
Click image to view Scottish True Crime Stories on Amazon
Stay safe,
Aaron
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When learning how to write true crime stories that send shivers down your spine, few authors capture the essence of the genre quite like Dahlia Cross. Her latest book, Contract Killers: 25 True Crime Stories, is a masterclass in storytelling. It’s gritty, suspenseful, and deeply engaging. It’s part of her larger Murders and Mysteries series, a ten-book anthology that explores the most chilling corners of human behaviour.
Ayrshire Stories: Tales from the West Coast — Crime, Mystery and Ghost Stories Set in Real Ayrshire Places
Eight university students travelled from Strasbourg to Ayrshire with the same book in their bags. They’d spent a year reading about Monkton Woods, Ayr Harbour and Maidens Beach, and now they wanted to stand in them. I met them (and their Professor) to sign their copies, and I still can’t quite believe a book about my corner of Scotland brought them here.
Ayrshire Stories: Tales from the West Coast is a 2024 anthology of crime, mystery, suspense, ghost stories and speculative fiction by writers from across Ayrshire, Scotland. Every story is set in a real Ayrshire place, from Monkton Woods and Prestwick Main Street to Muirkirk, Stevenston and Culzean Castle. It reached number one in the Amazon charts in 13 countries.
If you love Scottish crime fiction, short stories you can finish in one sitting, or seeing your own streets turned sinister, this guide tells you what’s inside, who wrote it, and where to find it.
Ayrshire Authors and the Towns Hiding in Their Books
My first spring in Ayrshire, the county locked down and I wrote twelve hours a day about a different county altogether: Caithness. I’d moved here in January 2020 and hadn’t yet read a single book about the place. (I was an Ayrshire author now, but I was still also the boy from Wick who calls seagulls scorries, writing Highland ghost stories a short walk from the Firth of Clyde).
When I finally caught up, starting with The House with the Green Shutters over one wet weekend that summer, the best Ayrshire authors turned out to hide real towns inside their books. The most famous are Robert Burns, John Galt, James Boswell, George Douglas Brown, William McIlvanney and Janice Galloway. The best books set in Ayrshire put Kilmarnock and Ochiltree under made-up names, and Galt invented a whole parish..
Contents
Ayrshire authors have produced some of Scotland’s finest books, cementing the historic county of Ayrshire, Scotland as a hotbed of creative talent in the literary history of the world. I’m fortunate to find myself now living in Ayrshire and being claimed by the press as Ayrshire author Aaron Mullins, and I’m inspired by the other authors who were born, lived or wrote some of their most famous novels here.
Who are the most famous Ayrshire authors?
The most famous Ayrshire authors are Robert Burns, born in Alloway in 1759; John Galt, born in Irvine in 1779; George Douglas Brown of Ochiltree; Kilmarnock’s William McIlvanney; and Saltcoats-born Janice Galloway. James Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s biographer, was born in Edinburgh but inherited the Auchinleck estate and is buried there.
Robert Burns (1759–1796)
Robert Burns was born in Alloway, now on the edge of Ayr, on 25 January 1759. His great Ayrshire poem, Tam o’ Shanter (1791), sends a drunk farmer riding home from Ayr on a stormy market night, past the witches dancing in Alloway Kirk and over the Brig o’ Doon. Burns stops on the way to praise the town:
‘Auld Ayr, wham ne’er a town surpasses, For honest men and bonie lasses.’
The National Trust for Scotland holds the original 14-page manuscript of Tam o’ Shanter in its collection. If you visit one literary site in the county, make it the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway, built around the restored cottage he was born in.
I first heard Tam o’ Shanter at a primary school Burns Night in Wick, and Nannie the witch chasing Tam to the running water of the Doon stayed with me. Years later, living here, I was invited onto Tamfest’s Tam’s Sunday Club and told the Flannan Isles Lighthouse disappearances on video. Tamfest was Ayr’s Hallowe’en festival from 2015, with a different line of the poem as its theme each year.
John Galt (1779–1839)
John Galt was born in Irvine on 2 May 1779 and made Ayrshire parish life the subject of his best novels. The Ayrshire Legatees ran in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1820, and Annals of the Parish, which the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica calls his masterpiece, followed in 1821.
Annals is told year by year by the Rev. Micah Balwhidder, minister of Dalmailing, an invented parish beside an invented town called Irville, both set in Ayrshire. Irville sounds a lot like Irvine, where Galt was born. I’ll let you draw your own conclusion.
The same Britannica credits Annals of the Parish with the first use of the word ‘Utilitarian’, which is more than most of us manage in a career. You can read the whole novel free on Project Gutenberg. Galt was putting Ayrshire voices on the page two centuries before I tried it with Caithness ones in my guide to writing Scottish dialect, and he managed it with less crossing out.
James Boswell (1740–1795)
James Boswell was born in Edinburgh in 1740, so he belongs to Ayrshire by inheritance rather than birth. He became the ninth laird of Auchinleck in 1782 and published The Life of Samuel Johnson in 1791. Johnson stayed with him at Auchinleck in 1773, on the way home from their tour of the Hebrides. Boswell died in London and was buried in the family vault at Auchinleck in June 1795.
George Douglas Brown (1869–1902)
George Douglas Brown was born in Ochiltree in 1869, the illegitimate son of a local farmer, and died at 33, a year after The House with the Green Shutters came out. The novel is set in Barbie, a mid-19th-century Ayrshire town based on Ochiltree. Brown called it ‘a brutal and bloody work’, and he meant it as a punch at the sentimental village stories of his day.
The house itself sits ‘planted firm and gawcey on a little natural terrace’ that juts into the Square, so the whole village can stare at it. When the book came out, reviewers compared Brown to Balzac and Stevenson.
Barbie is Ochiltree with the serial numbers filed off.
William McIlvanney (1936–2015)
William McIlvanney was born in Kilmarnock in 1936, the son of a miner, and taught English for 15 years before he wrote full time. His Glasgow detective, Laidlaw, made his name abroad. His Ayrshire novels are set in Graithnock, his fictional Kilmarnock.
Docherty (1975), his third novel, follows miner Tam Docherty and his family in Graithnock before and after the First World War. It won the Whitbread Novel Award. The Kiln (1996) returns to the same family two generations on and won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year. The Big Man (1985), about Dan Scoular, a hard man in an Ayrshire mining community in decline, became a film with Liam Neeson.
That makes three: Irville, Barbie, Graithnock. Ayrshire writers can’t leave their home towns alone, and they can’t bring themselves to name them either.
If you read one Ayrshire author, make it McIlvanney. Start with Docherty, then read The Kiln and meet the same family two generations later.
Janice Galloway (born 1955)
Janice Galloway was born in Saltcoats in 1955 and went to Ardrossan Academy. She taught for ten years before she wrote full time. Her first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989), follows Joy Stone, a 27-year-old drama teacher, through depression after her married lover drowns.
Galloway sets Joy’s exchanges with doctors and the men in her life out like lines from a script, so you watch them try to take charge of her. As a psychologist, the part she gets right is the gap between what Joy says aloud and what she’s thinking: she performs ‘fine’ for the doctors while the narration shows the thoughts underneath. In five areas terms, her behaviour and her thoughts have stopped matching, which is often what depression looks like from the outside.
For Ayrshire itself, read her memoirs. This Is Not About Me (2008) covers her Saltcoats childhood and won the Scottish Book of the Year for non-fiction in 2009. All Made Up (2011) follows her teenage years at Ardrossan Academy, where music, and one teacher in particular, kept her going.
Stewart Conn (born 1936)
Stewart Conn was born in Glasgow in 1936 and grew up in Kilmarnock, where his father was minister of St Marnock’s Church. He went to Kilmarnock Academy and later wrote his Ayrshire boyhood into his early poems and the 1995 collection In the Blood. From 2002 to 2005 he was Edinburgh’s first Makar.
Which Ayrshire authors are writing today?
The Ayrshire authors writing today include Saltcoats-born novelist Janice Galloway, crime writer Tony Black, whose detective novels are set in Ayr, and Ian McMurdo, who writes the county’s mining and football history. I’m on the list too: I’ve lived and written in Ayrshire since January 2020, and my anthology Ayrshire Stories reached number one in 13 countries.
Tony Black was born in Australia and grew up in Scotland and Ireland, and he keeps coming back to Ayr. Artefacts of the Dead (2014) opens with a banker’s body impaled on a spike at the council tip, and DI Bob Valentine, just back at work after a near-fatal stabbing, takes the case. His earlier Doug Michie novels, The Storm Without and The Inglorious Dead, are set in Ayr too; The Storm Without first ran as a serial in the Ayrshire Post. Undiscovered Scotland’s reviewer reckoned the town’s tourism officials must be holding their heads in their hands.
Ian McMurdo wrote Knockshinnoch: The Greatest Mines Rescue in History (2015), about 7 September 1950 at New Cumnock. After days of rain, liquid peat burst into Knockshinnoch Castle Colliery. Thirteen men died, and 116 were trapped for three days before rescue teams led them out through old workings full of gas. He has also written a crime novel, Dead Man Walking (2022).
Ayrshire Author Aaron Mullins
Aaron Mullins is me (hello), so I’ll stick to facts you can check. I grew up in Wick, spent 21 years in England, and moved to the Ayrshire coast in January 2020. Ayrshire Stories: Tales from the West Coast, the anthology I compiled with other Ayrshire writers, reached number one in 13 countries. The Ayr Advertiser covered it topping the charts, and later reported that boosted Ayrshire’s tourism when it brought a group of French university students to Ayrshire. My other books cover Scottish true crime, folklore and urban legends, and the wee boy from Wick who couldn’t make himself understood in England now gets introduced as an Ayrshire author. He’s still getting used to it.
What books are set in Ayrshire?
The best-known books set in Ayrshire are Burns’s Tam o’ Shanter, John Galt’s Annals of the Parish, George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters, William McIlvanney’s Docherty and Janice Galloway’s Saltcoats memoirs.
My own book, Ayrshire Stories: Tales from the West Coast, was a bestseller in 13 countries and is stocked in shops and libraries around the world. It was also studied at the University of Strasbourg, so it’s well-known enough to make a living as an Ayrshire author.
For crime, try Tony Black’s Ayr novels. The table pairs each book with the real Ayrshire place behind it.
Book
Author
Year
Place in the book
The real place
Tam o’ Shanter
Robert Burns
1791
Ayr, Alloway Kirk, the Brig o’ Doon
Ayr and Alloway
Annals of the Parish
John Galt
1821
Dalmailing, beside Irville
An invented Ayrshire parish; Galt was born in Irvine
My pick from the table is The House with the Green Shutters. Brown wrote it to tear down the cosy village tale, and a free LibriVox recording means you can start tonight.
Which fictional towns are based on real Ayrshire places?
Three famous fictional Ayrshire towns stand in for real ones. William McIlvanney’s Graithnock is Kilmarnock. George Douglas Brown’s Barbie is based on his native Ochiltree. John Galt’s parish of Dalmailing sits beside an invented town called Irville, in the county where Galt was born.
I kept the real names in my own Ayrshire stories, the towns and the beaches, right down to Prestwick station, so readers could stand where my characters stood.
Ayrshire Magazine
Ayrshire Magazine is a regional lifestyle and culture publication based in Ayrshire, Scotland. It covers a range of topics such as food, travel, arts, and events happening in the Ayrshire area. The magazine showcases the people, places, and businesses that make Ayrshire unique and aims to celebrate the local community. It often shines a spotlight on Ayrshire authors and featured my double-page interview following the success of my first bestselling book Mysteries and Misadventures: Tales from the Highlands.
Click to read my author interviewFiction Writer on the Beach: AM Speaks to Dr Aaron Mullins in Ayrshire Magazine for free.
How do I join Ayr Writers’ Club?
To join Ayr Writers’ Club, go along on a Wednesday night to the upstairs club room at the Mercure Hotel, Ayr (KA7 1UG), 7.30pm–9.30pm, or join on the club’s website. As of October 2026, full membership is £64 a year, student membership £40 and online membership £32. Guests pay £5, refunded if they join.
Ayr Writers’ Club formed in 1970 and first met weekly in the Wallace Tower. Over half a century later, its season runs September to May and covers short stories, novels, flash fiction, children’s writing, non-fiction, drama and poetry. Members enter the club’s own competitions through the year, and the Marion Montgomery Award for Poetry was presented for the first time in 2024. Membership also gets you a place at the Scottish Association of Writers’ weekend conference in March.
