The Sandwood Bay mermaid

Sandwood Bay lies on the north-west coast of Sutherland, about 5 miles south of Cape Wrath. It is a long walk in. Around 4 miles on foot from the car park at Blairmore, north of Kinlochbervie. Today the land is the Sandwood Estate, managed by the John Muir Trust. Two rocks jut out from the bay. The place already had a reputation. Mysterious Britain says that for hundreds of years the bay has been known as a haunt of the mermaids.

5 January 1900. Alexander Gunn, often called Sandy Gunn, was on the beach searching for one of his sheep. His collie suddenly let out a howl and cringed in terror at his feet. Later tellings say the dog was furiously barking towards something moving amongst the jumble of rocks.

Gunn looked. On a ledge, above the tide, a figure was reclining on the rock face. At first he thought it was a seal. Seals are common on these beaches. But this one was far too big. The hair was reddish-yellow. The eyes were greenish-blue. The body was yellowish and about 7ft long. It looked almost human. One modern retelling, from the John Muir Trust, adds a long tail with fins laid out upon the rock.

Nobody wrote it down in 1900. Everything known comes through one man, the angling and folklore writer R. MacDonald Robertson, who said he met Gunn in 1939. The Scottish Daily Express gives the year of that meeting as 1930. Robertson's last word on his witness was firm. "To the day Alexander Gunn died in 1944, his story never changed and he maintained that he had seen a mermaid of ravishing beauty." Hidden Scotland says Gunn met the ridicule that followed with steely resolve.

Every modern version repeats Robertson. Over the decades the details drifted. Reddish-yellow hair became long golden hair. The howling, cowering collie became a furiously barking one. The date sometimes softened to the early 1900s.

The simplest explanation is the one Gunn reached first. A seal. A sharper question comes from Tobar an Dualchais, the Scottish oral-history archive. A summary of one recording says the late Donald MacLeod, proprietor of the Garbet Hotel in Kinlochbervie, made up a story about mermaids in Sandwood Bay to attract customers. The record itself could not be checked. Nor is it clear whether it concerns Gunn's sighting or the mermaid lore in general. The Garbet Hotel was built before the Second World War. Any such tale would date from decades after 1900, though perhaps close to the time Robertson met Gunn.

The mermaid is not alone at Sandwood. There is a bearded ghost sailor in sea boots, cap and brass-buttoned tunic, said to knock at the bothy windows on stormy nights. In the 1940s he reportedly told two crofters, "All on this beach is mine, begone!" There are phantom hoofbeats too, linked to the each-uisge, the water horse. The bay featured in STV's Beyond Explanation in 2017 and in the podcast Folk on Foot in 2019. Tourism has kept the mermaid alive. Parkdean Resorts named Sandwood one of the UK beaches where you are most likely to glimpse one. More than a century on, nobody can say which rock held Sandy Gunn's mermaid.