Lord De Soulis And The Little Giant Of Kielder
Sinister places grow tall tales, and perhaps nowhere else in Scotland exudes brooding menace quite like Hermitage Castle. The great arches look like the gaping jaws of an eldritch titan waiting to swallow anyone foolish enough to stray too near.
Local folklore tells of a demon stalking its ruins for fresh blood, and of a giant whose grave lies nearby. At the centre of this web of oddities is one of the most reviled figures of Scottish history, the “Wicked” William, Lord de Soulis.
William de Soulis was Lord of Hermitage from 1318 to 1320 and allegedly spent those years terrorising the local population with killings and kidnappings. He was also said to be a wizard.
Soulis’s reputation was so foul that a marauding Northumbrian giant known as the Cout of Kielder who came to slay him was seen as a hero. Alas, the giant was lured into a nearby pool and drowned.
The giant’s alleged grave lies beside the ruins of the chapel but if it is indeed his, then he was a very little giant. The mound is less than 2.7m (nine feet) long and just high enough to stumble over.
Unfortunately the mound was scanned and revealed no trace of remains, giant or otherwise.
Since Soulis was invulnerable against common weaponry, a cunning plan was devised to get rid of him. A popular 18th century ballad recounted by Sir Walter Scott tells of how the outraged locals bound him with lead and boiled him alive in a brass cauldron upon the nearby Nine Stane Rig.
There seems to be some generational conflation at work here as Scott’s account almost certainly blends Soulis with an earlier Lord of Hermitage, Nicholas de Soulis, who was murdered by his servants in 1207. There is also the inconvenient fact that William de Soulis is on record as dying in prison at Dumbarton Castle in 1321 after conspiring with the English to assassinate Robert the Bruce.
As for the giant Cout of Kielder, “Cout” is a variation on “Chief” and less flowery accounts of the rivalry between him and Soulis describe him simply as a very large Northumbrian man wearing heavy armour. Rivalry between an English nobleman and a Scottish one is far less outlandish and more believable than tales of a drowned giant yet, I challenge anyone to wander the ruins of Hermitage Castle and say that strange shadows do not follow.