Go as a guest first: the £5 comes back if you join, so a trial night costs you nothing if it sticks. I haven’t been myself, but friends of mine go along as members, and others have been guest speakers. They tell me the Wednesday feedback nights are the best free writing lesson in the county. Dates and the season programme are on the Ayr Writers’ Club website.
The easiest place to meet Ayrshire authors is A Blether O’ Books, the book weekend at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway. Its 2025 programme included Lin Anderson and Kirsty Wark. Check with the museum before you book.
I shared the bill with Lin Anderson, crime writer and co-founder of Bloody Scotland, at a Troon Readers Day for Scottish stories, alongside journalist and author Rosemary Goring, so I can vouch that both are worth the ticket.
Ayrshire Magazine runs interviews with local authors too. Mine, ‘Fiction Writer on the Beach’, is in issue 36, on pages 32 and 33, from the year my first book became a bestseller.
Ayrshire Stories: the book this list started
The first version of this post sent me looking for the Ayrshire stories nobody had written yet, and that search became Ayrshire Stories: Tales from the West Coast (2024). It’s an anthology of 18 ghost, crime and mystery tales. I compiled it and wrote six; each of the other writers wrote one, including my co-author Helen, a friend since Wick High School.
The stories travel the county: Prestwick Main Street, Ayr Harbour, Stevenston, Muirkirk, Maidens Beach, and a ghost tour that goes wrong at Culzean Castle. Back home in Caithness, the John O’Groat Journal reported its run to number one.
Five of my six stories are in that list too. Bodies Without Boundaries is set in Ayr and ends on a bus to Irvine. More Things Between Heaven and Hell starts at Prestwick station and moves to an isolated private estate. Buried Secrets is set in Cumnock, and Cost of Living imagines a post-apocalyptic Troon. Masters of Disguise is set in Prestwick but borrows a true story from Wick: the day a café skive nearly ended with me caught red-handed, which I told in full in my Highland collection.
If a newcomer asks me for one Ayrshire book, I hand them this one and tell them to use it as a map. The students from Strasbourg did exactly that.
Ayrshire Stories FAQ
Was Robert Burns from Ayrshire?
Yes. Robert Burns was born in Alloway, now on the edge of Ayr, on 25 January 1759. Ayrshire runs all through his work: Tam o’ Shanter rides home from Ayr past Alloway Kirk. His birthplace is now part of the National Trust for Scotland’s Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, beside the Brig o’ Doon.
Was James Boswell born in Ayrshire?
No. James Boswell was born in Edinburgh in 1740, where the family kept a town house for his father’s legal career. The family estate was Auchinleck in Ayrshire. Boswell inherited it as ninth laird in 1782, and after he died in London in 1795, he was brought back and buried in the family vault at Auchinleck.
Is The Trick is to Keep Breathing set in Ayrshire?
Janice Galloway was born in Saltcoats, but The Trick is to Keep Breathing does not take place in a named Ayrshire town. For Galloway’s Ayrshire on the page, read her memoirs, This Is Not About Me and All Made Up, set in Saltcoats and at Ardrossan Academy.
Did Alasdair Gray grow up in Ayrshire?
No. Alasdair Gray was born in Riddrie, Glasgow, in 1934. In the Second World War he was evacuated to Auchterarder and Stonehouse, and the family lived in Wetherby, Yorkshire, from 1942 to 1945. He’s a Glasgow writer. The first version of this post said otherwise, and it was wrong.
Galt invented Irville. Brown hid Ochiltree. McIlvanney hid Kilmarnock. When my turn came I used the real names: I’m still an incomer, and I haven’t learned to be cagey yet.
Which book set in Ayrshire would you add? Tell me in the comments. I’m always after my next read.
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Happy reading,
Aaron Mullins
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The selkie’s grave at St Trothan’s in Castletown has a hollow at its base that never dries out. Local children believed that if you put your foot in the water and whispered a wish, it would come true. I never did it. I was too feart of what might answer.
Scottish mythical creatures were never far away in a Caithness childhood. Scotland’s folklore is crowded with water horses, seal people, giants, fairies and loch monsters, and the most famous Scottish monster of all is the Loch Ness Monster, followed by the kelpie, the selkie and the unicorn, Scotland’s national animal. Below are the 55 Scottish folklore creatures from my book Scottish Legends: 55 Mythical Monsters, sorted by where you’d meet them, with a table that tells you where in Scotland each one lives.
What are Scottish mythical creatures?
Scottish mythical creatures are the monsters, spirits and shapeshifters of Scotland’s Gaelic, Scots and Norse folklore. The biggest group lives in water: 23 of the 55 below haunt lochs, rivers or the seas around Orkney and Shetland. The best known are the Loch Ness Monster, the kelpie, the selkie and the unicorn, Scotland’s national animal.
Most of them began as explanations. A storm that sank a boat in the Minch needed a cause, so the cause had blue skin and a taste for rhyme. A child who stopped walking needed a reason, so the fairies had swapped him.
I studied this for a living. My PhD looked at how perception shapes what we feel and do next, and folklore is that idea at full volume. Two people can stand on the shore of Loch Ness, watch the same wake roll in, and walk away with different stories. One saw a boat. The other saw Nessie, and told everyone in the pub.
The Vikings left their stories here along with their place names (Wick comes from the Norse ‘vik’, a bay). That’s why Orkney and Shetland have trows that look a lot like trolls, and why the Stoor Worm reads like a cousin of the Norse world serpent.
Contents
Quick reference: where each Scottish folklore creature and mythical monster lives
#
Creature
Type
Where in Scotland
Helpful or harmful
Unicorn
National animal
Royal arms and mercat crosses nationwide
Helpful
1
Bauchan
Hobgoblin
Highlands
Both
2
Bodach
Hobgoblin
Highlands
Harmful
3
Brownie
Household spirit
Farms and houses nationwide
Helpful
4
Dunnie
Brownie-like trickster
Anglo-Scottish border, the Cheviots
Prankster
5
Maggy Moulach
Brownie
Tullochgorm, Strathspey
Helpful, until crossed
6
Redcap
Goblin
Border castles
Harmful
7
Wirry-cow
Bugbear, omen
Lowland Scotland
Harmful
8
Am Fear Liath Mòr
Mountain presence
Ben Macdui, Cairngorms
Harmful
9
Bertram de Shotts
Giant
Shotts, on the Edinburgh to Glasgow road
Harmful
10
Biasd Bheulach
Shapeshifter
Odal Pass, Isle of Skye
Harmful
11
Fachan
One-eyed giant
Highlands
Harmful
12
Baobhan sìth
Vampire
Highlands
Harmful
13
Caoineag
Banshee
Highland clan lands
Omen
14
Bogle
Trickster ghost
Lowlands and the Borders
Prankster
15
Glaistig
Goat-legged ghost
Highlands, near water
Both
16
Silkie
Silk-gowned ghost
Anglo-Scottish border
Harmless
17
Ghillie Dhu
Woodland fairy
Gairloch, Wester Ross
Helpful
18
Beast of Buchan
Big cat
Buchan, Aberdeenshire
Harmful (to sheep)
19
Beithir
Lightning serpent
Highland corries
Harmful
20
Black dog
Spectral hound
Nationwide
Omen
21
Cat-sìth
Fairy cat
Highlands
Harmful
22
Cù-sìth
Fairy hound
Highlands
Omen
23
Galloway Puma
Big cat
Dumfries and Galloway
Harmful (to sheep)
24
Pictish Beast
Carved creature
Pictish stones, north and east
Unknown
25
Gigelorum
Tiny beast
Highlands
Harmless
26
Wulver
Wolf-man
Shetland
Helpful
27
Changeling
Fairy substitute
Nationwide (and Ireland)
Harmful
28
Nicnevin
Fairy queen
Lowlands and the Borders
Harmful
29
Pech
Gnome-like race
Lowlands
Both
30
Seelie and Unseelie courts
Fairy courts
Nationwide
Both
31
Sluagh
Host of the dead
Highlands and Hebrides
Harmful
32
Trow
Dark fairy
Orkney and Shetland
Harmful
33
Bean-nighe
Washer at the ford
Highland streams
Omen
34
Blue Men of the Minch
Storm spirits
The Minch, by the Shiant Isles
Harmful
35
Boobrie
Shapeshifting bird
West-coast lochs, Argyll
Harmful
36
Ceasg
Mermaid
Highland seas and rivers
Both
37
Cirein-cròin
Sea serpent
Highland seas
Harmful
38
Each-uisge
Water horse
Highland lochs and sea lochs
Deadly
39
Finfolk
Sea sorcerers
Orkney
Harmful
40
Fuath
Water spirit
Highland rivers and lochs
Harmful
41
Kelpie
Water horse
Rivers and lochs nationwide
Deadly
42
Lavellan
Poisonous water rodent
Caithness and Sutherland
Harmful
43
Loch Ness Monster
Loch monster
Loch Ness
Unknown
44
Morag
Loch monster
Loch Morar, Lochaber
Unknown
45
Muc-sheilch
Loch monster
Loch Maree, Wester Ross
Unknown
46
Nuckelavee
Sea demon
Orkney
Deadly
47
Nuggle
Water horse
Shetland
Prankster
48
Oilliphéist
Sea serpent
Ireland (included for comparison)
Harmful
49
Sea Mither
Summer sea spirit
Orkney
Helpful
50
Selkie
Seal person
Orkney, Shetland and Caithness
Both
51
Seonaidh
Sea god
Isle of Lewis
Helpful, if paid
52
Shellycoat
Water bogle
Border rivers
Prankster
53
Stoor Worm
Sea serpent
Orkney
Deadly
54
Tangie
Water horse
Orkney and Shetland
Harmful
55
Water bull
Water spirit
Highland moorland lochs
Both
The unicorn: Scotland’s national animal
The unicorn is Scotland’s national animal, and it’s been on the royal arms for centuries. Unicorns supported the Scottish royal shield from at least the 1500s, and tradition dates the link to William I in the 1100s. When James VI took the English throne in 1603, one unicorn gave way to the English lion, and the pair still face each other on the royal arms today.
The Scottish unicorn always wears a gold chain. You can see it on mercat crosses on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and in Falcon Square, Inverness, and Scotland marks National Unicorn Day on 9 April. The unicorn isn’t one of the 55 in my book, which is why it sits here, above the count, with its chain on.
Scottish goblins and tricksters
Scottish goblins worked the farms and haunted the castles. Some played foul pranks on lazy servants. Others crept down chimneys at night to steal children.
If you try to meet one, make it the brownie. It’s the only creature in this section that does your washing up.
1. Bauchan
A bauchan is a Scottish hobgoblin that can’t make up its mind. At times it’s kind and helpful; at others it’s a rogue that does real harm, and the people who lived alongside one never knew which they’d get.
2. Bodach
A bodach takes its name from the Scottish Gaelic word for ‘old man’. In Highland tales it’s a hobgoblin tied to bad luck, and the nastier stories have it slipping down chimneys after children.
3. Brownie
A brownie (broonie in Scots, brùnaidh in Gaelic) is a small, shaggy household spirit that does the chores at night while the family sleeps. In return, you leave a bowl of milk or cream by the fire. A brownie that’s insulted or taken for granted can turn into something much worse, which is a fair warning for anyone with a flatmate.
4. Dunnie
A dunnie is a small brownie-like trickster from the Anglo-Scottish border, best known as the Hazlerigg Dunnie of Northumberland. It liked to turn itself into a horse, let a rider climb on, then vanish and leave them in the muddiest part of the road. On dark nights it wandered the Cheviots singing about the treasure it had lost.
5. Maggy Moulach
Maggy Moulach, or Hairy Meg, is the most famous brownie in the Highlands. She stood about two feet tall, with a great head of hair (or, in other tellings, hairy hands), and served the Grants of Tullochgorm in Strathspey. Her son, Brownie-Clod, was a dobie: a well-meaning brownie with very little in the way of brains.
6. Redcap
A redcap is an evil goblin that makes its home in the ruined castles along the border between Scotland and England. Of all the Border spirits, it’s the one you least want to find already living in your ruin.
7. Wirry-cow
A wirry-cow is less a creature than a fright. It’s an old Scots word for a bugbear, a goblin or an omen of evil: the thing you worried about in the dark, whatever shape it took.
Scottish giants and mountain monsters
Scotland’s giants mostly worked the roads. Some wanted gold or revenge. One just wanted to follow you down a mountain in the mist.
If you read about one, make it Am Fear Liath Mòr. It’s the only monster here reported by a professor of chemistry.
