WHO NEEDS NESSIE?
There can be no doubt that the most famous water-dwelling monster legend of our times is that which concerns Loch Ness in Scotland. For many centuries it has been alleged that a large, unknown creature lurks within the loch – a body of water so vast and deep that it is unlikely to ever give up its secrets. So much has been written about ‘Nessie’, the leviathan of Loch Ness, and yet to this day no one is any closer to proving whether such a beast exists at all. Even so, it is an endearing mystery set in the most wondrous and magical of locations, overlooked by the ruins of Urquhart Castle, visited every year by thousands of people. In 1996 I was one of those people fortunate to experience the early morning mist, inky black waters and a soundtrack of wheezing bagpipes. I was also amazed at how many tourists became excited by a distant splash or a strange shadow that seemed to loom across the mirror-like surface. I never saw the monster, perhaps because I don’t think it exists. I want it to in my heart, but in my mind, the creature that people claim to see is probably a visiting sturgeon, or maybe a large eel or even a big catfish. Of course, to call the enigmatic beast the Loch Ness Catfish would not sell t-shirts, mugs and toys, and so Nessie remains as something it cannot be – a long-necked dinosaur.
There are countless books written about the reputed creature of Loch Ness. Thousands of newspaper articles can be found if one chooses to search for them, and there are even claims that the beast may well have distant cousins in a few other lochs and lakes dotted around Britain. There are even lake monster legends from the other side of the world: the United States and Canada, Sweden, Norway, the list is endless. Of course, it is unlikely that the existence of these alleged monsters will be proven, and that’s probably a good thing because it means they continue to have that majestic aura about them. I really can’t see a freshwater angler reeling in anything more exciting than a big pike, or maybe an out-of-place Wels catfish or snapping turtle from a lake, but the seas around Britain and those vast, deep oceans of the world could be the place to hide real monsters. Way back in the first chapter I spoke about a few monster eel legends, but the monsters I’m going to be talking about in a moment are not simply overly large yet known species; no, I’m talking about beasts that could well be unknown to science.
Do sea serpents exist in Britain’s seas? (Illustration by Neil Arnold)
Legendary creatures said to inhabit lakes and lochs seem unlikely, but in the deep blue sea all manner of creatures could exist and, judging by some eyewitness reports, they do!
MORGAWR
The name ‘Morgawr’ may sound like some fetid demon from J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it is in fact something far stranger, or so people believe. Morgawr – Cornish for ‘sea giant’ – may be an anagram of ragworm, but it certainly doesn’t resemble one. Morgawr is a semi-mythical monster, akin to Nessie, said to inhabit the waters around the coast of the West Country, particularly Cornwall’s Falmouth Bay. Sightings date back a couple of centuries and some people claim to have even photographed the beast. The most famous cluster of sightings of Morgawr took place in the mid-1970s; a strange time for the area as UFOs seemed to be buzzing the local skies and a frightful creature named Owlman (see my book Shadows in the Sky) was seen at Mawnan Old Church a few miles from Falmouth.
In the September of 1975 a Mrs Scott and her friend Mr Riley observed Morgawr off Pendennis Point. They described the monster as approximately 20ft in length and having a humped back and a long neck. The monster was said to have dived into the depths then resurfaced with a conger eel in its mouth. Shortly afterwards, mackerel fishermen saw the creature and at the start of 1976 reports flooded in. A majority of these were chronicled in a peculiar little pamphlet called ‘Morgawr the Monster of Falmouth Bay’, which was written by Anthony Mawnan-Peller. This small work has often been regarded as nothing more than tomfoolery and legend, but it still acts as a brief and quirky guide to the legend.
Mawnan-Peller wrote in 1976:
A hundred years ago a long-necked monster was caught by fishermen in Gerrans Bay. Fifty years later, a Mr Reese and a Mr Gilbert, trawling 3 miles south of Falmouth netted an amazing creature. It was 20-feet long, with an 8-foot tail, a beaked head, scaly legs, and a broad back covered with matted brown hair.
In most cases, witnesses described something akin to a plesiosaurus, a prehistoric creature that became extinct millions of years ago. The plesiosaurus, despite existing in the Jurassic period, is very much alive today according to some researchers. For them, there can be no other creature in the ocean to explain the sightings of a long-necked beast; but can such an animal have eluded science and extinction for so long? It seems highly unlikely that even in the most remote parts of the world dinosaurs still exist, and yet we cannot dismiss every eyewitness report.
In the February of 1976, the Falmouth Packet newspaper published two very intriguing photographs, claimed to have been taken by a lady calling herself Mary F. The photos appeared to show a large, dark, humped beast rising from the waters off Trefusis Point, at Flushing. The monster, if it was a monster, had the typical long neck and small head one would associate with a plesiosaurus. The photographs seem to show some ‘thing’, but whether it is an animate object or not we will never know. One thing is for sure: whatever it appears to be, it seems too far out of the water to be a creature. Still, it added to the mystery of Morgawr.
The other major problem, as mentioned by Anthony Mawnan-Peller, was that there appeared to be a lack of consistency in the reports of the creature, which stated that its ‘length varied from 12 to 45-feet’. One report, made by two businessmen in the May of 1976, described two creatures at the mouth of Helford River. This particular spot became known as ‘Morgawr’s Mile’, as most of the sightings seemed to take place on the coastal stretch from Rosemullion Head to Toll Point. Mawnan-Peller also states that in the January of 1976 there was a sighting of Morgawr made by a dental technician, who described seeing a large, dark hump in the water, which he took to be a whale until the long neck rose out of the water. The witness claimed the beast was almost 40ft in length and, around the same time, a holidaymaker claimed to have seen a similar thing.
