Hello and welcome to snowy cold winter stories of Scotland.

I'm Annie, wishing that I knew how to play a fiddle.

And I'm Jenny, trapped inside a fairy hill playing cards with

the badgers and doing surprisingly badly. Yeah, these guys are wily. Badgers are card sharks,

especially the enchanted ones. I wish I'd known that before I got locked in a hundred year game with

them. Today we've got a fun little festive episode up in the far, far north of Scotland.

We're hopping on the ferry to Shetland to meet the troughs.

How jolly!

For anyone who hasn't already met a trow, the English translation is roughly troll or hobgoblin. The troughs are cousins to the fairies or elves that we speak of quite a lot.

We also get fairy stories in Shetland and in the far north, but we don't see trows travelling much further south than Keith Ness, so their home is in the far north of Scotland.

They enjoy the rocky coasts and island way of life far too much.

I do like the idea of Trows coming down and visiting the mainland to see their fairy cousins for new years and for

Christmas and just being really impressed by the size of the roads but really against the roundabouts.

I mean, no one is full roundabout once they've visited the Highlands.

I can picture these trows dashing off the ferry excited to go to a mediocre chain restaurant that they've

been weirdly craving since it's not available on the islands. So basically just us when we go to the

central belt. The troughs are often described as being a little more down to earth than the fairies.

They're neither good or bad. They kind of just treat you how you treat them.

Well, that's rather lovely, isn't it? It's the kind of mythological character that we want to deal with.

Now we find trowes mentioned in songs, poems and stories,

and their behaviour is always unpredictable.

Trows vary from either being surprisingly helpful

...