Jim Hewitson is inundated with accounts of a beast straight from The X-files

THAT'll larn me. Here I was dismissing the phenomenon of the Black Dog, a mysterious canine creature of legend who roams deserted tracks, church yards, and cross roads, as a principally English beastie. Of course, I reckoned without all you disciples of the Scottish myth sculking out there.

Depending which school of thought you adhere to, this animal is a fiend in the disguise of a dog, or the spirit of an evil person condemned to spend eternity in the form of a dog, or it may just be nasty demons mimicking the sports of men and hunting our souls. Take yer pick. Pretty scary whichever version you opt for.

But to suggest, as I did in April, that the Black Dog was a strictly non-Scottish affair was a bit of a blunder. Clearly, I was barking up the wrong tree.

For a start one reader drew my attention to three lines in Sir Walter Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel:

For he was speechless, ghastly, wan,

Like him, of whom the story ran,

Who spoke the spectre-hound in

Man.

Apparently, Scott was referring to a famous BDI - Black Dog Incident to you innocents who don't watch the X Files - which took place at Peel Castle on the Isle of Man and involved a creature called Mauthe Doog. This animal haunted the castle and particularly the guardroom, where soldiers became so familiar with the spectre that it would lie in front of the fire at their feet, totally unmolested.

Alas, one bold sojer, in a drunken fit, tried to determine once and for all if it were ``dog or devil'' and was immediately struck dumb, dying three days later ``in agonies more than is common in a natural death''.

The possibility that the Black Dog is a harbinger of imminent death is explored in a letter from Catherine Hymers in Caithness, who tells the story of her grandfather's boyhood encounter with a SPD (Suspected Black Dog) in the closing years of last century.

Apprenticed to a baker in Lochwinnoch, Renfrewshire, he was making his way to work early one morning when near the Cross in the centre of town he met a sinister black dog, trailing a chain. It disappeared into an entry. The incident occurred the following morning, and on the third day Catherine's great-granny went along with the boy. A stone was thrown at this malignant mutt which in turn threw them an evil look which chilled their blood.

It disappeared into the same entry leading to a lodging house where later in the day a resident of ill-repute died. Catherine says that her redoubtable great-grandmother would only say that the dog was ``the de'il cam for his ain''.

From Crieff in Perthshire Mary Sharp wrote to tell me of the Red Hound of Altanourn. In the 1920s her uncle, John Sillars, a novelist in Lamlash, Arran, was deep into the island folklore. Stories he told of the dog in Altanourn woods made a big impression on Mary as a teenager and she recalls always negotiating the woods south of Brodick ``pretty sharpish''. In the thirties the road was darker, narrower, and quieter than it is today.

Of course, Arran is overcrowded with spooky sights. One of Mary Sharp's favourites is the downhill drag to Lochranza where even the man who used to walk a stallion round the island farms always insisted that he had trouble persuading the horse past a particularly sinister stretch on this road. Others have since confirmed to me that this strange place unsettles travellers to this day. What's the odds it is another hang-out for the Red Hound?