A majority of lake and sea monster sightings around the world seem to describe a large, dark hump in the water that resembles an upturned boat. Some researchers who have analysed photographs, occasional pieces of film footage and spoken to eyewitnesses believe that these monsters may in fact be sturgeon – especially in the case of the Loch Ness critter. Sturgeon do not grow to 40ft in length, but it is known that eyewitness reports are often inaccurate, especially when judging size of an object from a distance. There are some twenty-six species of sturgeon and some of the largest can grow to almost 20ft in length. A majority of sturgeon prefer freshwater, which could explain the sightings in Loch Ness of an ‘upturned boat’, but such fish rarely venture beyond coastal areas and certainly do not have long necks.
Another suspect put forward to explain sea serpent sightings is the conger eel. However, eels do not reach much more than 9ft. A 210lb conger eel has been caught off Falmouth waters so maybe, just maybe, eyewitnesses are getting it wrong. Over the years, several differing species of whale have turned up on Devon and Cornish beaches. For instance, on 17 February 2010 a 17m-long fin whale was seen floating on the surface of the water at north Cornwall, and a few days later the creature was found beached at Porthowan, some 37 miles away from the first sighting. On 14 May 1998, an amazing spectacle was witnessed when more than 500 basking sharks appeared off Cornwall’s coast at Kennack and Coverack. The plankton-eating sharks, some measuring up to 35ft in length, may have been taking advantage of the unusually warm water.
Is it possible that in the mid-1970s witnesses, caught up in the Morgawr hysteria, had seen a species of whale or shark in the distance and wrongly identified it? Okay, so maybe we can sweep all those sightings under the carpet, but what about the strange sighting that took place in the autumn of 1944 and involved fishermen, the sort of people who should know their whale from their eel? On the website www.mevagissey.net, there is a fascinating account that describes an encounter with Morgawr off Fowey Point. The best thing about the sighting, apart from the actual incident involving the monster, was that a short while previous the fishermen in question had observed a whale a quarter of a mile off starboard.
Later that night, the crew had begun to haul in their nets when suddenly the boat seemed to bump on a large wave that had come from nowhere. The four fishermen, almost losing balance, stared into the blackness of the water when suddenly, just 12ft away, an object appeared. ‘A 3 to 4-foot diameter object with a ball-like head came straight out of the water and rose to a height of some 12-feet above the water’s surface,’ one fisherman stated: not the behaviour of a sturgeon, eel or whale. The creature, or whatever it was, seemed to breathe hard and then with grace slipped back vertically into the depths, rendering the witnesses silent until they returned to shore, realising that no one would ever believe their story. Five years later, on 5 July 1949, a Mr Harold T. Wilkins, accompanied by a friend, saw two plesiosaur-like creatures at East Looe, Cornwall. ‘What was amazing,’ Mr Wilkins exclaimed, ‘were their dorsal parts: ridged, serrated, and like the old Chinese pictures of dragons.’
Falmouth Bay – home to a sea serpent or two? (Neil Arnold)
On 1 August 1999 a Mr Holmes, who had worked for the Natural History Museum for some nineteen years, was visiting Gerrans Bay, south-east of Truro in Cornwall, with his wife. Mr Holmes was equipped with his video camera and had been filming his wife swimming in the water when he caught sight of a ‘fin-like’ object, which emerged 200m offshore. Initially, Mr Holmes thought the creature was a shark, until he zoomed in and realised that the ‘fin’ was in fact a neck. Just behind the neck a rounded back, measuring approximately 7ft in length, could be seen breaking the surface of the water, and atop the neck was a reptilian head.
The creature eventually disappeared below the depths. When John took his video home and watched it back, he was again stunned by the form. Eventually, he showed it to various marine biologists: one expert ventured that it may have been a distressed oarfish, but all essentially said that, whilst unusual, the footage was too blurry to determine. Oarfish are bizarre-looking fish, which could explain some mistaken sea serpent sightings. They can grow up to 56ft and are the longest bony fish said to exist, but they prefer tropical waters and are rarely seen. Even so, beaching does occur when the fish is sick or dying. In 1866 a 15ft-long oarfish washed up dead on England’s north-east coast at Seaton Crew, near Hartlepool in Cleveland. The creature was stuffed and put on display at Redcar’s Kirkleatham Old Hall museum and can now be found at the Gray Art Gallery in Hartlepool. In 2003 a 3m specimen was also caught off Cleveland, and in 1981 one was found washed up at Whitby in Yorkshire.
In 2002, two experienced seamen – Dan Matthew and Mike Bedford – had two separate encounters with a creature that couldn’t have been an oarfish. Dan Matthew, cox for the St Piran patrol boat, was on a small vessel in the vicinity of Maenporth at 10.30 a.m. on 8 May, when he noticed something ‘weird’ in the water up ahead. ‘As we got to within 100 yards,’ reported Matthew, ‘its neck was completely out of the water, but when it saw us coming its neck fell from a vertical position and made quite a big splash. It was grey/black in colour.’ Matthew was literally stunned by what he had seen, concluding: ‘I’ve boated in the Fal for many years and I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve seen lots of dolphins and whales, but it wasn’t either of those?’
Amazingly, four days later, a chief engineer aboard the same patrol boat got talking to an elderly fisherman, who told him that on the same day as Matthew’s sighting he was a mile north of Manacles when he had seen an object resembling a large fin, but some 3ft in length, protruding from the water. ‘It was too big for a basking shark,’ he reported; so what was it? If people were seeing a plesiosaurus, or something of a similar nature in the waters around Cornwall, then the descriptions didn’t always seem to match the classic Morgawr reports.
