The Benbecula Mermaid: Stoned at Grimnis, Buried at Nunton (c. 1830)

The story survives in one primary source. Alexander Carmichael set it down in the second volume of Carmina Gadelica, published in 1900, in a note on "Maighdean na tuinne", the maid of the wave. He dated it "Some seventy years ago." That places it around 1830. No day. No month. Only one name. Duncan Shaw, factor for Clanranald, baron-bailie and sheriff of the district. He was named Clanranald's factor at Nunton on 8 June 1815.

People were cutting seaweed at Sgeir na Duchadh, a reef at Grimnis on the west coast of Benbecula. Before putting on her stockings, one of the women went to the lower end of the reef to wash her feet. She heard a splash in the calm sea. She looked up. Some few feet away was "a creature in the form of a woman in miniature."

She called to her friends. Everyone rushed to the place. The creature made somersaults and turned about in various directions. Some men waded into the water to seize her, but she moved beyond their reach. Some boys threw stones. One struck her in the back.

A few days afterwards, the creature was found dead at Cuile, Nunton. Nearly two miles away. Its upper portion was about the size of "a well-fed child of three or four years of age, with an abnormally developed breast." The hair was "long, dark, and glossy." The skin was "white, soft, and tender." The lower part was like a salmon, "but without scales."

Crowds came, some from long distances. All were unanimous, Carmichael wrote, that "they had gazed on the mermaid at last." Duncan Shaw ordered a coffin and shroud. The body was buried in the presence of many people, a short distance above the shore where it was found. When Carmichael wrote, there were "persons still living who saw and touched this curious creature."

Where she lies is disputed. Carmichael says above the shore. Mysterious Britain says above the highest tide mark. A Stornoway Gazette retelling places her in the nearby churchyard. R. Macdonald Robertson reportedly wrote in 1961 of seeing the grave in a Nunton cemetery.

In 1994, Heritage Site and Landscape Surveys Ltd searched the dunes around Culla Bay, at the request of the Keeper of Mollusca at the National Museums of Scotland. Granite Productions Ltd sponsored the work. On the crest of the dunes, in a wind-eroded hollow, they found an isolated stone. A brief examination "did not support the hypothesis that it had been set-up as a grave-marker." No exhumation has ever been recorded.

No one has alleged a hoax. But in 2011 the Beachcombing blog noted the absence of any newspaper report from the time. It also asked whether a name like Duncan Shaw could survive some seventy years of oral tradition. Shaw's documented post at Nunton at least fits. Later retellings drifted. A teenage boy whose stone killed her. A mermaid who cried out in pain and disappeared beneath the waves. Neither detail is in Carmichael.

Carmichael placed the story beside others. Colin Campbell, a crofter from Barra, watched a figure through a telescope and saw "the head, the hair, the neck, the shoulders, and the breast of a woman." Neill MacEachain, becalmed in the Sound of Mull, saw something similar. Today the Western Isles historic environment record lists the site as "Nunton, 'The Mermaid's Grave'."