Some small stones have been found [in the parish of Wick], which seem to be a species of flint, about an inch long and half an inch broad, of a triangular shape, and barbed on each side. The common people confidently assert, that they are fairies arrows, which they shoot at cattle, when they instantly fall down dead, though the hide of the animal remains quite entire. Some of those arrows have been found buried a foot under ground, and are supposed to have been in antient times fixed in shafts, and shot from bows. Some stones also of a flinty nature have been found, which when broken contained the shape of serpents coiled round in the heart of the stone.

Not only the common people, but even the clergy, and better sort, in the interior of the Highlands, till about sixty or seventy years ago, believed in ghosts, fairies, brownies, hob-gobblings, and the like. I fell in with an old man, that positively insisted he had seen them, and that a gentleman, belonging to the parish of Boharm, upon shooting among fairies, who were dancing round a green tumulus, one summer evening, wounded one of them, so that it could not fly off with the rest; that he caught it and kept it all night; but that, recovering, it flew away in the morning.