Could sunfish be held responsible for some of the Morgawr ‘fin’ sightings? The ocean sunfish is an unusual-looking fish that can weigh over 2,000lb. It spends most of its time in tropical and temperate waters, and is recognisable by its long dorsal and ventral fins. On 25 July 2006, BBC News reported that some nineteen sunfish had been spotted off Cornwall’s south-western tip. ‘We only spotted the sunfish lying on their side at the surface,’ reported Dr Brendan Godley, a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter Cornwall Campus. ‘This is the first time we have spotted them during our surveys.’ The fin of a sunfish would certainly confuse a lot of people as it protrudes from the water.
In the September of 1995 the West Country papers were all in a fuss over more Morgawr sightings. During this period, one Gertrude Stevens was at Golden Bank, in Falmouth, when she saw a small head atop a long neck just 60yds away. She described the monster as around 20ft in length with a conical body narrowing towards the tail. The beast then sank out of sight. The latest sighting had triggered the memory of several other witnesses who came forward to speak of their encounters with the Cornish sea giant. On 10 July 1985, for example, a Dr Eric Bird, accompanied by his sister Sheila, spotted the creature off Porthscatho on a very calm evening. They also reported the creature to be approximately 20ft in length and having a ‘long muscular tail visible just below the surface’. The same year, Carrie Ham spotted an object resembling an overturned boat in the Helford River but was shocked when a long neck emerged from beneath the water.
According to Fortean Times magazine, ‘One of the most celebrated sightings was by Falmouth fisherman George Vinnicombe in 1976.’ He also reported seeing an upturned boat-like object some 30 miles off the Lizard, and then the head and neck appeared, convincing the witness it was something out of the ordinary. In the same year Doc Shiels, a local magician and showman, had his sighting of Morgawr, but he was hesitant in reporting his experience to the newspaper as he thought that coming from a theatrical background may have led people to believe he had made the whole thing up. Even so, Mr Shiels’ wife Christine contacted the Falmouth Packet because she, too, along with her children, witnessed the creature, which she described as a ‘large, dark, long-necked, hump-backed beast moving slowly through the water, then sinking beneath the surface’.
On 11 August 1976 one Patrick Dolan, whilst sailing from Falmouth to Kinsale in Ireland, spotted a ‘worm-like’ object some 30 miles north-north-west of the Scilly Islands. ‘The neck was about 8-feet out of the water,’ he said, ‘it [the creature] was about 40-feet long and propelled itself with an undulating movement … I must have had it in my vision for about twenty minutes.’
With so many sightings of Morgawr being reported over the years, sceptics have asked why there isn’t more film or photographic footage of the beast. Considering the amount of people who were visiting the coast armed with video cameras and the like, should there not be more?
On 17 November 1976 David Clarke, from Cornish Life, visited Helford River with Doc Shiels. Mr Clarke wanted to take some photographs of Mr Shiels with the water in the background, and so they went down the cliff path to Parson’s Beach. After taking several photographs, Doc noticed something out in the water, which resembled a small, dark-coloured head, and so several photographs were taken. Sadly, they remain inconclusive to this day. As author Graham J. McEwan wrote: ‘the frames were double and triple exposed’ due to the slipping of the wind-on mechanism of the camera.
On 27 July 2010 a long-necked sea creature was reported off the Devon coast. Witness Gill Pearce took several photos of the object and reported her sighting to the Marine Conservation Society (MCS). The creature appeared 20m or so off Saltern Cover Bay, at Goodrington (bringing to mind Richard Freeman’s story from the first chapter regarding the monster eel) and moved with a shoal of fish. A spokesman for the MCS commented, ‘It was reported as a turtle as it had large flippers and what appeared to be a shell, but was also said to have a small head on a thin neck about 2ft long which craned above the surface like a plesiosaur.’ An electrician named Graham Oxley also reported seeing the creature in the bay: he said it measured some 10ft in length and was black in colour. The MCS spokesman added: ‘The lady thought it might have been a turtle but turtles don’t catch fish, so at the moment it is “unidentified”.’
Had this been the same creature bothering Cornish waters for more than a century, or was there a more down-to-earth explanation? In 1993 the legend of Morgawr had become so popular amongst locals that a mechanical sea beast named Morgawr was built and put on display as an attraction at Land’s End. Whilst Morgawr had embedded itself into local legend, just like Nessie in Scotland, there seemed to be more to the Cornish beastie than just folk tales. Cryptozoological researcher Jon Downes, who spent many years investigating the Morgawr phenomenon, came across a fascinating story from the 1970s that a majority of people had overlooked: Anthony Mawnan-Peller wrote of a ‘Strange (and so far unidentified) carcase … discovered on Durgan Beach, Helford River, by Mrs Payne of Falmouth.’ Jon added: ‘This account has been quoted extensively in books about the subject, but few bother to report the aftermath of the story.’
It seems that, a short time after the discovery, a teenage amateur naturalist named Toby Benham contacted the press to state that the bones were not from a sea monster but from a whale that had been brought in on the storm tides. According to Jon:
For the past five years the skull had apparently been in the art department of Toby’s old school in Falmouth. Eventually we [The Centre For Fortean Zoology] managed to contact the teacher Mr Brown and were told we could photograph the skull whenever we wanted … but we wanted more.
Jon asked Mr Brown if they could borrow the skull of the ‘monster’ for analysis, to which the teacher obliged. Upon seeing it, Jon realised straightaway it was indeed from a whale.
Of course, for every mystery solved, another puzzle emerges. Prawle Point, a coastal headland in south Devon, was reached in July 1912 by the German vessel Kaiserin Augusta Victoria and at the helm was a Captain Ruser. On 5 July at 6.30 a.m., it was reported in the ship’s log that a creature, measuring some 20ft in length and of the appearance of an eel, had been seen splashing the waves violently with its tail. Captain Ruser commented that almost all of the monster’s body was visible (just like in those strange photographs taken by ‘Mary F.’). The previous year a serpent in the region of 60–90ft in length with brown-green skin was observed at Westward Ho!.