8. Am Fear Liath Mòr (the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui)
Am Fear Liath Mòr is the Gaelic name for the Big Grey Man, a presence said to stalk Ben Macdui, the highest mountain in the Cairngorms and the second highest in Britain. In 1891, the mountaineer and chemist Professor Norman Collie was coming down from the summit cairn in mist when he heard footsteps behind his own, taking longer strides. He kept it to himself for 34 years, then told the Cairngorm Club in Aberdeen in 1925, and other climbers started admitting they’d heard them too.
One explanation is the Brocken spectre, where a walker’s own shadow is thrown huge onto mist. I’d add that a lone walker in fog, high up and tired, has a brain that fills the silence with whatever it fears most. Collie said he wouldn’t go back up there alone, and I don’t blame him.
9. Bertram de Shotts
Bertram de Shotts (sometimes Bartram) is a giant who attacked and robbed travellers on the road between Edinburgh and Glasgow, near Shotts in Lanarkshire. Every motorist on the M8 has met his descendants.
10. Biasd Bheulach
The Biasd Bheulach was a shapeshifter that haunted the Odal Pass on the Isle of Skye, near Kylerhea. It’s one of the few Scottish monsters with a single, named stretch of road to itself.
11. Fachan
The fachan is a Highland giant with one eye in the middle of its face, one leg, and one hand growing out of the centre of its chest. If the Cyclops had been drawn by a committee, this is what you’d get.
Scottish ghosts and ghouls
Scottish ghosts announce a death more often than they cause one. Banshees cry at waterfalls and bogles play tricks on the road. Up in the hills, a vampire in a green dress is waiting for a dance partner. (If Are You Afraid of the Dark? ever made a Highland episode, it would start here.) For the haunted castles and closes, see my 50 Scottish urban legends and ghost stories.
If you make friends with one, make it the baobhan sìth. It’s the one that turns up at a party.
12. Baobhan sìth
The baobhan sìth is a Highland vampire who appears as a beautiful woman, often to men out hunting, and dances with them before she turns and feeds. She’s the best argument in Scottish folklore for going home early.
13. Caoineag
The caoineag, the ‘wailing woman’, is a Highland banshee who foretells the death of a clan’s members by crying at night, usually beside a loch or a waterfall. Nobody ever sees her, which is worse.
14. Bogle
A bogle is a Scots and Border word for a ghost or goblin that would rather confuse and frighten you than serve you or kill you. The shellycoat (number 52) is a bogle, and a ‘tattie bogle’ is still a Scots word for a scarecrow.
15. Glaistig
The glaistig is a Scottish ghost who, like the baobhan sìth, appears as a beautiful woman in a green dress, with a grey face and long yellow hair. The dress hides her lower half, which is a goat’s.
16. Silkie
A silkie (no relation to the seal-folk selkie) is a female ghost of the Anglo-Scottish border who wore a rustling silk gown. She was quiet and solitary, and the only sound she made was the swish of silk as she worked.
17. Ghillie Dhu
The Ghillie Dhu is a shy, dark-haired male fairy who lives alone in the birch woods of Gairloch in Wester Ross. He’s one of the few creatures here with a reputation for kindness, especially to lost children.
Beasts, hounds and big cats
Scotland’s beasts include a wolf-man who leaves fish for the poor and a big cat that an MP took to the House of Commons. Their howls kept farmhouses awake, and the sheep they killed were found at first light.
If you go hunting for one, make it the Beast of Buchan. It’s often in the newspapers, so could make you famous.
18. Beast of Buchan
The Beast of Buchan is a big black cat reported in the Buchan area of Aberdeenshire since the 1930s. It became famous when the local MP, Alex Salmond, blamed it for attacks on livestock in his constituency and raised it in the House of Commons. A cat seen for ninety years can’t be one cat, which is why it gets called a phantom.
Big cats in the Highlands aren’t pure invention. In 1980 a real puma, later named Felicity, was caught near Inverness after locals reported a big cat in the hills. And the Kellas cat, a wildcat and domestic cat hybrid first found at Kellas in Moray, may explain some of the black-cat sightings in the north-east.
19. Beithir
The beithir is a huge serpent that appears at night when lightning strikes. Its Scottish Gaelic name is given different meanings by different sources, including serpent, lightning and thunderbolt, and one is said to live in Loch a’ Mhuillidh.
20. Black dog
The black dog turns up in folklore all over Britain. In Scotland it’s usually a demon, ghost or shapeshifter that comes out at night, and it may be the Devil himself, or one of his staff.
21. Cat-sìth
The cat-sìth is a large, spectral black cat with a white spot on its chest that haunts the Scottish Highlands. Some tales make it a fairy; others say it’s a witch who can turn into a cat nine times, and not one more.
22. Cù-sìth
The cù-sìth (the ‘fairy dog’) is a spectral hound that roams the Highland hills. It’s the size of a small cow, with a shaggy coat that’s dark green, which makes it the only dog in Scotland you’d spot more easily in the snow than on a hillside.
23. Galloway Puma
The Galloway Puma is a phantom big cat said to stalk the forests of Dumfries and Galloway. It’s the south-west’s answer to the Beast of Buchan, and just as camera-shy.
24. Pictish Beast
The Pictish Beast is a carved animal that appears again and again on Pictish symbol stones, and nobody can say what it is. It has a long snout, a curling crest and scrolled feet, and it’s been staring out of standing stones for over a thousand years without explaining itself.
25. Gigelorum
The gigelorum is the smallest creature in Scottish folklore. It’s said to be so tiny that it makes its home in a mite’s ear.
26. Wulver
The wulver is a kind Shetland creature with a man’s body, short brown fur and the head of a wolf. It lived alone in a cave by the shore, fished from a rock known as the wulver’s stane, and left fresh fish on the windowsills of poor families. Of all the 55, it’s the one I’d most like as a neighbour.
Scottish fairies and the fairy courts
Scottish fairies are rarely the kind with wands. They steal children and fly with the restless dead. They also sort themselves into two courts, one that might help you and one that certainly won’t.
If you’re looking for evidence of one, make it the changeling. It’s the only entry in this list with a real court case behind it.
27. Changeling
A changeling is a fairy left in place of a human child that the fairies have stolen. Sometimes the fairies left one of their elderly so that humans would care for it in its old age. A changeling looks exactly like the child it replaced, but over time, the stories say, it gives itself away.
The belief had real victims, and the two best-recorded cases are Irish. In 1826, in County Kerry, four-year-old Michael Leahy could neither stand, walk nor speak, and he was thought to be fairy-struck. An old woman, Anne Roche, had him bathed in the River Flesk three mornings running, and on the third he drowned. She said she was putting the fairy out of him, and at her trial in Tralee she was found not guilty of murder. In 1895, at Ballyvadlea in County Tipperary, Michael Cleary burned his wife Bridget to death, insisting she was a changeling and that he’d get his real wife back from the fairies.
I read both cases the same way. The changeling story gave frightened people a reason for an illness, or a change in someone they loved, that nobody could explain or treat. For Michael Leahy and Bridget Cleary, that story was fatal.
28. Nicnevin
Nicnevin is a Queen of the Fairies in Scottish folklore. Her name may come from Gaelic forms meaning ‘daughter of the divine’ or ‘daughter of the little saint’.
29. Pech
The Pechs were a short, strong, gnome-like race who, according to Scottish rhymes, brewed heather ale and fought the Scots. The name is the Lowland Scots word for the Picts.
30. The Seelie and Unseelie courts
Scottish folklore gave us the best-known way of sorting fairies: the Seelie Court and the Unseelie Court. The names come from the Scots word ‘seely’, meaning happy, lucky or blessed, and its opposite, ‘unseely’. Old Scots words make good monster names, as I found out the hard way when I tried writing Scots words for my own characters.
31. Sluagh
The sluagh, or sluagh na marbh (‘host of the dead’), is the flying host of the unforgiven dead in Scottish Gaelic folklore. It travels as a flying crowd, looking for souls to carry off.
32. Trow
A trow is a dark fairy of Orkney and Shetland: short, ugly and shy, but dangerous and full of mischief. Trows love music, and some Shetland fiddle tunes, the ‘trowie tunes’, are said to have been learned from them.
Scottish water monsters
Water monsters make up 23 of the 55. Some taught children to keep away from deep pools, and some warned young women about handsome strangers who smelled faintly of pondweed. The worst of them, the nuckelavee, has one weakness: it can’t cross fresh running water.
I bet of all the Scottish mythical creatures, you’ve heard of the Loch Ness Monster. It’s my favourite, and I’ve been looking for it on and off for most of my life.
33. Bean-nighe
The bean-nighe, the washerwoman, is a Highland banshee seen by lonely streams and pools, washing blood from the clothes of those about to die. In some tellings she’s the spirit of a woman who died in childbirth. If you see her at the ford, the shirt she’s scrubbing may be yours.
34. Blue Men of the Minch
The Blue Men of the Minch, also called storm kelpies, are blue-skinned sea spirits who live around the Shiant Isles, in the strait between Lewis and mainland Scotland. When a ship passed, their chief rose out of the waves and called out two lines of verse. If the captain answered in rhyme, the ship went through. If he couldn’t, the Blue Men raised a storm and sank it.
The folklorist Donald A. Mackenzie wrote the legend up in 1917 and wondered whether it began with North African captives held by Norse raiders in the Minch. Either way, it’s the only monster in Scotland you can beat with a good couplet, and I’d fancy my chances in Caithness Scots.
35. Boobrie
The boobrie is a shapeshifter that lives in the lochs of Scotland’s west coast, Argyll above all. It usually takes the form of a huge water bird, but it can turn into other monsters when a bird won’t do.
36. Ceasg
The ceasg is a Scottish mermaid with the upper body of a beautiful woman and the lower body of a grilse, a young salmon.
37. Cirein-cròin
The cirein-cròin is a sea serpent big enough to eat seven whales at a sitting, which is a lot to hide behind its party trick: disguising itself as a small silver fish.
38. Each-uisge
The each-uisge, the ‘water horse’, looks like a kelpie but is far more dangerous. It haunts sea lochs and lochs, appears as a fine horse or a handsome man, and drags anyone who mounts it into deep water. The folklorist Katharine Briggs counted it among the most dangerous water horses of all.
39. Finfolk
The Finfolk are a race of shapeshifting sorcerers who terrorise the shores of Orkney. They swim from their undersea home, Finfolkaheem, to hunt for human husbands and wives to carry off.
40. Fuath
A fuath (plural fuathan) is one of a family of malevolent Highland water spirits. The folklorist Donald A. Mackenzie placed them in Scotland’s seas, rivers and lochs.
41. Kelpie
The kelpie is a shapeshifting water horse that seems to live in every river and loch in Scotland. It appears as a horse by the water’s edge, and anyone who climbs on is carried under. Robert Burns named water-kelpies haunting the ford in his 1785 poem ‘Address to the Deil’, written here in Ayrshire, where I live now.
The kelpie is the second most famous Scottish monster after Nessie, and it has the biggest statues. Andy Scott’s two steel horse heads, The Kelpies, stand 30 metres (98 ft) high between Falkirk and Grangemouth, beside the Forth and Clyde Canal. They were completed in 2013, opened in April 2014, and modelled on two Clydesdales, Baron and Duke, as a tribute to the working horses of Scotland’s farms, canals and industry.
42. Lavellan
The lavellan is Caithness’s own monster: a water creature bigger than a rat, living in deep pools, with breath poisonous enough to sicken cattle at a distance. The 17th-century geographer Robert Sibbald called it common in Caithness, with a head like a weasel’s. When the naturalist Thomas Pennant toured the county in 1769, locals told him they kept the creature’s skin and cured sick cattle with water it had been dipped in.
Pennant thought the lavellan was a water shrew, which, as it happens, is one of the few venomous mammals in the world. Nobody in Wick ever warned me about it, which feels like an oversight.
43. The Loch Ness Monster
The Loch Ness Monster, Nessie (Niseag in Gaelic), is said to live in Loch Ness, which runs for about 23 miles (37 km) down the Great Glen, starting about 6 miles south-west of Inverness. The oldest story comes from Adomnán’s 7th-century Life of St Columba, in which Columba drives off a water beast in the River Ness, below the loch. The modern legend began with a wave of sightings in 1933, and the most famous photograph, the ‘surgeon’s photograph’ of 1934, is now known to be a hoax.
I’ve taken a cruise down the loch and paddled at the water’s edge a few times, which is either brave or daft depending on what you believe. Most of my visits came on the drive north, calling in on family in Inverness before the long road home to Wick. I’ve never seen her. I’ve never stopped looking either.
44. Morag
Morag is the monster of Loch Morar in Lochaber, the only loch in Scotland deeper than Loch Ness. In Alien Animals, Janet and Colin Bord collect accounts that make her sound a lot like Nessie’s cousin.
