Loch Na Fideil

Loch Na Fideil was reputedly the home of a legendary female creature or spirit known as the Fideal after which the body of water is named (Loch of the Fideal). Depending upon which source you read, she attacks either men or women and children, dragging them down under the water in order to devour them. Katherine Briggs in her ‘A Dictionary Of Fairies’ (1976) mentions the Fideal and refers to ‘Scottish Folk-lore and Folk Life’ (1935) by Donald Alexander Mackenzie, who suggested that she was a personification of the entangling bog grasses and water weeds in Loch na Fideil. According to legend the Fideal was killed by a man called Ewen, who lost his life during the fight. As Katherine Briggs quotes, “Ewen killed the Fideal and the Fideal killed Ewen.”

Loch Na Fideil drains into the much larger Loch Maree which is positioned beside it and where sacrifices to water dragons took place until the 18th Century.