In 1934, the Western Morning News featured a report of a 10ft-long, 6in-thick ‘monster’ seen off Whitsand Bay, but the description very much resembled a large eel. It had been observed by a Mr Gunn who, along with three other people, was relaxing on the beach between Tregantle and Freathy when a black object – which they at first took to be a log – appeared in the water some 50yds away. The object then turned and headed towards the shore, moving how a ‘caterpillar crawls’. The witnesses were convinced the beast was not an eel, and the closest creature they could match it to was a boa constrictor snake. The following year, a huge black creature was seen off Port Isaac, on the Cornish north coast. It was said to have been almost 50ft in length.
‘But where are the sea serpent bodies?’ I hear you cry. Interestingly, the West Briton – a weekly Cornish newspaper of 1876 – covered the story of the capture of a ‘sea serpent’, which was found alive and tangled around a buoy by some fishermen who were pulling in their crab pots. They were around 500yds from the shore when they saw the creature, which they struck with an oar. When they finally dragged it ashore it was finished off and thrown back into the sea!
The legend of Morgawr is never likely to fade. Every time an unusual object is seen off the Devon or Cornish coast, it will become part of Morgawr folklore. However, the most intriguing aspect about this particular sea giant is that a majority of eyewitness reports seem detailed when compared to a majority of rather vague wakes, plops and splashes associated with Nessie and other water-dwelling monsters.
Two types of sea serpent are reported by witnesses. (Illustration by Neil Arnold)
The thought of a plesiosaur or two roaming Britain’s coastal waters still doesn’t sit right with me, but then again, what else can be put forward to explain such sightings? In his classic book In the Wake of Sea Serpents, Belgian zoologist Dr Bernard Heuvelmans proposed that the multi-humped monsters being seen could well be primitive whales, thought to have been extinct for 30 million years. But those witnesses who have observed Morgawr have never been of the opinion that they’ve seen a type of whale. One obscure option is that such beasts are mere phantoms; ghostly apparitions roaming an ethereal sea and still appearing to those susceptible enough to witness them. Maybe the theory isn’t so crazy when we consider the amount of reports concerning spectral ships, ghostly sailors and the like; and so until a carcass is found and scientifically analysed, or conclusive enough film footage emerges, I guess every theory is plausible, however ridiculous it may seem. And it is not as if these monsters are unique to Devon and Cornish coasts: indeed, judging by the next batch of reports, sea monsters are all around Britain.
CURIOUS CREATURES OFF THE KENT COAST
Mr Andrew Drew, in a letter to the International Weekly Journal of Science, wrote:
On Monday, August 5th 1879 a number of geologists crossed in the Folkestone boat to Boulogne, to study the interesting formations of that neighbourhood, and, when about three or four miles from the French coast, one of these gentlemen suddenly exclaimed, ‘Look at that extraordinary object passing across the bow of the steamer, about a mile or a mile and a-half in advance of us!’.
The crew looked where the man was pointing and saw ‘an immense serpent about a furlong in length, rushing furiously along at the rate of 15 or 20 miles an hour’. The object was described as being black in colour with a paler behind, and its elongate body appeared on the surface of the water.
The Kent coast doesn’t feature heavily with regards to sea serpent sightings, but it does still feature. One of the earliest reports comes from 1912 when a Mr Stone and two other witnesses observed a creature with a long, sinuous body off St Margaret’s Bay, near Dover. Five years later in the July of 1917, a monster was reported to have been seen off Ramsgate. According to a W.H. Lapthorne, in an article submitted to Bygone Kent magazine (Vol. 6, No. 9, 1985), the monster was witnessed by the crew of ‘an armed drifter’, which had been ‘attached to the famed Dover Patrol’. The boat had been cruising between North Foreland and Margate when a look-out on the boat shouted that a large snake-like creature had appeared up ahead. The witness, startled by the monster, described it like ‘some gigantic conger eel about 15-feet in length, with a long scaly body, a large spiny dorsal fin and dark olive green in colour’.
Strange serpents have been reported off the coast near Dover. (Matt Newton)
As the vessel neared the serpent, the captain ordered his men to fire (which seems a little unusual) and the sixth shell struck the dorsal fin of the beast, causing it to violently thrash about in the waves before sinking in a frothing whirlpool of its own crimson. However, that was not the end of the saga. In 1957 a similar incident took place, this time off the Sussex coast, when some of the local fishermen began to speak of a strange monster out at sea that had destroyed their nets. Those that caught a good enough glimpse of the serpent claimed it was some 50ft in length and bore a large scar on its fin. Was it the same serpent? Then, in 1968, a creature was seen off Seaford, suggesting that maybe a family of these leviathans were loitering off the south-east coast.
In 1934 there were reports off Herne Bay of a 20ft-long monster that had been pursued by motor boats. Even travelling at 40mph, they could not catch the sea beast. A big crowd gathered on the seafront to watch the chase. Some described the serpent as having a dark back but a yellow underside and that, as it arrowed through the waves with an undulating motion, bathers ran for their lives. Sixteen years later in 1950 at Cliftonville, between Margate and Broadstairs, a similar creature was seen by a John Handley. Mr Handley, a Londoner, had visited the seaside resort in the July and was swimming in the cool waters near to the Libido Baths when there was a strange disturbance in the water. Just 200yds away a ‘2ft long head with horse’s ears’ emerged from the water. Mr Handley panicked, swam back to shore and never once looked back. Another woman who was sunbathing confirmed what Mr Handley had seen, but neither could identify what the creature was.