45. Muc-sheilch
The muc-sheilch is the monster of Loch Maree in Wester Ross, with a look all its own, and it was said to travel to other lochs nearby.
46. Nuckelavee
The nuckelavee is a horse-like sea demon from Orkney, and Katharine Briggs called it ‘the nastiest’ of all the demons of Scotland’s Northern Isles. Its name comes from the Orcadian knoggelvi, which the Orkney folklorist Walter Traill Dennison translated as ‘Devil of the Sea’. On land it appears as a skinless horse with a man’s body growing from its back, and its breath was blamed for blighted crops and sick livestock.
In 1891 Dennison recorded the account of an islander called Tammas, who met the nuckelavee and escaped by crossing a stream running from a loch, because the demon can’t cross fresh running water. Only one spirit can control it: the Sea Mither (number 49), who keeps it locked away through the summer.
I wrote a nuckelavee into Call of the Nuckelavee, one of the stories in Mysteries and Misadventures: Tales from the Highlands. A woman walks the dunes of an Orkney beach, following the voice of her drowned father, until a dog she recognises beckons her into the sea. Some of the fear in it came from a cave outside Budapest: lights off, total silence, and the ringing in my ears.
47. Nuggle
The nuggle (also noggle or shoopiltee) is a Shetland water horse that haunts the lochs, streams and shores of the islands. Nuggles are always male, come out only at night, and play pranks on islanders and travellers.
48. Oilliphéist
The oilliphéist is an Irish sea serpent, included here because it’s so often compared to Nessie. Its name comes from the Irish oll (‘great’) and péist (‘worm, monster’). In one tale it carved out the River Shannon as it fled to the sea. In another it swallowed a drunken piper called O’Rourke, who kept playing in its stomach until it spat him out.
49. Sea Mither
The Sea Mither, or Mither o’ the Sea, is a powerful Orcadian summer spirit who fights an endless battle for the seas with her enemy Teran, the spirit of winter. She’s also the only one who can keep the nuckelavee locked up, which makes her the most useful creature in Orkney.
50. Selkie
A selkie is a seal that can shed its skin and walk ashore as a human. The best-known tale has a man steal a selkie woman’s skin so she has to marry him. She gives him children, but the day she finds the skin, she’s back in the sea.
The selkie I grew up with is buried at St Trothan’s, Castletown. A fisherman found a baby girl wrapped in sealskin and raised her. She grew up seeing the devil in the church rafters, was banned from the church, and died in childbirth. The hollow at the base of her grave never dries out. It’s the only grave I know with its own water supply, and the only wish I never made.
51. Seonaidh
Seonaidh, or Shony, was a sea god of the Isle of Lewis. The writer Martin Martin recorded in 1703 that at Hallowtide (Halloween), each family gave malt for ale, and one man waded into the sea up to his waist with a cup of it. He asked Shony for plenty of seaweed to feed the fields, threw the ale into the waves, and the whole parish spent the rest of the night drinking and dancing in the fields. It’s the only Halloween tradition in this list that ends in a ceilidh.
52. Shellycoat
The shellycoat is a water bogle of Scotland’s Border rivers, named for its coat of shells, which rattles when it moves. In one tale, two men by the Ettrick heard a voice crying ‘Lost! Lost!’ from the water and followed it upstream all night, all the way to the river’s source. Then they heard the shellycoat laughing at them.
53. Stoor Worm
The Stoor Worm, or Mester Stoor Worm, is a gigantic sea serpent from Orkney whose breath poisoned crops, animals and people. It looks like a cousin of Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent of Norse mythology.
54. Tangie
A tangie is a shapeshifting water spirit of Orkney and Shetland that takes the form of a horse or a man, usually draped in seaweed.
55. Water bull
The water bull (tarbh-uisge in Gaelic) is a shapeshifter like the water horses, but it prefers the shape of a bull. It haunts moorland lochs and now and then takes human form.
Scottish cryptids: the folklore creatures people still report
Scottish cryptids are folklore creatures with modern sightings behind them: animals people still claim to see on Scotland’s lochs and hills. The best known are the Loch Ness Monster, Morag of Loch Morar, the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui and the Beast of Buchan. One big cat really was caught.
Accounts collected by Janet and Colin Bord in Alien Animals
Scottish folklore legends: beyond the monsters
Scottish legends include heroes and hauntings as well as mythical monsters. Robert the Bruce took heart from a spider that kept trying to climb its thread, Glamis Castle is famous for its ghosts, and Edinburgh’s Mary King’s Close has a claim to be the most haunted street in the capital. I’ve gathered those stories in 50 Scottish urban legends, myths and folklore tales. The human monsters, the ones who really existed, are in my Scottish true crime stories.
“This is the fourth book I have read from the same author. Again another interesting read. I always enjoy reading short stories, tales, legends about Scotland.”
Amazon Review ★★★★★
Scottish Mythical Creatures FAQ
What mythical creature is associated with Scotland?
The unicorn is the mythical creature most associated with Scotland, because it’s the national animal and has supported the Scottish royal arms since at least the 1500s. The most famous Scottish monster, though, is the Loch Ness Monster, followed by the kelpie, honoured by Andy Scott’s 30-metre Kelpies sculptures near Falkirk.
What are fairies called in Scotland?
Scottish Gaelic calls the fairies the daoine sìth, which means ‘people of the fairy mound’. In the north of Scotland, folklorist Walter Gregor recorded them being called ‘the Fair Folk’ or ‘the Good Neighbours’, and Scots also spoke of ‘seely wights’. Polite names like these may have been a way of keeping the fairies from taking offence.
What’s the difference between a kelpie and an each-uisge?
A kelpie and an each-uisge are both Scottish water horses that drown anyone who rides them. The kelpie is the more widespread, haunting rivers and lochs across Scotland. The each-uisge lives in Highland lochs and sea lochs, and folklorist Katharine Briggs counted it among the most dangerous water horses of all.
What is the most evil Scottish mythical creature?
The nuckelavee of Orkney has the strongest claim to be the most evil Scottish mythical creature. Folklorist Katharine Briggs called it ‘the nastiest’ of all the demons of Scotland’s Northern Isles. On land it appears as a skinless horse with a man’s body growing from its back, and its breath was blamed for blighted crops.
Are there really big cats in Scotland?
Scotland has one native wild cat, the Scottish wildcat, but big-cat sightings in Buchan go back to the 1930s. In 1980 a real puma, later named Felicity, was caught near Inverness. Some black-cat sightings in the north-east may be Kellas cats, wildcat and domestic hybrids first found in Moray.
Scottish mythical creatures in my life
I first heard Tam o’ Shanter at a primary school Burns Night in Wick. What stayed with me was the chase: Nannie the witch reaching for Tam’s grey mare, Maggie, and Tam galloping for the bridge over the Doon, because no witch can follow you across running water. Maggie made it, minus her tail.
Plenty of the Scottish mythical monsters in this list can be beaten with a trick that simple. Get to the stream before the nuckelavee does. Answer the Blue Men in rhyme. Leave the brownie its cream. And never climb on a horse you find standing by a loch.
And if you’re ever in Castletown, leave the selkie’s hollow alone. It never dries, and it doesn’t need your foot in it.
‘Mind an’ keep til eh runnin’ watter.’
Which Scottish mythical creatures did your granny use to keep you away from the water? Tell me in the comments, and if I’ve missed a monster from your corner of Scotland, give me its name and its story.
The full tales of all 55, and the people who swear they met these creatures and lived to tell the tale, are in my book Scottish Legends: 55 Mythical Monsters. It reached Amazon’s top 100 on the day it came out. Read Scottish Legends on Amazon.
Happy reading,
Aaron Mullins
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Here’s how to write a children’s book, step by step, with the best children’s book writing tips from Monty author Claire Owers and me. You’ll learn how to write, edit and publish a children’s book, with the right word count for a picture book or chapter book and the right age band for your reader. Publishing your own children’s book can cost nothing upfront, because Amazon KDP lets you publish a paperback and an ebook for free. These steps work for any kids book, whether you’re writing children’s stories for your family or for bookshops.
My primary 5 teacher wrote in my report card that I had a talent for creative writing. After my first book came out, she cooked me dinner, brought out albums of photos I’d never seen, and showed me her copy. It was homework, handed in 25 years late.
Children’s books stay with people that long, so they’re worth getting right. The short version of how to write a children’s book takes five moves. Choose your reader’s age, learn the word count for that age, give one character one problem worth caring about, and cut every word the pictures can carry. Then pick your route to publication.
If you’ve got a bedtime story a child keeps asking for, and no idea how it becomes a book with a cover, an ISBN, a barcode and a price, this guide is for you. Most of my books are for adults, so I wrote it with someone who has done this four times. Claire is a children’s author from Aberdeenshire who writes the Monty series of chapter books for five- to nine-year-olds, starring her family’s chocolate Labrador and his weakness for cheese. She self-published all four, and her advice runs through every step below.
The five golden rules for writing a children’s book
Write for one age band and keep to its word count, which is 500 to 600 words for your average picture book.
Give one main character one problem, and let them fail before they win.
Leave room for the pictures by cutting anything an illustrator can show.
Read every draft aloud, then test it on children who will give you honest feedback.
Send agents the text only, and if you self-publish, budget for an illustrator and a cover designer.
BOOKMARK this step-by-step guide on how to write a children’s books in 20 easy steps. Then use this list to create your own amazing story books for kids!
Contents
Where do I start when learning how to write a children’s book?
The best place to start learning how to write a children’s book is by reading around 50 recent books for the age group you want to write for. Read them, then pick one format. The usual choices are board book, picture book, early reader, chapter book and middle grade. That choice sets your word count and who you pitch to.
Monty by the numbers, one self-published children’s series
Claire published the first three Monty books in eight months, between September 2020 and April 2021. Here’s the series:
Monty: A Nose for Trouble came out in September 2020. Monty trashes the school fair, and Megan and her sister Nicole set out to cure his food obsession and his weakness for cheese. goodreads
Monty: A Nose for Treasure followed in November 2020, at 150 pages in paperback. It’s an island adventure, with Monty’s sister Daisy along for the ride. amazon
Monty, A Nose for Truffles came out in April 2021, at 184 pages. A camping holiday goes wrong when Soufflé the pig is pig-napped. amazon
Monty, Double Trouble brings in a new fur-sister, Dot, with a habit of nipping tails. amazon
Each book runs around 150 to 200 words.
A series also does work a single book can’t, because a child who finishes book one asks for book two. For anyone working out how to write children’s books that sell, that’s the strongest argument for planning a series.
Stage 1. Planning how to write a children’s book
Step 1. Read 50 recent children’s books in your age band
Reading 50 children’s books published in the last five years, all for the age you want to write for, is the quickest way to learn how to write a children’s book for today’s readers. Classics show you what lasts. Recent books show you what agents, publishers and parents choose now, including how short picture books have become. Writer’s Digest goes further and suggests reading at least 100 picture books.
Borrow them from the library or sit in the children’s section of a bookshop. For each book, note the age on the back, the word count(counting the words in a picture book takes about five minutes), where the problem first appears, and the line or lesson a child would repeat in the playground.
Watch for the page a child turns back to. As a boy in Wick, I read a big full-colour book called Ancient Egypt until it fell apart, and the chapter that I remember most was the one on embalming. Children might reread a bit an adult would skip. A book with one of those gets read until the spine gives out.
If you’re new to writing at any length, my guide to how to write a book covers the habits that will help you.
Step 2. Choose your age band and children’s book word count
Every format has its own children’s book word count, and there are six to choose from. Most new writers start with picture books or chapter books. Picture books should aim for 500 to 600 words and stay under 1,000, and chapter books run from 4,000 to 15,000 words. Choose the format first, because it sets your page count and who you pitch to.
Format and reader age
Typical length
Board book, ages 0–3
50 to 100 words in total, about 10 card pages
Picture book, ages 3–7
500 to 600 words, never over 1,000, 32 pages
Early reader, ages 5–7
Up to about 1,500 words
Chapter book, ages 6–9
4,000 to 15,000 words, about 60 to 150 pages
Middle grade, ages 8–12
30,000 to 60,000 words
Young adult, ages 12 and up
50,000 to 80,000 words
These ranges were checked against several sources. Writer’s Digest (via kdpbook.io) and Mary Kole cover picture and chapter books. Write for Kids gives middle grade as about 30,000 to 60,000 words. UK Publishing House puts board books as low as 50 to 100 words and young adult novels at 50,000 to 80,000. Usborne’s That’s not my bus… is a typical 10-page board book. Mary Kole sets a lower ceiling for picture books aimed at the youngest readers, at 400 words.
