Little frizzle and other spooky stories.

Now a thriving tourist spot, the Isle of Mull was once a perilous place to survive-particularly if you stumbled upon its multitude of myths and magic, believes Helen Fields

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THE Isle of Mull, an outrageously green patch of land in Scotland's Inner Hebrides, thrives today on a diet of tourism, fishing and farming. Go back a century or five and the picture was much the same, save for the tourists taking the form of rampaging clans hungry for power and resources. It was a perilous place to survive, yet Mull has been inhabited for more than 10,000 years. Little wonder that those hardy folk who braved the tides to fish and climbed the cliffs for bird eggs found solace in myth and legend. Even today, as you hike through the glens and sit a while beside the lochs there, you'll find it's easier to believe in witches and wee folk in Scotland than perhaps anywhere else in the world. You wouldn't expect any less from a country with the unicorn as its national animal.

Mull's witches, however, were a breed apart. It's said that not merely one witch or two made the island her home, but a whole race of them. These weren't hidden figures in ramshackle cabins scaring the children, feared and avoided these women were important. Powerful, in their own way, respected by local people and consulted by the clan chiefs.

So it was that the Mull witch known as the Dòideag was called upon when a galleon from the Spanish Armada sailed into Tobermory harbour in 1588. Among the sailors and soldiers on board was a Spanish princess who had dreamed of the island and of finding a man there whom she would love with all her heart. She spotted the man as he neared the shore and history might have taken a very different turn had that man not been married. As it was, his wife was none too happy about the princess's attempts to woo her husband and she approached the witch for a solution.