In 1999 I was contacted by a Mr Wire who told me of a spectacular incident off the Kent coast. He said:
I was fishing off Folkestone Pier with a fellow angler when in the distance we saw a black object. I looked through my binoculars and saw a huge animal that I can only describe as a sea serpent. The creature was roughly 100-feet long and seemed to be diving and then resurfacing. We both watched it for about 30 minutes and it was so ridiculously large that I laughed and did not tell anyone else about it. The animal had a long neck, moved very slowly and looked all the world like the Loch Ness monster plesiosaur that people talk about. It was massive.
Is there any way Mr Wire could have been mistaken? Despite their stories of ‘the one that got away’ anglers usually know their species pretty well, but then the Kent coast has had some unusual visitors over the years.
On 14 April 1998, two teenage boys thought they had discovered the carcass of a sea serpent at Greatstone-on-sea, near Romney Sands. Peter Jennings and Neil Savage were strolling along the beach looking for anything unusual when they stumbled upon an 8ft-long decomposing body. The creature still possessed a skull, a series of large vertebrae and rotting body tissue. The story was featured in the Kentish Express of 19 April and the Folkestone Herald on the 23rd. The boys told neighbour Peter Fender about their find, who in turn told the Herald: ‘It’s a bit of a mystery. The dead creature is dark yellow, and has stripes running the length of it.’
The reporter wrote: ‘Mr Fender said it was too big, with a thick spine, to be a conger eel. It is thought the body has been on the beach for a while. It is falling apart, with the tail missing – and it smells.’ Zoologist Karl Shuker examined the pictures of the creature in the newspapers, and in his ‘Alien Zoo’ column for Fortean Times magazine, he commented:
As soon as I saw the photos I realised that the carcass was strikingly similar to the famous Hendaye sea serpent corpse of 1951 – conclusively identified by Dr Bernard Heuvelmans as that of a basking shark. All of the telltale features were present – the cottonreel-shaped vertebrae, the long triangular snout, and most distinctive of all, a pair of slender curling ‘antennae’ projecting from the snout’s base. These are in fact the rostral cartilages which, in life, raise up the shark’s snout.
Of course, basking sharks don’t grow to 100ft in length so did Mr Wire, an experienced fisherman, unknowingly see a whale? In the December of 1763 a whale (species unspecified) measuring 56ft in length was found washed ashore at Seasalter, near Whitstable. Other reports from the time suggest it was 36ft long. Even so, a sperm whale measuring 61ft is recorded from Broadstairs a year previous. Another sperm whale turned up at Whitstable in 1764 at and was said to have measured 54ft in length with a girth at its widest point of 38ft. The Chatham Standard of 29 July 1980 commented on the 36ft-long dead whale discovered by anglers at Yantlet Creek.
Whales have certainly been known to come further inland, with numerous sightings over the years in British rivers. The River Thames has seen a few, as has the River Medway; the most unusual being the narwhal that was found at Wouldham Creek in 1949. The narwhal, measuring more than 13ft, was a rare find as such creatures are normally found in Arctic waters, and this beast had only been the fifth of its kind found in British waters in more than four centuries. Mind you, the weirdest creature, and the closest thing we’ve had to a monster in a Kent river, was encountered in the 1940s in the Medway: when the Pocock family gave chase to a 40ft-long form resembling a ‘monstrous eel’ that evaded capture and seemed immune to bullets. In 2008 the Medway Messenger reported on a similar serpent seen swimming up the Medway towards Strood. If such a monster can loiter in rivers then the sea would be a far more likely lair to hide in, and so it is very likely that, whatever it was, it must have come from the North Sea.
To list even a small portion of unusual (albeit known) visitors caught, found dead or sighted around British waters would be a monumental and exhausting task, and so we must stick to those ‘monster’ stories and head off to the Scottish coast.
SCOTTISH SERPENTS
Over the years, there have been several reports of alleged serpents in Scottish waters. One of the first ever recorded was in the June of 1808 at Coll, in the Outer Hebrides. A Mr McLean, parish minister of Eigg, wrote to a Dr Neil, secretary of the Wernerian Society, to discuss his encounter, which then appeared in the Transactions of the Wernerian Society. In his letter, Mr McLean wrote that that whilst rowing along the coast he ‘observed, at about the distance of half a mile, an object to windward, which gradually excited astonishment’. The monster appeared at first as a ‘small rock’ until it elevated itself above the sea, revealing a large eye. So stunned was the witness that he made sure to steer clear as the beast eyed his boat then plunged with a disturbance into the depths. Mr McLean rowed hard for sure, worried that the animal, or whatever it was, was now on his trail. This was confirmed when ‘as we leapt out on a rock … we saw it coming rapidly under water towards us.’
As the serpent reached the shallower waters, it raised its mighty head and then headed off out of sight. Just what type of creature had Mr McLean witnessed? He described a beast bereft of fins that moved with an undulating motion – certainly unlike a whale – and its size was some 70–80ft in length, unlike that of an eel! Mr McLean also mentions in his correspondence that, whilst off Canna, some thirteen fishing boats had seen a similar brute; with one crew member describing the head of it as the size of a small boat and the eyes the size of dinner plates.
In his book Sailors, Sea Serpents & Sceptics, Graham J. McEwan lists many Scottish serpent sightings. He includes one from 1822 from the ‘Scottish coast’ that was allegedly observed by a ‘friend of Sir Walter Scott’ but, according to McEwan’s table, the next sighting doesn’t come until the 1850s when a Mrs M’Iver observed a long-necked creature at Greiss Bay, in Sutherland. This sighting was mentioned in the Evening Telegraph of 24 January 1893 under the heading, ‘The Great Sea Serpent’. The report speaks of a Mr W.H. Russell who, in writing ‘to the Times’, speaks of visiting Mrs M’Iver in 1851 and receiving a detailed eyewitness statement of the encounter. According to the witness, the creature had been seen in the little bay causing great alarm to the fish population until eventually heading out to sea, where fisherman apparently shot and wounded the poor creature. After this incident, the beast headed toward the shoreline where it proceeded to haul at least 8ft of its body onto the ground. There it rested until the boats came close, and then it slid into the depths.