My father gave me The Hobbit far too young, and I struggled through it. It’s still my desert island book. Children will forgive a book that’s too hard if the story is strong enough, but they shouldn’t have to, and the age band on your cover is a promise to the adult buying it.
Your kids book listing will carry an age range (Claire’s Monty books say 5 to 9), so choose the narrowest honest one. A book bought for the wrong age is the one that gets the disappointed review. For adult fiction lengths, see average length of fiction writing.
Step 3. Find a children’s book idea with a twist, and check it isn’t taken
A strong children’s book idea puts one unexpected thing into a situation children already know. In Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea, a hungry tiger walks into the family kitchen while Sophie and her mummy are having tea. In Claire’s books, a chocolate Labrador with a weakness for cheese leads two sisters into chaos. Search for your premise before you write.
Kerr’s tiger grew out of a trip to the zoo and a lonely afternoon with her daughter, who kept asking her to ‘talk the tiger’ until the story was just as she liked it. If a child keeps requesting one of your bedtime stories, you may already have your idea.
Then check the competition before writing a children’s book on that idea.
Search Amazon’s children’s books and your library catalogue for your premise in three or four words.
Ask a children’s librarian or bookseller what children ask for that they can’t find.
Ask a teacher which books disappear from the class library and never come back.
Read the one-star reviews of the closest book. They tell you what readers wanted and didn’t get.
If your idea has already been done, that’s good news, because it means children want it. Change who tells it (the parrot narrates the pirate’s voyage) or who it happens to (the pirate is scared of water). As Claire puts it, ‘Make sure that you have a fresh take or a point of difference. Mixing the familiar with the unexpected can work well.’
Step 4. Write for two readers, the child and the adult who buys the book
Writing a children’s book means writing for two readers. The child listens or reads. An adult chooses the book, pays for it and, with a picture book, reads it aloud, often for the hundredth time. Nielsen’s figures show women bought 59% of children’s and YA books in the UK in 2020, so the first person your book must win over is usually a parent or a teacher.
Adults look for a story they won’t mind reading aloud for the fortieth time, and a joke or two aimed over the child’s head. Matty Long’s Super Happy Magic Forest does both, and readers praised its jokes on every page for children and grown-ups alike.
Parents also buy books that teach something useful, like sharing or being brave, as long as the lesson arrives inside the story. Claire’s warning is worth pinning above your desk. ‘A strong message can be valuable in children’s storytelling, but don’t be tempted to talk down to children. A subtle message should feel organic in the story and will resonate more than a lecture.’
Step 5. Build a children’s book character kids want to be friends with
A strong children’s book character has one clear want, one visible quirk and an age close to the reader’s, or slightly older. Write those down before you draft, along with what scares them and what makes them laugh, and you’ll know how they behave on every page.
Claire’s test is a simple one. ‘I find that children identify well with a main character that is around the same age as them, or slightly older. If your reader wants to be friends with your main character then you’re on the right track!’
Answer these before you write a line.
What’s their name and age?
What do they want more than anything in this book?
Which three words describe them?
What’s their catchphrase or habit?
What scares them, and what makes them laugh?
Who do they clash with?
Do they have a pet, a hobby or a secret?
What will a child remember about them a week later?
My PhD studied the connections between perception, emotion and behaviour, and I now use the CBT five areas model to build characters. It splits any moment into five parts. Children’s characters show all five on the surface, which makes them easy for young readers to follow. Here’s Isla, seven, on her first day at a new school.
Situation. The teacher asks her to stand up and say her name.
Thought. ‘Everyone will laugh at my voice.’
Emotion. Fear.
Physical sensation. Hot cheeks and a wobbly tummy.
Behaviour. She whispers her name to her shoes.
Change one area and you’ve got a story. If Isla thinks ‘My dog would do this better’, her behaviour changes, and so does the book. For physical description, my guide to how to describe people has the techniques. In a picture book, leave most of it to the illustrator.
Stage 2. Writing a Children’s Book
Step 6. Give your character a problem, and let them fail first
Writing children’s stories means giving your main character one problem to solve, with each attempt harder than the last. Bring the problem in on the first page or two, let the character fail at least twice, and make sure the child solves it in the end, with grown-ups kept to the edges.
Claire doesn’t wait long. ‘I try to introduce the key problem as early as possible, usually on the first page or two, kids don’t tend to like a slow burner!’
Think of it as The Crystal Maze, with every room harder than the last and the crystal waiting in the final one. Say your hero is on a treasure hunt. They dig up a boot, then a bottle cap. Rain turns the garden to mud. Then they’re called in for tea just as the spade hits a box.
Check your draft against these four questions.
Does the character face several obstacles, rather than one?
Does the reader know why solving it matters to this character?
Does each attempt cost them more than the last?
Does the character, rather than an adult, make the final move?
Step 7. Open fast, or open in a voice
Open a picture book on the problem or the action, because young readers decide fast and the word count leaves no room for backstory. A chapter book can open in a voice so distinctive that the reader wants more of it, as long as the problem arrives by the end of chapter one.
Claire opens fast. ‘You want to hook your reader from the first sentence. In my experience, kids are less likely than adults to stick with a book that doesn’t grab them early on. An action scene can be a great place to start.’
When I was Editor-in-Chief of an independent publishing house, reading over 100 submissions a year, the openings I liked best began in a voice that could only belong to that narrator, often before anything had happened at all.
So here’s my pick. For picture books, follow Claire and start with action. For chapter books, start with voice, and get the trouble moving before chapter two.
Step 8. Choose your point of view, tense and vocabulary
Most picture books use third person and past tense, because both are easy to read aloud. Present tense suits stories that happen as you read them, like Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. Pick one point of view and one tense, keep them for the whole book, and match your vocabulary to the reader’s age.
Claire suggests trying more than one. ‘Point of view and tense are a matter of personal preference, and different styles will work better with different stories. Try writing your opening lines a few times in different styles, and see which feels best, just make sure to stick to the same style throughout the story.’
First person works well in chapter books, where a funny narrator can carry a whole chapter on attitude alone.
For early readers and chapter books, borrow a test teachers use. The five finger rule, which Scholastic explains for parents, has a child read a page and hold up a finger for every word they can’t read or say. Two or three fingers means the book is about right. Run it on your draft with a child in your age band.
Step 9. Decide whether your children’s book should rhyme
Only rhyme if you have the time. Rhyme works when the rhythm holds in every line, whoever reads it and at whatever speed, and a forced rhyme is one of the quickest ways to lose an editor. Mary Kole warns that rhyming picture books are a tough market and that many agents and publishers aren’t looking for them, so a strong story in prose has the better chance of getting published.
Hand your rhyming draft to a friend who has never seen it and ask them to read it aloud. Mark every place they stumble. If they stumble more than once, the metre needs work, or the story wants to be prose.
For the masters, flick through any Dr Seuss book or Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo. The stories would still work without the rhyme, so that’s the test.
Step 10. Use repetition and patterns
Repetition lets young children guess what comes next, and guessing right is half the fun. Usborne’s That’s not my… board books, written by Fiona Watt and illustrated by Rachel Wells, have run since 1999, repeating their title line on every page until the last one, where the right puppy, bus or unicorn finally turns up.
The wolf in The Three Little Pigs huffs and puffs at each house for the same reason. The pattern sets up the surprise.
Claire uses it too. ‘Most picture books for younger children will involve repetition of some kind, it really helps them to connect with the story and anticipate what’s coming next.’
In chapter books, repetition becomes the running joke. Monty’s weakness for cheese turns up in every book, which gives a young reader something to look forward to in the next one.
Sound patterns count as well. Pamela Duncan Edwards built Some Smug Slug as an alliterative tale, and Henry Cole hid an S on every page of the pictures.
Stage 3. How to Edit a Children’s Book
Step 11. Write for your children’s book illustrator with page turns, spreads and art notes
A standard picture book has 32 pages, because printers bind pages in groups of eight. After the title and copyright pages, you have about 14 double-page spreads for the story. Split your text into 14 scenes, put each page turn where you want a surprise, and cut anything the pictures will show.
Once the title, copyright and dedication pages take their share, about 28 story pages remain, or roughly 14 spreads. Here’s one common way to lay them out. Publishers move the front matter around, but the shape holds.
Pages
What goes there
1
Half-title or an opening picture
2–3
Title page and copyright
4–5
Spread 1, meet the character and the problem
6–19
Spreads 2 to 8, attempts that fail, each bigger than the last
20–27
Spreads 9 to 12, the worst moment, then the turn
28–31
Spreads 13 and 14, the win and the callback
32
The last joke or a quiet final picture
Make a dummy before you edit. Fold eight sheets of A4 in half, staple them along the fold and number the pages 1 to 32. Write your text on to each spread. Gaps and crowded spreads show up straight away.
Keep art notes for moments when the picture says what the words don’t. If your text reads ‘Nobody had touched the cake’ and the picture should show the dog with icing on his nose, add a one-line note. Otherwise, trust the illustrator.
Give your illustrator something worth drawing. Super Happy Magic Forest sends a unicorn, a gnome, a fairy, a faun and a mushroom on a quest, with jokes and details to pore over on every page. An ordinary setting works too, if something extraordinary walks into it, as Judith Kerr’s tiger proves in a family kitchen.
If you’re submitting to agents, send words only. The publisher chooses the illustrator.
Step 12. Land the ending
End a children’s book soon after the problem is solved, with a win the main character earned. The strongest endings call back to the opening with a repeated line or a returning joke, and they finish within a page or two of the climax.
Claire’s rule for endings leaves room for mischief. ‘Happy endings are important for little ones, but that doesn’t mean that they need to be predictable. As long as all of the story threads reach a satisfying conclusion, then a funny twist at the end can be brilliant and memorable.’
Perhaps your character wanted the biggest present at the party, and comes home happiest with the cardboard box it came in.
Step 13. Choose a title children can say and parents can find
A good children’s book title is short, easy to say aloud and tells a parent what kind of book it is. Keep a working title while you draft, write ten versions at the end, and search each one. If your favourite is already a bestseller, pick another.
Most strong titles fall into one of four types.
A mystery, like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, which promises a secret.
An instruction, like Mo Willems’ Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, which children long to disobey.
Alliteration, like Some Smug Slug, which is fun to say aloud.
The hero plus their trouble, like Claire’s Monty: A Nose for Trouble.
Test your top three on children and adults. The one a child repeats back to you without being asked is usually the winner.
Step 14. Edit your children’s book to word count, then read it aloud
Editing is where you really learn how to write a children’s book, so give it two passes. The first pass is for story, and asks whether every spread or chapter moves the problem forward. The second is for words, and cuts anything the illustration will show and any line you stumble over aloud. Then read the whole thing aloud again, to someone else.
Claire is blunt about the work involved. ‘Don’t underestimate the work involved in writing a children’s book. They demand all of the same elements as a book for grown-ups; a strong hook, a well-considered story arc, an inspiring setting and characters to fall in love with.’
The one time I entered a primary school poetry-reading competition, I was whisked into a hall full of strangers to recite a poem I’d half-memorised. I can’t remember the poem. I remember the terror. Read your draft aloud anyway, ideally to a room. You’ll hear every clunky line before a parent does.
When I taught academic writing, the commonest mistake I saw was leaving work to the last minute. My line was ‘Given enough time, we can accomplish anything.’ A picture book has nowhere for a rushed line to hide, so give the draft a week in a drawer before the second pass. Late homework is allowed here.
Before you move on, check each of these.
The word count sits inside your format’s range from step 2.
The problem appears on the first spread or in chapter one.
Each spread shows a new scene.
Page turns land on surprises.
You can read it aloud without stumbling.
The character, rather than an adult, solves the problem.
Step 15. Test it on children, then hire a children’s book editor
Before you pay for editing, read your draft to children in your age band, through a library or a school, with a parent’s say-so. Watch more than you ask, because a fidget tells you more than ‘I liked it’. Then hire an editor who has worked on your format, and fix the overall story before the sentences.
Some of the best children’s book writing tips come from children, and Claire relies on their honesty. ‘I’m inspired by the energy, creativity and brutal honesty that children have when coming up with story ideas and reading their favourite books!’
Editing comes in layers, in this order.
Developmental edit. Fixes plot, character, pacing and age fit.
Line edit. Fixes rhythm and read-aloud flow.
Copy-edit and proofread. Fixes spelling, grammar, punctuation and consistency, and for picture books comes after the art is placed.
Edit the story first and the commas last. Fixing grammar in a scene you later cut is money down the drain.
