Scotland has been telling stories about its own landscape for a very long time, and many of the creatures in those stories are still attached to particular stretches of coast, particular lochs and particular kitchen hearths. The good news for a beginner is that you do not need a folklore degree to keep them straight. Where a creature lives, what it wants and how it behaves will usually tell you everything you need to know.

Selkies: The Seal Folk of the Northern Isles

A selkie is a seal in the water and a person on land. The change happens when the seal slips out of its skin, hides it somewhere along the shore — under a rock, in a cave, behind a boat — and walks about on two legs. If someone finds that skin and keeps it, the selkie is bound to them, often for years, until the skin is found again. The stories are not frightening so much as sad: selkies are gentle, remember the sea constantly, and eventually go back to it.

Their heartland is Orkney, Shetland and the Hebrides. A well-known Hebridean tradition holds that the MacCodrum family of North Uist were descended from a selkie, and seal-shaped stories turn up all along the northern coasts. The word itself comes from Scots, related to older terms for the common seal, so it is a shoreline word rather than an academic one. If you are on the coast of Orkney or Shetland on a still evening, watching seals hauled out on the skerries, you are looking at the raw material. If you find a sealskin on a beach, leave it exactly where it lies.

Kelpies: The Horses You Must Never Ride

Kelpies are water horses, usually described as strong, sleek and black or grey, standing quietly at the edge of a loch or river as though already saddled. Their manes hold water like seaweed, and they are patient in a way that real horses are not. A rider who mounts one finds the skin sticks fast, and the horse walks into the water with them. Some versions give a kelpie human form — a handsome stranger with damp hair and a bit of sand about the shoes — but the trick is the same.

Kelpies are generally creatures of rivers and lochs; the each-uisge is the water horse of the sea and deeper lochs, and it is worse, with hooves or seaweed where a human form should be clean. Kelpie tales are told around Loch Ness, Loch Awe and Loch Garve in Ross-shire, among many others. The practical advice that once accompanied them still makes sense: keep children and loose animals away from the water's edge.

Brownies: Helpful, Until You Thank Them

Brownies are small, brown, hairy and roughly person-shaped, with no clear face. They attach themselves to a house or farm and work at night — threshing corn, churning butter, tidying a hearth, finishing the jobs everyone forgot. The usual payment is a bowl of cream, milk or porridge left out on the step.

Two rules matter. Do not thank them, and never give them clothes. A brownie who is thanked takes offence and leaves; a brownie offered a new hood or shirt goes away singing that such finery is too grand for the likes of him. The Brownie of Cranshaws in the Borders is the best-known example, and in the Highlands a similar figure called the gruagach watched over cattle and was given milk. Mistreat a brownie and he may sour into a boggart, which is exactly as troublesome as it sounds.

A Quick Way to Tell Them Apart

• Selkie: a seal on the shore, or a quiet stranger with seal-dark eyes. Gentle, mournful, always half away to the sea.
• Kelpie: a horse beside water, or a handsome stranger with wet hair. Charming and lethal.
• Brownie: a small, brown, unbeautiful figure, probably in your kitchen. Useful, touchy, allergic to gratitude and clothing.

The Wider Cast You Will Meet

• Trows: Shetland's underground folk. Small, musical, easily offended and reluctant to be out in daylight.
• The Nuckelavee: an Orkney horror, a skinless horse with a human torso fused to its back. It cannot cross running fresh water, which is why those stories usually end at a stream.
• The Blue Men of the Minch: they swim between Lewis and the Shiant Isles and challenge a passing captain to a riddle contest. Lose, and the ship goes down.
• The Bean-Nighe: the washer at the ford, a Highland figure seen scrubbing the clothes of those about to die. Meeting her is not a good omen, and conversation seldom improves matters.

Where the Stories Are Still Kept

This is living tradition, not museum display. Shetland keeps trows and selkies in its place names and its winter fire festivals; Orkney's Neolithic sites sit comfortably alongside nuckelavee tales; North Uist and the Uists generally hold the selkie stories closest. On Skye, the Fairy Pools in Minginish and the Fairy Glen near Uig carry their own quieter legends, while Loch Ness needs no introduction at all. In Edinburgh and Glasgow, storytelling nights in pubs and community halls carry the older material to new listeners every month.

The practical approach is simple. Travel in winter if you can, when the dark arrives early and the stories suit the weather. Ask about place names when you are in a pub or a village hall, and listen to how locals say them. Read the old names on an Ordnance Survey map and you will find half the cast already there. Above all, treat the creatures as neighbours rather than content: leave the milk out, keep off the skin, and never, ever get on the horse.