The account, recorded by Alexander Carmichael in his monumental Carmina Gadelica (1900), describes an event of around 1820–1830 on the west coast of Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides. Crofters cutting seaweed at Sgeir na Duchadh near Grimnis spotted a small creature in the shallows behaving like a tiny woman. Several boys began throwing stones; one struck the creature in the back. She was not seen again alive. A few days later her body washed up at Cuile, Nunton, nearly two miles away.
The story
The physical description given by eyewitnesses and preserved by Carmichael was unexpectedly precise: the upper body was about the size of a well-nourished child of three or four, with long dark glossy hair, white and tender skin, and developed breasts. The lower half resembled a salmon but was without scales. The creature was not dismissed as a dead seal or unusual fish: Mr Duncan Shaw, the factor for Clanranald and the legal authority in the district, ordered a small coffin and shroud to be made. The burial took place publicly, with many witnesses present, a short distance above the shoreline at Nunton.
Carmichael's documentation in Carmina Gadelica gives the account an unusually rigorous provenance for mermaid folklore — it is a named official acting on a firsthand account, within living memory of the collector. A later investigation commissioned by the National Museum of Scotland identified an isolated stone in the dunes at Culla Bay that may mark the grave site, though the NMS was unable to confirm this definitively. The story was also reported in the Stornoway Gazette and has been treated as one of the most seriously documented mermaid accounts in Scottish island tradition.