The Reay mermaid of Sandside Bay, Caithness, 1809

Reay is a village that grew up around Sandside Bay, on Scotland's north coast in Caithness. Local people had claimed sightings in the bay before. William Munro, a schoolmaster at Thurso, did not believe them. Then, about 1797, Munro saw it too: "a figure resembling an unclothed female, sitting upon a rock extend[ing] into the sea, and apparently in the action of combing its hair, which was long and thick." The face was plump, the cheeks ruddy, the eyes blue. After three or four minutes it dropped into the sea.

12 January 1809. About noon. The sun was "shining clearly." Elizabeth Mackay, daughter of the minister of Reay, was on the shore of Sandside Bay with a cousin, C. Mackenzie. Two servant maids and a boy were down among the rocks.

The figure was "distant from us a few yards only." The face "seemed plump and round, the eyes and nose were small, the former were of a light grey colour, and the mouth was large." Forehead, nose and chin were white. The side of the face was bright pink. The hair was "thick and long, of a green oily cast." The arms were very long and slender.

"As the waves advanced the Mermaid gently sunk under them and afterwards re-appeared." With both hands it threw back its hair and rubbed its throat.

A hand went up over its head, "as if to frighten a bird." Sometimes it turned quite round, several times in succession. Sometimes it laid its right hand under its cheek and floated. It stayed in view for about an hour.

According to Rev. David Mackay, the minister of Reay, the cries of the boy made it disappear. It re-appeared farther out. Then it took its course a considerable way along the shore, and was gone.

The letter describing the encounter was written "merely for private information." Sir John Sinclair obtained a copy, and it found its way to the English newspapers. The Morning Post printed it on 6 September 1809. By 2 November it was on the front page of the Massachusetts Spy.

Sir Humphry Davy told of a bathing man, a young man interested in geology who had swum at the spot after examining the granite. That story set the swim in "the middle of August," though the sighting was in January. In 1849 the John O'Groat Journal revived the case. John Paterson, at Sandside from 1804, wrote that locals suspected a large grey seal.

"I fired, and the old grey seal sank immediately." James Taylor, who knew all the parties, answered that the letters "are conclusive of the fact that mermaids have been seen by them," and dismissed the Davy tale as "an after dinner story." No one accused the witnesses of a hoax.

Katie Louise Garner traces the influence of the case on Christian Isobel Johnstone, Thomas Love Peacock and Walter Scott in the decade after 1809, reading the letters as female testimony and the production of coastal knowledge. In Nightmare Abbey, published in 1818, Peacock's ichthyologist Mr Asterias hunts a mermaid on the Lincolnshire coast. The witnesses described only what they saw. A face in the water, a few yards away. An hour on a bright January noon.