The most amazing aspect of the encounter, however, was that the serpent left behind some scales, described as ‘about the size and shape of a scallop shell’. Mrs M’Iver was said to have been in the possession of some of these scales. The article also goes on to mention another monster sighting, this time from the shore of Dunrobin, as witnessed by a Revd Dr Joess and a Lady Florence Chaplin.
In 1872 there were several sightings around Scotland of a serpent. The Inverness Courier commented that:
In the present case, the limit in which the animal has been seen on our coast, is Lochduich to the north and the Sound of Mull to the south, only about a fifth of the space between Cape Wrath and the Mull of Kintyre; and it is in that part it should be most looked for.
In the August of that year the Revd John McRae (Minister of Glenelg, Inverness-shire) and the Revd David Twopeny (Vicar of Stockbury, Kent) reported to the Zoologist that, on 20 August whilst travelling in a small cutter from Glenelg to Lochourn, they, as well as two women and a young lad on board, observed a serpent on a perfectly still and sunny day. At first the monster appeared as a ‘dark mass about 200 yards astern of us, to the north’ but was then followed by another hump, and then another. The creature moved very slowly across the water, then was gone. The next moment, the first ‘mass,’ which they took to be the head of the creature, reappeared, followed by more humps that suggested the rest of the body. ‘There was no appearance of undulation,’ reported McRae and Twopeny, who estimated the creature to be some 45ft in length. The serpent came to within 100yds of the cutter and its crew, much to the alarm of some of the witnesses, but the monster then headed off towards Skye.
The following day the serpent – as the creature was believed to be – was seen again. This time it was sunning itself in the rays and looked to be considerably longer. More sightings of the serpent followed. ‘We were inclined to think it perhaps might be attracted by the measured sound of the oars,’ McRae and Twopeny wrote, concluding in their letter that, ‘The public are not likely to believe in the creature till it is caught and that does not seem likely to happen just yet …’. A day or so after these extraordinary sightings others claimed to have seen the monster, particularly in the Loch Duich area.
In 1873, on 17 September, a Dr Soutar reported seeing a serpent at Golspie, Sutherland. In 1886 there had been another sighting of a serpent in the sea loch of Duich, whilst in 1893 a Dr Farquhar Matheson and his wife were sailing one afternoon in the Kyle of Lochalsh, off the north-west coast of Scotland, when they observed something rise out of the water some 200yds ahead. The neck and head resembled that of a giraffe and was brown all over, and despite being in view for a mile or so, the witnesses eventually lost sight of it.
During the early 1900s there were more serpent reports in Scottish waters. One night, three fishermen were off the Isle of Skye when one of them observed a large object that rose out of the water some 50yds or so ahead. The two other fishermen – who hadn’t yet seen the creature – began pulling on the nets, hoping to haul in a decent catch. When they caught sight of the serpent, however, they dropped their nets in the water and made for the shore with haste. On a summer’s day in 1910 a Mr W.J. Hutchinson had a similar experience. He was out shooting wildfowl with his father and cousin in the vicinity of Meil Bay in the Orkneys when, as they were sailing towards the Skerries, they saw several whales thrashing in the water, as if in distress. Suddenly, the long neck and huge body of a creature appeared out of the water, terrifying the men who did their best to avoid the leviathan. Mr Hutchinson reported that they had a good view of the creature, which was only just over 100yds away, and that its neck rose some 18ft out of the water.
In 1910 three men witnessed a serpent in the vicinity of Meil Bay in the Orkneys. (Glen Vaudrey)
In the August of 1935 it was claimed that a sea serpent had washed ashore at the small port of Girvan, on the west coast of Scotland. The anomaly was said to measure some 35ft in length and had skin covered in bristles. Archie and Gwen Wilson, who saw the decaying lump, reported: ‘We saw the thing laying on the beach close to some rocks; it was horrible to look at, like some eerie relic from our past.’
Sceptics often dismiss reports of sea serpents and state that if such creatures existed then surely we’d find remains. This is untrue when we look at the giant squid, which, for all its size, rarely turns up on beaches across the world let alone in fishing nets. Some forms that do wash up on coastlines decay quickly: a creature such as the basking shark, when decomposed, has a bodily structure that resembles a plesiosaur. Many people can thus become confused when seeing animal remains, especially when they are not used to seeing such disfigured and pungent blobs. In July 2011 several newspapers reported that a sea monster carcass had been found at Aberdeen. A dog-walker stumbled across the rotting carcass, commenting: ‘It’s nothing like we’ve ever seen before. It almost looks prehistoric.’ Of course, the remains were not from some type of dinosaur or dragon; with Rob Deville, marine life expert from London Zoo, commenting that the body was probably of some sort of whale.
There are numerous cases on record of strange animals washing ashore in Britain. Some of these are alien species not native to our waters, but in the case of alleged serpents it is always important to go with the consistency rather than jump to conclusions; all other angles and species must be eliminated first before any talk of serpents can be taken seriously. A prime example of media sensationalism occurred with the case of the Canvey Island ‘monster’, found washed ashore in Essex in 1954.
On 13 August 1954 the local press ran the headline, ‘Fish with feet found on beach’, after a Revd Joseph D. Overs claimed to have discovered the creature. The newspaper article, accompanied by a photo of the ‘monster’, stated that the fish was more than 4ft in length and that underneath its stomach could be found two feet, each having five toes. Sadly, this was another case of witnesses having no knowledge whatsoever of nature. The fish was nothing more than an ugly anglerfish. Bizarrely, some authors and researchers who looked into the story – without actually researching it adequately – sketched their own interpretations, resulting in several hilarious mutants, which didn’t in any way, shape or form resemble the creature that had washed ashore.