Ask any editor which books they’ve worked on in your age band, and for two authors you can contact. Membership of SCBWI, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, tells you less than you’d think about an editor, because SCBWI British Isles welcomes published, self-published and brand-new writers alike. It’s a brilliant place to find a critique group.
Stage 4. How to Publish and Sell a Children’s Book
Step 16. Decide how to publish your children’s book
Traditional publishing pays you an advance and covers the costs, but you usually need an agent and you give up control of the art. Self-publishing gives you control and a bigger share of each sale, but you pay for illustration and editing yourself. My pick is the traditional route for picture books and self-publishing for chapter books like Claire’s.
Colour printing makes publishing your own children’s book costly when it’s a picture book, and hard to price. KDP’s hardcovers also need at least 75 pages, so a 32-page hardcover picture book has to be printed elsewhere. A chapter book is mostly text, prints in black and white, and grows into a series.
Traditional publishing
The publisher pays for illustration, editing and printing.
In the UK, you usually need an agent.
For a picture book, you send the text only.
A picture book paperback typically pays a 7.5% royalty, split equally when the author and illustrator are different people, so the author gets 3.75%.
You have little say over the art, but bookshop shelves are far easier to reach.
Self-publishing
You pay for illustration, editing and the cover.
You don’t need an agent.
On KDP, paperbacks pay 60% or 50% of the list price, depending on price, minus the printing cost, and ebooks pay 35% or 70%.
You control every picture and the cover, but bookshop shelves are hard to reach.
Step 17. On the traditional route, find a literary agent for your children’s book
Most UK publishers accept submissions only through literary agents. Find agents who represent your format in the Children’s Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook. Then send each one exactly what their website asks for, which is usually a query letter, a short synopsis and, for a picture book, the full text.
Shortlist 20 agents who represent your format and age band, using the Yearbook and agency websites.
Read each agent’s guidelines and recent deals before you write a word to them.
Write a one-page query letter with a paragraph on the story, the word count and age band, two lines about you, and why this agent.
Format the manuscript double-spaced, with no illustrations unless you’re an illustrator yourself.
Track every submission in a spreadsheet, and expect silence from many of them.
Step 18. To self-publish a children’s book, hire an illustrator and a cover designer
If you self-publish, you commission the art. Choose an illustrator whose portfolio already shows the style and age band you want, agree in writing who owns the images and where you can use them, and budget for the cover separately, because online the cover sells the book before anyone reads a word.
Claire learned this with her first book. ‘I have some basic graphic design training so initially I did my own cover design, but once the first book started to sell well, I decided to invest in a professional one and used Fiverr to find a designer. The new cover really shifted sales up a level.’
Ask every illustrator these questions.
Have you illustrated a book in this format before?
How many spreads or pictures does the fee cover, and how many rounds of changes?
Who owns the copyright, and can I use the art on adverts, merchandise and later editions?
Will you supply print-ready files at the trim size and bleed my printer needs?
When will each stage be ready?
In UK Government Copyright, an illustration’s copyright arises automatically the moment it’s made, so the contract decides what you can do with the art. Bring a rough sketch of each spread, however simple, so you’re both picturing the same book
Step 19. Publish on Amazon KDP, Kindle Unlimited and beyond
Amazon KDP lets you self-publish a children’s book for free, as a paperback, which needs at least 24 pages, and as an ebook. Enrolling the ebook in KDP Select puts it in Kindle Unlimited, but makes that ebook Amazon-only for 90 days. Skip Select if you’d rather sell the ebook through Apple Books, Kobo and libraries via Draft2Digital.
Paperbacks. Since June 2025, KDP has paid 60% of the list price at or above a set price and 50% below it, minus the printing cost. Printing cost rises with page count and with a colour interior, so a picture book needs a higher price than a black-and-white chapter book of the same length.
Ebooks. These earn 35% or 70%, depending on the price band.
Kindle Unlimited. Amazon divides a monthly fund by the total pages read and pays each author their share. The exclusivity covers the ebook only, so your paperback can be sold anywhere.
Going wide. Draft2Digital sends ebooks to Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and library distributors such as OverDrive, and now offers print on demand too.
Here’s how Claire describes the first printed copy. ‘I was filled with a surreal, childlike glee when the first printed copy of my book arrived in the post. It felt amazing to hold it in my hands; a condensed, beautiful version of all the hours of hard work. But the best reward of all is hearing from your first avid reader. Children really are the best fans, they truly fall in love with your world and characters, and being a small part of their childhood is an honour.’
Step 20. Sell your children’s book through schools, libraries, reviews and a series
Once you know how to write a children’s book, the next job is getting it in front of adults. Children’s books sell through people who meet the author or trust whoever recommends the book. Plan your launch around people, with school and library visits, local press, a launch event and reviews from parents. Then write the next one, because a series lets every new book send readers back to the first.
Local press is the easiest coverage a new author can get. Send your local paper a short release, a photo of you with the book, and a reason the story belongs in their paper.
For school visits, contact the school librarian, offer a reading and a short writing activity, and let the school order signed copies in advance.
Questions about how to write a children’s book
How much money can you make writing a children’s book?
Most children’s authors earn modestly. The 2022 ALCS survey put median earnings from writing at £7,000 a year for authors who write as their main job. A traditionally published picture book author typically earns 3.75% of the cover price, about 30p on a £7.99 paperback, and only once the advance has earned out.
Do children’s books sell well?
Children’s books are a big market, and Nielsen counted 14.6 million children’s book buyers in the UK in 2023. Most were light buyers, picking up one to five children’s books a year, so a new author competes for a few slots on each family’s shelf. A series and word of mouth help you win them.
Can I use ChatGPT to write a children’s book and sell it?
You can, but Amazon KDP requires you to declare AI-generated text and images, including the cover, even if you edited them heavily afterwards. Using AI only to brainstorm, or to check writing you created yourself, doesn’t need declaring (KDP content guidelines). A story only you could write is still the one worth selling.
Do I need to copyright my children’s book before I send it out?
A picture book draft can take an afternoon, but getting it right usually takes months of rewriting and reading aloud. Chapter books take longer, though a series picks up speed, and Claire published the first three Monty books between September 2020 and April 2021. Self-publishing adds time for editing, illustration and formatting.
Writing a memorable children’s book
Which children’s book did you read until it fell apart? Tell us in the comments, along with the children’s book you’re writing now.
My P5 teacher kept my book beside her photo albums. Write yours well enough that a child keeps it beside their bed.
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Claire Owers is a children’s book author living in the North East of Scotland with her husband, two girls and one slightly daft Labrador, Monty – the unwitting star of the show! Her sports coaching background helps her wrangle this unruly mob. She loves working with kids, taking inspiration from their energy, creativity and brutal honesty. Claire self-published her Monty series of children’s chapter books through Amazon. These funny and fast-paced pet adventure stories are ideal for 5-9 year old animal lovers.
How to Write Children’s Books Writing for older readers too? Browse more free resources for writers, with guides on characters and book lengths.
These 50 Scottish urban legends are the ones I’d tell you on a dark night, and after each one you’ll get the true story behind it. There are Scottish ghost stories from haunted castles, Edinburgh urban legends from under the Royal Mile and Glasgow urban legends that made the newspapers. The rest is creepy Scottish folklore, the Scottish myths and folklore tales that still give names to our caves and lochs.
In Wick, the axeman lived two streets over from my house. Kick his lamppost until its light went out and he’d come for you. So, naturally, we took turns. He never came for me. The nearest we got to danger was the night we picked a lamppost outside the police houses, which ended in a hasty jog up the riverside.
That’s the general pattern behind most the Scottish urban legends on this list. Take a real place and an ancient rule, then see what happens when you test it.
Most lists of Scottish ghost stories give you the spooky half and stop before you find out what happened. Here, every legend ends with the truth as far as the records go, and where you can see the evidence.
I’ve grouped the 50 into haunted houses first, then Edinburgh and Glasgow, then the roads, the crimes, the monsters and my own Wick ghost story. Midnight Society rules apply.
Creepy Myths and Folklore Tales
The most famous Scottish urban legends are Sawney Bean, the Gorbals Vampire, the Mackenzie Poltergeist and the Flannan Isles Lighthouse.
Several have hard evidence behind them. You can still see the Arthur’s Seat coffins, the Devil’s card table and a horn cut from a woman’s head in 1671.
Others fall apart on inspection. Sawney Bean first appears in an 18th-century London crime catalogue, and historians have found no record of him from his own time.
For one legend you can see with your own eyes, start with the Arthur’s Seat coffins in the National Museum of Scotland.
Contents
What are the most famous Scottish urban legends?
The most famous Scottish urban legends are Sawney Bean, the Ayrshire cave cannibal, the Gorbals Vampire hunted by Glasgow children in 1954, the Mackenzie Poltergeist of Greyfriars Kirkyard and the Flannan Isles keepers who vanished in 1900. Each grew from a real place, and three of the four have records you can still check.
If you only read one, make it the Flannan Isles at number 50. It’s the one I chose to tell on camera, and it’s the best example on this list of a true event that rumour has dressed up as a Scottish urban legend.
Creepy Scottish folklore in haunted castles and houses
Scottish ghost stories cluster around big houses, because big houses kept records, and records give a legend something to cling on to.
1. The House of the Binns and the Devil’s card table
General Tam Dalyell, known as ‘Bluidy Tam’, was said to play cards with the Devil at the House of the Binns in West Lothian. The Devil always won, until Tam propped a mirror behind the table and read his hand. Auld Nick spotted the cheat and threw the heavy marble table at him. It missed, flew outside and sank in the Sergeant’s Pond. Nobody believed a word of it. Then, in the drought of 1878, the pond dried up and there was the table. It’s back in the entrance hall now, with a dark mark on one corner that visitors call the Devil’s hoof print (National Trust for Scotland).
2. The Green Lady of Crathes Castle
Crathes Castle, a 16th-century tower house near Banchory in Aberdeenshire, has a room named after its ghost. The Green Lady crosses the Green Lady’s Room, stops by the fireplace and lifts a baby out of thin air, and Queen Victoria is said to be one of the people who saw her. The detail that keeps this story going came in the 1800s. Workmen lifting the hearthstone found the bones of a child underneath, and some accounts add a woman.
3. The footsteps of Skaill House
Skaill House, on Orkney’s west coast near Skara Brae, was built around 1620 for Bishop George Graham, and part of it stands on an old burial ground. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and dogs barking at nothing. One ghost has been there long enough to earn a name, Ubby. The bones are real. Drainage works at the house uncovered a medieval cemetery, and archaeologists dated the burials to between the 11th and 14th centuries.
4. The haunted room at Castle Stuart
Castle Stuart, near Inverness, was finished around 1625 for the third Earl of Moray, and one turret room had such a reputation that nobody would stay in it. The story goes that four local men agreed to sit a night each for a £20 reward. The minister dreamt of a giant covered in blood. The church elder was found fainted on the floor. The shoemaker saw a dark shape with cloven hooves. Last came Rob Angus, a poacher the size of a door who was scared of nothing. ‘You will find me as I am, or dead,’ he told the servant. In the morning they found him dead beneath the broken window.
5. The Green Lady of Ackergill Tower
Ackergill Tower stands on Sinclair’s Bay, a short drive north of Wick, so this one belongs to my home town. In the 1400s Dugald Keith carried off Helen Gunn, the ‘Beauty of Braemore’, on the eve of her wedding to another man and locked her in the tower. She fell, or jumped, from the top while trying to escape, and the feud between the Keiths and the Gunns grew bloodier from there. She’s still seen as a Green Lady on the battlements. The tower ran as a hotel for years, closed around 2019 and is now a private home, so admire it from the coast. Keep the Keith name in mind. It turns up again at number 29.
6. The Monster of Glamis
Glamis Castle in Angus picked up its monster from Victorian gossip. The story said a secret chamber held a deformed child of the family, an heir the world had been told was dead. Nobody has ever produced the room. Of all 50, this is the one I trust least, because a legend about a hidden room can never be disproved, only repeated.
Edinburgh urban legends
Edinburgh urban legends lean on the old town’s habit of building on top of itself, so a good half of them happen underground or behind locked gates.
7. Annie’s room in Mary King’s Close
The Real Mary King’s Close is a set of 17th-century streets and houses buried under the Royal Mile. In 1992 the Japanese psychic Aiko Gibo, filming a documentary, said a little girl called Annie clutched at her in one room. Annie had been left behind during the plague, Gibo said, and had lost her favourite doll. Gibo bought a doll on the Royal Mile and left it for her, and visitors have been leaving toys in the room ever since. On 17 April 2019 a guide radioed in to say the original doll was gone. The attraction later found it was a tartan-clad Daisy doll designed by Mary Quant.
