How This Started

Dayligaun (say it Day-li-gawn) is an old Scots word for the fading of the light at the end of the day. Daylight, gone. It's the half-hour when the colour drains out of the sky over the Forth, the street lamps come on, and the stories start.

It felt like the right name for what we make. Our Ghosts aren't frightening. They're the kind you'd happily share a room with. But they belong to that hour, and to the old places where the light goes first.

There wasn't a grand plan. Edinburgh has centuries of ghost stories in its closes, kirkyards and old buildings, retold by every generation. We wanted to give some of those Edinburgh ghosts a form you could hold: small, handmade, and made to last.

Years of mould-making and casting gave us the skill to make them properly, by hand, to a standard worth putting our name to. A long interest in the stranger corners of Edinburgh's history did the rest.

Dayligaun isn't one person at a bench. It brings together makers, artists, historians and researchers, all drawn in by the hold these stories seem to have on anyone who spends long enough here.

People often ask if our Ghosts are pottery. They aren't. There's no clay in our workshop, and no kiln.

Every figure is cast in fine British casting plaster. We mix it by hand in small quantities, pour it into our own moulds and leave it to set. Once it's hard, each figure is lifted out, cleaned up and finished at the bench. Plaster takes fine detail beautifully and sets to a smooth, hard surface that holds colour well.

Colour is where East Lothian comes in. Around the workshop are hedgerows, field margins and coastal paths, and through the year we gather plants from them. Nettle came first. Weld, heather and bog myrtle are next. We draw the colour out of them ourselves and use it wherever we can. Sometimes the colour goes into the mix, so it runs right through the plaster. Sometimes it's added by hand once a Ghost is cast. It depends on the effect we're after. Plant dyes shift a little with the season and the harvest, so those batches carry something of the landscape they were made in. Some effects can only come from a man-made pigment or paint. For those we use the best we can find, and each product page lists exactly which dyes and pigments went into it.

Every finished figure is sealed with varnish, then polished with beeswax, to help hold its colour. Last comes the mark, debossed into the back of every Ghost, Shade and Revenant. It's the same crest you see at the top of this page, and the same mark since the very first we made. It's how you know one of ours.

None of Edinburgh's ghost stories belong to us. Burke and Hare, the Mackenzie Poltergeist, the piper under the Royal Mile: the city told these long before we arrived and will go on telling them long after. We just give a few of them a shape. An object, not a claim. No ghosts, real or otherwise, were harmed in the making of Dayligaun.

Some stories get their own proper write-up. You'll find the history behind them in Excerpts from the Archives.

Our first Ghost Drop is fifty numbered Ghosts, offered through the Register and in no other way. Archive Notice AN-2026-01 explains why we set things up like that before we'd sold a single figure.