In Issue 245 of Fortean Times (February 2009), a Mr Gary C. Hammond wrote in and stated that, ‘Cold and deep are ideal water conditions for anglerfish and Canvey holds the British record for a shore-caught angler, some 68lb, caught in the Sixties.’
In 1990 a peculiar creature was found washed ashore in Benbecula in the Hebrides. A Louise Whitts, aged 16 at the time, discovered the 12ft-long carcass and took a photograph of it. Bizarrely, Louise never presented the photograph to an expert and mislaid the item until 1996, when she finally took it to the curator of the Hancock Museum in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. According to the curator, a Mr Alec Coles, no marine biologist, botanist or zoologist could identify the furry remains, which to this day remain a mystery. The creature became known as the ‘blobster’ of Benbecula. The story took a rather unusual twist, however, with Louise commenting: ‘It was beside some land owned by the Ministry of Defence and there were big notices all over the place saying that if people found anything on the beach they were not to touch it.’
In 1954 an alleged monster washed up on the shore at Canvey Island in Essex. It turned out to be an anglerfish. (Neil Arnold)
Was the hairy carcass some type of secret experiment gone wrong or, like so many other potential serpent carcasses, nothing more than a badly decomposed whale or other known species? To this day the photo remains intriguing (I understand the last place it was on show was in the Hancock Museum).
On 26 June 1908, the Daily News ran the incredible story of the crew of the steamship Balmedic, who had dredged up a strange skull north of Scotland and taken it to Grimsby. The skull suggested an animal roughly the size of an elephant, but with huge eye sockets and a leathery tongue some 3ft in length. The Grimsby Telegraph of 29 June reproduced a photo of the skull. A Mr Pycraft, from the British Museum, stated that he had never seen anything like it before.
Although not quite a serpent, one of the most fascinating catches to be recorded took place on 17 April 2001 from the waters of Kinlochbervie, Sutherland. A halibut measuring 8ft in length was caught by James Lovie, skipper of the trawler Enterprise, and after being weighed (topping the scales at 20 stone!) it was sold to a fishmonger in Aberdeen. This particular fish was more than twenty times the size expected. The biggest fish ever caught off British waters, however, was a sturgeon hooked off Orkney in 1956 and weighing 50 stone! If one of these was to wash ashore and rot, I imagine all manner of strange stories pertaining to serpents would circulate.
On 25 September 1808, a serpent carcass was said to have been discovered on the island of Stronsay, north-east of the Orkneys. The carcass was found at Rothiesholm Head after a local man noticed a large amount of seabirds fussing over something on the shore. As he neared the beach in his boat, he realised that some type of carcass was on the rocks and it appeared to have a long neck and a body length of over 50ft. When the gales blew the corpse to the shore, it was revealed that the skin of the creature was grey and six limbs extended from its body. The neck was over 10ft in length and the head, resembling that of a sheep, had the eyes of a seal.
The remains stayed on the shore and rotted to nothing, but some researchers who looked at the case believed that the monster was nothing more than a basking shark. If this was the case then the measurement of over 50ft is a mystery in itself, because the longest basking shark recorded measured 40ft (caught in nets in Canadian waters in 1851). The average adult reaches lengths of between 20–26ft, so if the Stronsay carcass was simply a basking shark, it was still a monster of one!
On 18 November 1873, a sea serpent was observed in the Firth of Forth by more than 120 witnesses, who described a gigantic, eel-like creature. In 1882 the Glasgow Herald of 2 June told the story of a serpent seen off Shetland, 28 miles east of Fetlar. The monster was said to have measured over 150ft in length with a head covered in barnacles. The whiskers on the face alone were said to be 8ft long! Witnesses on board a boat named Bertie claimed that the creature was making straight toward the vessel and ‘had blown’, but not like a whale. The witnesses could see the wide, gaping mouth – a mouth big enough to have swallowed the boat. Thankfully, the serpent merely followed the ship rather than deciding to take a bite out of it. Eventually, so unnerved were they by the presence of the pursuing creature that the crew showered it with stones, it nevertheless only gave up the chase some three hours later. When the witnesses came ashore, they spoke of their encounter and a while later were called upon to give sworn statements.
Alleged sea serpent carcasses have been washed up on the beaches of Britain. In most cases, they turn out to be nothing more than badly decomposed known animals. (Illustration by Simon Wyatt)
On 13 September 1959, a shark fisherman and his friend saw a strange creature in the waters off Soay. One would have thought that the witness, a Mr Tex Geddes, would have been used to seeing large fish, but on this occasion he could only describe the beast as ‘some hellish monster of prehistoric times’.
His colleague, a Mr Gavin, confirmed, reporting:
the head was rather like that of a tortoise with a snake-like cranium running forward to a rounded face. Relatively it was as big as the head of a donkey. I saw one laterally placed eye, large and round like that of a cow. When the mouth was open I got the impression of large blubbery lips and could see a number of tendril-like growths hanging from the palate. Head and neck arose to a height of about 2ft. At intervals the head and neck went forward and submerged. They would then re-emerge, the large gaping mouth would open (giving the impression of a large melon with a quarter removed) and there would be a series of very loud roaring whistling noises as it breathed.
What type of monstrosity had Mr Gavin and Mr Geddes seen? Mr Geddes added, ‘The head was definitely reptilian, about 2ft 6in high with large protruding eyes. I would say we saw 8 to 10 feet of back on the water line.’
