Cu Sith

The Cù Sìth — the 'fairy dog' of the Scottish Highlands — is a spectral hound the size of a young bull, with a shaggy dark-green coat and a long braided or coiled tail. Unlike the black dogs of England it is green as the fairy mounds it haunts, and it moves in eerie silence save for the three great bays it gives when on the hunt. Those bays were a death-warning: anyone who heard them and failed to reach safety before the third was said to be overcome, or carried off.

In Highland belief the Cù Sìth served the fairies, ranging the moors and glens, and was especially feared as a stealer of nursing mothers, spirited away to suckle the children of the Otherworld. It was said to travel in a straight line across the land, often by hidden tracks, and its appearance was an omen no one wished to meet. The creature belongs to the rich Gaelic tradition of supernatural hounds and survives as one of the most distinctive of all the fairy beasts of Scotland.