8. The Mackenzie Poltergeist
Sir George Mackenzie was Lord Advocate when about 1,200 Covenanter prisoners were held in a corner of Greyfriars Kirkyard after the Battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679, and his prosecutions earned him the name ‘Bluidy Mackenzie’. He was later buried a few yards away, in the Black Mausoleum. Generations of Edinburgh children dared each other to shout through the keyhole, ‘Bluidy Mackenzie, come oot if ye daur, lift the sneck and draw the bar!’ In the late 1990s a homeless man broke into the tomb looking for shelter. Since then, people on ghost tours have reported bruises and scratches, and a few have fainted near the mausoleum.
9. The Headless Drummer of Edinburgh Castle
Edinburgh Castle’s drummer is heard more often than he’s seen, a lonely beat on the ramparts when the castle is quiet. When people do see him, he has no head. The usual telling says his drumming warns that the castle is about to be attacked, which makes him one of the few ghosts on this list who’s on your side.
10. Albert of the Edinburgh Playhouse
The Edinburgh Playhouse on Greenside Place opened as a cinema and is now one of the biggest theatres in the UK. Staff talk about Albert, a man in a grey coat who appears on level six with a sudden drop in temperature. He’s said to have been a stagehand killed in an accident or a night watchman who died in the building. In one version, police called to a break-in in the 1950s spoke to an older man called Albert on level six, then learned the next day that Albert had died some time before. The theatre named Albert’s Bar after him.
11. The Arthur’s Seat coffins
In late June 1836, boys hunting rabbits on the north-east slopes of Arthur’s Seat pulled back some slates and found 17 miniature coffins, stacked in two tiers of eight with one more on top. Each held a carved wooden figure. Several were destroyed when the boys threw them at each other, and eight survive in the National Museum of Scotland. Nobody knows who made them or why. The favourite theory ties them to the 17 victims of Burke and Hare, though the surviving figures are all dressed as men and most of the victims were women.
12. The Unicorn Woman’s horn
On 14 May 1671 a surgeon called Arthur Temple cut a horn from the head of a woman named Elizabeth Love, about three inches above her ear. It had been growing for seven years. The horn is in the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum, with a small engraved medallion naming the witnesses to the operation. Doctors call it a cutaneous horn, a hard growth of keratin, the same material as your fingernails.
Glasgow urban legends
Glasgow urban legends are younger than most, and the best of them reached the national newspapers within living memory.
13. The Gorbals Vampire
On the evening of 23 September 1954, police were called to the Southern Necropolis in the Gorbals and found hundreds of children, some as young as four, armed with stakes and kitchen knives. They were hunting a seven-foot vampire with iron teeth that, according to the playground, had eaten two local boys. Nobody was missing. Newspapers blamed American horror comics, and the panic helped pass the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955, which is still law.
The iron teeth are the detail that interests me. They’re older than any comic. A beast with ‘great iron teeth’ appears in the Book of Daniel, and Glasgow schools taught a 19th-century poem about Jenny wi’ the Airn Teeth, a bogeywoman of Glasgow Green. It probably helped that the Dixon’s Blazes ironworks lit the graveyard red every night. A rumour spreads fastest when it borrows a fear people already carry.
14. Cathedral House Hotel
Cathedral House, on Cathedral Square opposite the Necropolis, opened in 1877 as a hostel for prisoners released from Duke Street Prison. Susan Newell was hanged at Duke Street in October 1923 for strangling a newspaper boy, and she remains the last woman executed in Scotland. Guests report an invisible presence brushing past them on the stairs, and children playing on the top floor when there are no children in the building. It’s a boutique hotel now, so you can test the stairs yourself.
15. The girl in the Arches
The space under Glasgow Central station lay derelict until 1990, when it held an exhibition for the city’s year as European City of Culture. Then it became The Arches, an arts venue and nightclub, until it closed in 2015. Staff told of a lost-looking girl in old-fashioned clothes in the lower corridors, so real that people offered to help her before she vanished. In 2009 the cast of an Alien Wars show reported that she screamed and fled whenever they came near. The arches host events again today as Platform.
16. Provan Hall
Provan Hall, in Easterhouse, is a 15th-century hunting lodge built for the bishops of Glasgow and one of the oldest houses in the city. Its darkest story is a soldier who came home after two years away, found his wife with a baby boy, and killed them both in the master bedroom. Mother and son are said to be seen upstairs. Reston Mather, the last private owner, died in the house in 1934 and is said to stand on the staircase. Provan Hall reopened in 2023 after restoration, and paranormal groups queued to get in.
17. Dalmarnock Bridge
Dalmarnock Bridge carries Dalmarnock Road across the Clyde, and there’s been a crossing here since a wooden bridge went up in 1821. The present iron bridge dates from 1889–91. The legend is a man at the rail, staring down into the water. People who stop to help say he leaps, then vanishes before he reaches the river. If that story sits close to home for you, Samaritans are free to call on 116 123, day or night (Samaritans Scotland).
18. The bird, the tree, the bell and the fish
Glasgow’s coat of arms packs four legends of St Mungo onto one shield, and many Glaswegians can still recite the rhyme. ‘Here is the bird that never flew, here is the tree that never grew, here is the bell that never rang, here is the fish that never swam.’ The bird was St Serf’s tame robin, killed by Mungo’s classmates and brought back to life by Mungo. The tree began as frozen hazel branches he set alight to restart a fire. The bell is said to have come from Rome. The fish was a salmon from the Clyde with a lost ring in its mouth, and it saved Queen Languoreth from execution.
19. Overtoun Bridge
Overtoun Bridge, finished in 1895 on the drive to Overtoun House near Dumbarton, has an ugly local nickname, the dog suicide bridge. Since the 1960s, around 50 dogs are reported to have died after leaping the parapet from the same spot, almost all of them long-nosed breeds. In 2010 the canine psychologist David Sands studied the bridge from a dog’s height. He concluded the likeliest lure was the scent of mink in the gorge below, with the drop invisible until it was too late. I walk my dog on the beach most days. Here, I’d keep the lead on.
Scary Scottish folklore on the roads, in the caves and up the mountains
Scary Scottish folklore loves a lonely road and a dark cave, and Scotland has plenty of both.
20. The A75 Kinmount Straight
The A75 Kinmount Straight, a four-mile stretch between Carrutherstown and Annan in Dumfries and Galloway, is called Scotland’s most haunted road. Its best-known night came in 1962, when brothers Derek and Norman Ferguson said a hen flew at their windscreen and vanished on impact. An old woman waving her arms followed it, then a screaming man and a parade of animals. Last, a furniture van came straight at them and disappeared. Later drivers report hitting a figure that runs into the road, then finding no body when they stop.
21. The Ghillie Dhu
The Ghillie Dhu is a shy, wild-haired fairy of the birch woods around Gairloch in Wester Ross, dressed in leaves and moss. He avoids adults but is kind to children. In the best-known story he found a lost girl in the woods and walked her safely home. His reward was a hunting party of five men sent to capture him. They never found him.
22. The Old Man of Storr
The Old Man of Storr is a pinnacle of rock on the Trotternish Ridge of Skye. Legend says a giant lived on the ridge, and when he was buried his thumb was left sticking out of the ground. Stand underneath it on a misty day and the idea gets much easier to believe.
23. MacKinnon’s Cave
MacKinnon’s Cave, under the Gribun cliffs on Mull, is one of the deepest sea caves in the Hebrides, and Dr Johnson and James Boswell measured it in 1773. Abbot MacKinnon is said to have hidden here in the 15th century. The darker story is a piper who walked in with his dog to outplay the fairies. Only the dog came back, terrified and hairless. You can reach the cave only around low tide, so check the tide tables before you set off.
24. Fingal’s Cave
Fingal’s Cave on Staffa is made of six-sided basalt columns, the same rock that forms the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. One legend names it after Fionn mac Cumhaill, the Irish giant also called Finn McCool. The other story is literary. In 1761 James Macpherson published Fingal, an epic he claimed to have translated from ancient Gaelic. When Sir Joseph Banks visited in 1772, at the height of the craze for Macpherson’s poems, the name stuck. Before that, the cave was known in Gaelic as An Uamh Bhinn, the melodious cave, for the way the sea echoes inside it.
25. The Corryvreckan whirlpool
The Gulf of Corryvreckan, between Jura and Scarba, has a whirlpool fierce enough to need two legends. In the first, the Cailleach Bheur, the hag goddess of winter, washes her great plaid in it, and when she lays it out white across the land, winter has arrived. In the second, a Norse prince called Breacan tried to win a princess by mooring his boat by the whirlpool for three days and nights. He brought ropes of wool, hemp and a maiden’s hair, trusting the hair to hold because its owner was pure. All of them snapped, Breacan drowned, and the maiden admitted she wasn’t as pure as she’d claimed.
26. Am Fear Liath Mòr, the Big Grey Man
Ben Macdui, at 1,309 metres the second-highest mountain in Britain, is home to Am Fear Liath Mòr, the Big Grey Man. In 1925 the mountaineer Professor Norman Collie told the Cairngorm Club that, alone near the summit in 1891, he’d heard crunching footsteps behind him, one for every few of his own, and fled down the mountain in terror. Walkers since describe a towering grey figure, or a sudden dread that tells them to leave.
27. The piper of Clanyard Bay
Clanyard Bay, on the Rhins of Galloway near Stranraer, has a twin of the MacKinnon’s Cave story. A piper went into the caves to find the fairies, playing so the people above could follow him. The music grew fainter until it stopped, and his dog ran out hairless. Locals say you can still hear pipes under the fields at night. The same tale turns up under Edinburgh Castle and in caves on Tiree, which tells you how well a good story travels.
28. Machrie Moor and the standing stones
The Calanais Standing Stones on the west coast of Lewis were raised in a rough cross shape about 5,000 years ago, and Orkney’s Ring of Brodgar is a near-perfect circle inside a Neolithic henge. My pick for a legend is Machrie Moor on Arran, where six stone circles stand on open moorland. One double ring is called Fingal’s Cauldron Seat, and the giant Fingal is said to have tied his dog Bran to a stone in the outer ring while he ate (Historic Environment Scotland). Arran is in North Ayrshire, so it’s the closest of the three to my own front door.
True crime behind Scottish urban legends
Some of the best Scottish horror stories started as crime reports, and this is where the psychologist in me does most of the work. For the cases that stayed in the courtroom, my guide to Scottish true crime stories goes further.
29. Three Bloody Strokes
In the legend of the Battle of Barry in Angus, in 1010, a warrior later claimed as the first of the Keiths chased the Danish leader Camus into the hills and killed him. King Malcolm II dipped three fingers in Camus’s blood and drew three red lines down the warrior’s shield. The Keith chiefs still carry those three stripes, and their motto, Veritas Vincit, means ‘truth conquers’. The awkward truth is that the battle may never have happened. An 1881 account suggested it was invented to explain old burials found at the site, and its main source, the chronicler Hector Boece, probably drew on local folklore.
30. Lady Finella the king killer
Kenneth II really was killed at Fettercairn in 995, and the Annals of Ulster say it was ‘by deceit’. Legend names the deceiver as Lady Finella, whose son the king had killed. She lured him to a house where a statue stood in the middle of the room, rigged to hidden crossbows. When the king touched it, the bolts fired from every side. Finella fled to the coast and, cornered by the king’s men, threw herself from the waterfall near St Cyrus still marked on maps as Den Finella.
31. The Burning Bishop of Caithness
This one is from my home county. Adam of Melrose, Bishop of Caithness, raised his butter tax from a span of butter for every 20 cows to one for every 10. The farmers complained to Earl Jon Haraldsson, who ruled Orkney under the King of Norway and Caithness under the King of Scots. Retellings give the earl the line ‘The devil take the bishop and his butter; you may roast him if you please!’ On 11 September 1222, a crowd gathered at the bishop’s house in Halkirk and shouted ‘Roast him alive!’ They dragged him into his kitchen and burned it down with him inside. King Alexander II came north to punish them, and he wasn’t gentle about it.
32. Sawney Bean
Sawney Bean is the goriest of all Scottish horror stories, and it’s set on my adopted coast. Legend puts him and his wife Agnes in a cave at Bennane Head, between Girvan and Ballantrae in South Ayrshire. Over 25 years they raised a clan of about 45 children and grandchildren, ambushed travellers on the coast road, and killed and ate more than 1,000 people. A search party sent by James VI found the cave, and the whole family was executed in Edinburgh. Historians have found no record of any of it from the time. The story first appears in the Newgate Calendar, an 18th-century crime catalogue published in London and known for its gore.
