The Loireag is the weaving-fairy of the Outer Hebrides, known especially from Benbecula and South Uist, and one of the most sharply characterised of all the household spirits recorded in Alexander Carmichael's great folklore collection, the Carmina Gadelica. A man of Benbecula described her to Carmichael as 'a small mite of womanhood that does not belong to this world but to the world thither' — 'a plaintive little thing, stubborn and cunning', a fairy water-maid who took charge of the making of cloth.
The story
The Loireag presided over every stage of the women's work of clothmaking — the warping, the weaving, the waulking (the rhythmic fulling of the new tweed) and the washing of the web — and she was exacting about the proper way of doing things. The waulking was accompanied by a whole tradition of songs and ceremonies, and if the women neglected any of these usages the Loireag took her revenge: should a song be sung twice over at the waulking, she would come and render the web as thin and useless as before, so that all the work had to be begun again. She was especially wrathful at any woman who sang out of tune in a hard, harsh voice and drowned out the others.
Like many such spirits she also demanded her due of milk — a libation had to be set out for the Loireag, and if it were forgotten she would suck the milk of the goats, sheep and cows of the township dry, and lay a spell on the beasts so that they could not stir. The Loireag is a perfect embodiment of the social discipline of the old island life: the fairy who rewards careful, communal, properly observed labour and punishes haste, carelessness and disrespect for tradition, watching over the looms and waulking-boards of the Hebrides.