Most of Scotland's mythical creatures live in the old centuries. Am Fear Liath Mòr — the Big Grey Man — is one of the very few that has been reported, in detail, by trained mountaineers in living memory. He haunts a single mountain: Ben Macdui, the second-highest peak in the British Isles, in the heart of the Cairngorms.
The classic account belongs to Professor Norman Collie, a respected chemist and one of the foremost climbers of his generation. In December 1925, addressing the Cairngorm Club in Aberdeen, Collie described an experience from a solo descent of Ben Macdui some thirty-odd years earlier. Mist was down. Visibility was poor. As he walked, he became aware of footsteps behind him — slow, heavy footsteps in the snow, taking three or four strides for every one of his. He stopped. The footsteps stopped. He walked on. They followed.
Collie was a hardened, rational man, not given to flights of fancy. His description is the one every climber on the Cairngorms eventually hears: 'I was seized with intolerable fear, and ran for four or five miles, nearly down to Rothiemurchus Forest. Whatever you make of it, I do not know, but there is something very queer about the top of Ben Macdui, and I will not go back there again, by myself, I know.'
He was not alone. Other climbers came forward — some with similar tales of footsteps, some claiming to have caught a glimpse: a tall, grey, vaguely human figure, perhaps ten or twelve feet high, half-seen in the mist on the high plateau. Some heard a low humming. Some described a sudden, irrational panic that drove them off the mountain at a full run.
Sceptics offer the usual explanations: mist plays tricks, exhaustion at altitude warps perception, the Brocken spectre (your own shadow magnified onto a wall of cloud) is well documented in the Cairngorms. All of these are plausible. None of them quite explain the consistency of the panic, or the fact that experienced mountaineers — people who have seen optical illusions before — describe Am Fear Liath Mòr as something else.
Our Veiled Grey Man design honours the modern Highland legend: the mist on the plateau, the suggestion of a figure that is just the wrong shape, and the moment when an experienced climber turns and runs. Whatever lives at the top of Ben Macdui, it has been frightening Scots for over a hundred years. That is plenty long enough to count as folklore.