My guess is that a lonely road with real robberies needed a monster to explain the travellers who never arrived home. If you like your Ayrshire darker, here are the writers and books set in Ayrshire.
33. The ghosts of Culloden
On 16 April 1746, the Jacobite army of Charles Edward Stuart met the government army of the Duke of Cumberland on Culloden Moor near Inverness. Scots fought on both sides. The battle took less than an hour, and around 1,300 men died, about 1,250 of them Jacobites (National Trust for Scotland). Visitors to the moor report a tall Highlander in tartan who walks among the clan graves and whispers one word, ‘defeated’.
34. Isobel Gowdie, Queen of the Witches
In 1662, Isobel Gowdie, a farm labourer’s wife from Lochloy near Auldearn, gave four confessions to witchcraft over six weeks, and there’s no record that she was tortured. She described flying with her coven, meeting the Queen of the Fairies and turning into a hare with a charm that began ‘I shall go into a hare’. No record survives of her execution, or of anything after. People confess to impossible things for reasons that make sense to them, such as fear or the hope of mercy, and Isobel told her interrogators the most detailed story of any Scottish witch trial. Historians still argue over why.
35. The death of Netta Fornario
In November 1929, the body of Norah Emily Editha Fornario, known as Netta, was found on the island of Iona near Loch Staonaig, on a mound island legend linked to the fairies. She was naked apart from a black cloak and a blackened silver cross, and she lay on a large cross cut into the turf, with a knife nearby and her feet cut and scratched. She’d come to Iona from the London occult scene, a friend of the occultist Dion Fortune, and two days earlier had tried in a panic to leave the island. Her death certificate gives exposure. Fortune blamed a psychic attack.
Scottish monster myths
These Scottish folklore tales are the oldest on the list, the myths and legends of Scotland with teeth and claws. I’ve kept them short, because my list of Scottish mythical creatures gives each one a full entry.
36. The Blue Men of the Minch
The Blue Men of the Minch, also called Storm Kelpies, live in the strait between the Outer Hebrides and the mainland. They’re blue-skinned and swim just under the surface, waiting for ships to sink. In the version Donald Mackenzie collected in 1917, their chief challenges a ship’s captain in rhyme. A captain who can answer every line sails on. One who runs out of words loses his ship.
37. The zombie priest of Melrose
The chronicler William of Newburgh, writing in the 1190s, told of a priest at Melrose so fond of hunting with hounds that he was nicknamed the Hundeprest, the dog-priest. After his death in about 1196 he rose from his grave, tried to break into the abbey and visited the bedroom of his former mistress. Four monks kept watch at his grave. When three left to warm up, he rushed the last one, who struck him with an axe and drove him back underground. The next morning the monks dug up the body, still fresh and bleeding from the wound, and burned it to ashes.
38. The Nine Maidens and the Dundee dragon
A farmer at Pitempton, near Dundee, sent his eldest daughter to the well for water. When she didn’t come back he sent the next, then the next, until all nine were gone. He found them dead by the well with a great serpent coiled beside them. A young man called Martin, sweetheart of one of the daughters, chased it down while the crowd shouted ‘Strike, Martin!’, which folk etymology turned into the place name Strathmartine. A Pictish carved stone at Balluderon is still called Martin’s Stone, and a dragon statue stands on Dundee’s High Street.
39. The Stoor Worm
In Orkney the Stoor Worm, or Mester Stoorworm, was a sea serpent so vast that it woke on Saturday mornings and yawned nine times. A sorcerer told the king to feed it seven maidens every week, or give up his own daughter, Princess Gem-de-lovely. The king offered her hand, and Odin’s sword Sickersnapper, to anyone who could kill it. The winner was Assipattle, a farm boy who spent his days lying in the ashes. He sailed into the worm’s mouth and set fire to its liver with a burning peat. The dying worm’s teeth became Orkney, Shetland and the Faroes, and its body became Iceland.
40. The Loch Ness Monster
Nessie is my favourite, and I’ve stopped at Loch Ness more times than I can count, visiting family in Inverness or driving north to Wick. The first story comes from Adomnán’s Life of St Columba, which says that in 565 Columba drove a beast back into the River Ness. The modern monster arrived in 1933, when the Inverness Courier reported a couple’s sighting of a huge creature from the A82. The famous ‘Surgeon’s Photograph’ followed in 1934, and in 1994 Christian Spurling confessed it had been a toy submarine with a sculpted head. People still look. So do I.
41. The Boneless
Shetland’s Boneless, called the Frittening in older tellings, is barely a creature at all. People describe a pale mass with no shape, wet and foul-smelling, that comes in from the shore at night. It doesn’t hunt like a monster. It arrives before a disaster, which is worse.
Scottish folklore tales behind the national symbols
Scotland’s flag, flower and best-known saying all come with a battle story attached.
42. The Saltire
St Andrew is said to have been martyred at Patras in Greece around 60 AD on an X-shaped cross, because he refused to die on the same shape of cross as Christ. Scotland’s flag comes from a later legend. In 832, King Óengus II of the Picts, outnumbered by the Angles near what’s now Athelstaneford in East Lothian, prayed for victory and saw a white saltire of cloud against a blue sky. He won, and the white cross on blue became Scotland’s flag. The village has a Flag Heritage Centre in an old doocot beside the church.
43. The thistle at Largs
In the late summer of 1263 King Haakon IV of Norway brought a fleet to the Ayrshire coast. Legend says his men took their boots off to creep up on the sleeping Scots in the dark, and one of them stood on a thistle. His yell woke the camp, the Scots won the Battle of Largs, and the thistle became Scotland’s flower. The plant was most likely the spear thistle, a common native species, rather than the cotton thistle on most badges, which probably didn’t grow in medieval Scotland. Largs is a short way up the coast from me, and the thistles there still hurt.
44. Robert the Bruce and the spider
The story goes that Robert the Bruce, beaten and hiding in a cave, watched a spider fail again and again to fix its web, until it finally succeeded, and took it as a sign to fight on. Caves on Rathlin Island and at Kirkpatrick Fleming both claim him. The spider seems to have reached Bruce through Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather in the late 1820s, and an earlier version was told about his ally James Douglas. The line ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’ is younger still. It comes from William Hickson’s The Singing Master, published in 1836.
45. The Templar knights at Bannockburn
Legend says Robert the Bruce won at Bannockburn in 1314 with help from a band of Knights Templar, who had fled France after their order was suppressed. In the story, a charge of mysterious riders breaks the English line at the decisive moment. The details change with every telling, and the earliest accounts of the battle don’t name them.
46. The Brahan Seer
Coinneach Odhar, the Brahan Seer, is Scotland’s Nostradamus, a labourer on the Seaforth estate near Dingwall who saw the future. He’s credited with foreseeing Culloden, and a day when Scotland would have its own parliament again. His last vision, the story goes, showed Lord Seaforth with another woman, and Lady Seaforth had him burned in a spiked tar barrel at Chanonry Point, where a memorial stone stands by the lighthouse. Records do show a Coinneach Odhar wanted as a ‘principal enchanter’ in 1577, a century before the legend’s date. He also warned that if the Eagle Stone in Strathpeffer fell three times, ships would sail to the village. It has fallen twice, and it’s now set in concrete.
Unexplained Scotland, including my own Wick ghost story
The last four are the Scottish ghost stories I’d tell first, two of them from Caithness.
47. Wick North Primary School
This one is mine. It was a warm evening and I was playing football on the ground in front of Wick North Primary, where you could see into every classroom window. Near home time I glanced up, and there was my old primary 5 teacher, or so I thought, looking down at us from one of the windows. She had long hair past her shoulders and a white dress, and she looked grey, which I put down to the setting sun on the glass. I waved. She didn’t wave back. She just kept staring. When a friend asked what I was waving at, I turned to point, and the window was empty.
My primary 5 teacher, I should say, was very much alive. Years later she cooked me dinner and showed me her copy of my first book. So whoever was at that window, it wasn’t her. The school has since been demolished, and I still don’t have an answer.
48. The selkie’s grave at St Trothan’s
I grew up with this Caithness legend. In St Trothan’s churchyard in Castletown, the story goes, lies a girl a fisherman found as a baby, wrapped in a sealskin. She grew up seeing the devil in the church rafters, was banned from the church and died in childbirth. A hollow at the foot of her grave never dries out. Local children believed that if you put your foot in it and whispered a wish, it would come true.
49. The day it rained herring in Strathpeffer
In 1828 Major Forbes Mackenzie of Fodderty, near Strathpeffer, crossed one of his fields and found a large patch of ground covered in herring fry, three to four inches long, fresh and whole. The sea was three miles away. The report in the Gentleman’s Magazine pointed out the fish weren’t bruised, so birds hadn’t dropped them, and suggested a waterspout from the firth. My grandparents ran a tearoom in Strathpeffer, so I’ve a soft spot for a village where it once rained fish.
50. The Flannan Isles Lighthouse
The Flannan Isles lie about 20 miles west of Lewis, and the lighthouse on Eilean Mòr was first lit in December 1899. A year later, on 15 December 1900, the steamer Archtor passed in poor weather and reported no light. Storms kept the relief ship Hesperus away until 26 December, and the relief keeper, Joseph Moore, found the station empty. James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald MacArthur were gone. One set of oilskins was still there and the clocks had stopped. The Northern Lighthouse Board’s superintendent concluded the men had most likely been swept away at the west landing. The famous log entries about weeping and praying don’t appear in the official records.
I told this one on video for Tamfest’s Tam’s Sunday Club, and the detail I always come back to is the ship in the dark, looking for a light that wasn’t there.
Where can you see Scottish urban legends for yourself?
Many Scottish urban legends left physical evidence you can visit. The Arthur’s Seat coffins and the 1671 horn are in Edinburgh museums, and the Devil’s card table is at the House of the Binns. Memorial stones mark the Brahan Seer’s death and Martin’s dragon. Here’s where to find the ones I’d visit first.
Legend
Where to go
Arthur’s Seat coffins
National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh
The Devil’s card table
House of the Binns, near Linlithgow
Annie’s room
The Real Mary King’s Close, Royal Mile
The Black Mausoleum
Greyfriars Kirkyard, on a guided tour
The 1671 horn
University of Edinburgh Anatomical Museum, open days
The Gorbals Vampire
Southern Necropolis, Glasgow
Martin’s Stone
Balluderon, north of Dundee
Fingal’s Cauldron Seat
Machrie Moor, Isle of Arran
Brahan Seer memorial
Chanonry Point, near Fortrose
Den Finella
Near St Cyrus, Aberdeenshire
If you visit one, make it the coffins. They’re small enough to walk past, and nobody in nearly 200 years has explained them.
Scottish Urban Legends FAQ
What is the scariest Scottish urban legend?
The scariest Scottish urban legend, for me, is the Mackenzie Poltergeist in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, because people still report bruises and scratches after guided tours of the Black Mausoleum. Sawney Bean is gorier, but he’s safely in the past. Mackenzie’s reputation is still growing every year.
What is the most haunted place in Scotland?
Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh is the place most often called the most haunted in Scotland, thanks to the Mackenzie Poltergeist. For a road, the A75 Kinmount Straight near Annan holds the title. For a castle, Glamis and Crathes are the usual contenders, each with a ghost story tied to a real room.
What is the difference between a myth, a legend and an urban legend?
A myth explains the world through gods or giants, like Finn McCool building the Giant’s Causeway. A legend attaches a story to a real person or place, like Robert the Bruce’s spider. An urban legend is a modern story passed around as true, usually through a friend of a friend, like the Gorbals Vampire.
Are any Scottish urban legends true?
Some Scottish urban legends are true at the core. The Arthur’s Seat coffins, the 1671 horn and the Flannan Isles disappearance are all documented. Others, like Sawney Bean, have no evidence from the time at all. Most sit in between, a real place or death with a supernatural explanation added later.
Everything else in a legend is decoration. Tonight in Wick, a kid is probably kicking a lamppost and waiting for the axeman, and I hope they get the chase they so desire. That’s how legends begin.
An’ if eh light goes oot, dinny wait aboot til see fit comes oot. (I wrote a whole guide to writing Highland dialect after getting it wrong the first time.)
Which legend did the kids in your town dare each other with? Tell me in the comments, and I’ll add the best ones to the next update.
If you’d like the next story the moment it goes live, subscribe below for new-post notifications. The longer versions of these tales are in my book Scottish Urban Legends: 50 Myths and True Stories, which went straight into an Amazon top 100 bestsellers list when it came out (John O’Groat Journal).
p.s. I realise that there are hundreds more Scottish myths, legends and true stories out there, and I would love to hear your favourites in the comments below.
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