Rare Scottish Stories #4 The Cave of Giant Bones

In days of old when Scotland was named Caledonia, alongside man lived a race of giants. Now, what happened to them is anyones guess but there are none left now to ask. Some say the last of them battled amongst each other and wiped out the last of their kind; some say a monster from the deep sea rose up and picked them off one by one; some say that they went with Angus Og when he went away in sorrow due to the sins of man. Whatever you believe is most likely, on one will fault you for it as no one will know more than you will once this story is told. There is nothing left to show except for giant bones in a great sea cave near the far Northern tip of Scotland.

The man who first found the giant bones ran away screaming and he was never the same again in mind or heart. He swears that when he bent over to examine a giant’s knucklebone, that it was half as big as himself. In examining the bones, he accidentally kicked it with his boot and felt something move in the darkness of the cave. Suddenly a huge booming voice filled the chamber.

"Och now! Will ye not take heed to yourself, wee man o' the people, that ye'll not be disturbing honest folk in their sleep!"

The man looked around the cave and sure enough he was alone but he could feel someone else was there with him. He felt a rush come towards him and this was when he ran away screaming in terror. This was the most significant moment in this Highland man's life and he told it over and over to anyone who would listen. One thing he would never share however, was the exact location of the cave. He was filled with paranoia and terror that if anyone else should find the cave due to his loose lips, that the giant would find him and destroy him. Eventually, local people got tired of this story but the town in which he resided was popular with fishing and hunting and people came from afar for these sports. With minimum effort, it was easy for him to find a new pair of ears to tell his story to. One fateful day he told his story to a man who had never been to Scotland before.

The stranger was the sort to find great pleasure in finding fossils and ruins and he thought to himself that if he could find this cave with giant bones, that he could publish a book about it and make himself quite wealthy. The bones he could sell too for further profit. The trouble was that the man would not divulge where this cave was and he would not budge on telling of it, even with a bribing.

The stranger flew into a rage and declared that he would just need to find the cave for himself. He searched in every cave he could find and sure enough, on the Northern tip of Scotland, there is an abundance of caves. As time passed, there was not so much as a rock he had not looked into and he had explored everything. He came to the conclusion that the story was nonsense and that the cave had never existed in the first place, let alone filled with the bones of giants!

He walked back up the cliff as it was easier than walking on the shale of the shore and as he was doing so, a fair height up, the ground shifted from under him and he fell a great way back onto the shore. With the wind knocked out of him he rested on the rubble for a while, ensuring that he was not to greatly hurt. On his decent up the cliff again he saw that the entrance of a cave had been revealed. What luck!

It was the right cave sure enough! He walked in and he could not believe that the ground was full of giant bones just as the man had said. He started laying the bones out to construct into one full skeleton, thinking what a great sketch the image would make for his book. He carried on moving and sorting the bones until a great booming voice was heard blasting through the cave "Leave the bones be, man!". The stranger jumped out of his skin and skittered around in terror, falling over the giant bones until another booming voice was heard from within the cave "Och, ye clumsy lout! Will you not stop booting my poor old bones about!" The stranger kept his head down in shivering terror as he did not want to see who was so clearly chiding him. When he eventually lifted his head to see who had been chastising him there stood before him a ring of ghosts of the most giant kind.

There was nowhere for the stranger to run as the ring of giant ghosts, easily topping 21 feet or more had him surrounded. The giant ghosts where stood shoulder ot shoulder and toe to toe so even running past them was impossible. The stranger stood there shaking like a leaf and near enough crying for his mother.

"What shall we do wi' the wee sma' man?!" bellowed one of the ghosts.

"Crock him!" “Let me at him!" "I’ll be taking him apart, is I will, to spread his wee bones amongst our own. T'was my shin he was knocking awhile back so it was!" Shouted the other ghosts.

"Let's get rid of him!" they all agreed in a jeer.

With the giant ghosts all in agreement about the dispatching of this poor wee stranger from outside Scotland, he was in floods of tears, unable to even whimper for mercy.

Suddenly he felt a mighty force pick him up and throw him out of the cave far into the sea. Luckily for him, nearby fishermen heard the splash and retrieved him from the cold water more dead than alive. On board the fisherman's boat, the stranger was deranged and tried to tell his story to the fisherman who just laughed and said that people always had strange storied to tell after almost drowning. They told him that he had fallen from the cliffs above and nothing more.

The stranger never wrote his book but the story got around town and spread far and wide. Many people came to search for the cave but it was never found. All that was to be seen was two massive boulders side by side half buried in the cliff and sure enough, it looked like it had been that way for thousands of years. Some folk say that the giants closed the cave of themselves, not wanting to be disturbed from their eternal rest again.

You are welcome to go and try to find the cave for yourself.

Copyright by Laura McParland taken from antique sources.

Not to be re-distributed in any form online or in publishing without written consent by the author.