Loch nan Dubhrachan lies beside the old road between Isle Ornsay and Knock on the Sleat peninsula of Skye, and 19th-century folklorists recorded it as the haunt of an each-uisge, the deadly Highland water-horse. Unlike the more familiar kelpie, the each-uisge could take the form of a fine horse or a handsome young man, and this one was said to have a particular fondness for pretty girls — though, as the old tellers warned, his attentions never ended well for them. Travellers near the loch reported being waylaid by a mysterious 'beast', and the stories grew so persistent that by 1870 the laird ordered a full-scale dragging of the loch to settle the matter once and for all.
The story
A Skye man named MacRae, who as a boy was present at the attempt, recalled that the nets — manned by terrified villagers on both shores — suddenly snagged on something huge and powerful in the depths. Convinced they had hooked the water-horse itself, the men dropped the ropes and fled in panic. When the nets were finally recovered they held nothing but mud and two small pike — but the loch's reputation as a dwelling-place of the each-uisge endured, recorded a generation later in J. A. MacCulloch's 'The Misty Isle of Skye' (1905).