A number of witnesses reported seeing a serpent in the Firth of Forth in July 1939. The beast was described as having a horse-like head and large eyes. Eight years previous, a man and his teenage daughter were cycling along the beach at the Isle of Arran when they saw a large, upturned boat-type of object lying on a rock out in the water. The curious witnesses approached the object but were shocked when it moved and revealed a head and set of eyes, which were glaring at them. The beast ‘wobbled’ and plopped into the water, leaving a huge wake. The witnesses described the monster as greyish in colour, heaving a parrot-like head with a strange beak. The general size of the creature was estimated to be that of a large elephant. So stunned were they by their encounter that the witnesses wrote a letter to the Glasgow Herald, although it was not featured.
In 1953 at the Firth of Clyde, a fisherman reported seeing a 30ft-long monster. This was not the first time a serpent had been seen there: in 1935 fishermen observed a creature with a long neck in the vicinity of Great Cumbrae.
In 1962 a dog-walker watched in horror as a bizarre beast slithered into the water off Helenburgh, Glasgow. Two years later, two naturalists spotted a serpent through their telescope as it swam in waters off Shuna and the following year, in 1965, one of the most unusual monster sightings took place in the Tayside region, when motorists travelling east of Perth on the A85 claimed to have seen a sea monster on the side of the road! Add this to another fifty or so sightings from around Scottish waters and we have a strong case to suggest there is something lurking in the coldest depths, which is not recognised by science.
The main problem with such reports, however, is that due to lack of evidence they are very quickly relegated to folklore, alongside dragons and the like. Legends of dragons are very much harder to swallow for some, but as a mythical creature the fire-breathing sky serpent of folklore has most certainly embedded itself into British history. One such tale concerns the Arbroath behemoth, which many foggy centuries ago was said to have killed and eaten many villagers before returning back to the depths of the sea. One rumour, which began to circulate at the time, was that local fishermen had caught one specimen – albeit a small one – in their nets, put it into a metal cage and taken it to Dundee, where it drew in the crowds like moths to a flame. Of course, like in all good Hollywood movies, the dragon eventually escaped and wreaked havoc on the area, killing many before it was chased back to the sea. En route, it managed to devour many fishermen and crush their fragile boats. A great story indeed, but it seems that, over the years, the serpents of our seas have calmed down somewhat.
WELSH WONDERS
Wales could well be considered the monster capital: its folklore is drenched in tales of fairies, sprites, giants, mermaids and, of course, dragons. There is something so enchanting about Wales; maybe it is the deep valleys and the remote peaks that overlook those rolling hills. It gives a sense of magic; a sense that there is still a place within the British Isles that could offer us a secret, or hide a monster.
On 3 September 1882, a group of people were standing on the pier at Llandudno looking across the sea when they spotted something unusual in the region of Little Orme’s Head. The object was travelling at some speed toward the Great Orme, suggesting it was about a mile away from the witnesses. An F.T. Mott, as recorded in Nature, stated: ‘It is estimated to have been fully as long as a large steamer, say 200ft; the rapidity of its motion was particularly remarked as being greater than that of any ordinary vessel.’ Whatever it was, it had a jet-black colouration and was ‘snake-like with vertical undulation’.
In 1805 the crew of the Robert Ellis watched in awe as an ‘immense worm’ followed in hot pursuit in waters between Anglesey and the mainland of Caernarfon. The creature swam so quickly that it soon overtook the ship and was said to have climbed aboard via the tiller-hole. Then, like a snake, it coiled itself under the mast. One crew member was said to have attacked the creature and somehow, instead of battering it to death, they forced it back to the water. Even so, the beast was back in hot pursuit until the ship changed course and pulled away from the critter. Seventy years later, a 12ft-long object, black in colour, was seen by staff at the Minydon Hotel, Anglesey. The creature was spotted at the west of Red Wharf Bay.
Sea serpent legends are rife on the Welsh coast. (Simon Wyatt)
Stories of Welsh serpents are not just confined to foggy archives, though. In the August of 1963 a man holidaying at New Quay, Dyfed, on the west coast of Wales, was stunned to see a 30–40ft-long object that disturbed a seal colony. The description of the monster seemed to match that of a plesiosaurus, with the long neck, small head and a dark body propelled by four flippers.
On 2 March 1975 at Barmouth, six schoolgirls (all aged 12) were walking along the beach at dusk when they saw a 10ft-long monster about 200yds away. The creature had a long neck, green eyes and a long tail. The creature was also on the beach and heading off towards the sea. Around the same time, other visitors to Gwynedd reported seeing strange things out at sea and there was also the discovery of big footprints on the sand. Had this been some elaborate hoax or was there a sea serpent coming ashore?
Barmouth certainly has a history of serpent sightings. In the summer of the same year, a husband-and-wife team were sailing in their 30ft-long sloop 5 miles off Shell Island, when they saw a creature in the calm water. ‘As we drew closer we thought it was a huge turtle,’ remarked one of the witnesses, ‘but it turned out to be unlike anything we’d ever seen.’ Although the neck was short like a turtle, the creature was in the region of 11ft in length and 8ft across. Maybe the couple had in fact seen a turtle. Leatherback sea turtles are the fourth largest modern reptile and the largest of the sea turtles, and can grow to around 9ft in length. Coincidentally, the largest ever found was a specimen of over 9ft, found in Wales on the west coast. It weighed 2,020lb!
Is this the skeletal remains of a sea serpent found on the Welsh coast? No, it’s just an unusual rock formation. (Found and photographed by Simon Wyatt)
In 2009 a serpent of sorts did come ashore, quite literally. The Daily Mail of 5 August reported on the ‘Revolting Dr Who sea monster that terrified tourists’, after the discovery of a 6ft-long creature, which had washed ashore on the Gower Peninsula. Hundreds of people were said to have flocked to see the ghastly beast and the press had a field day, despite the fact the tubular manifestation was nothing more than a ‘seething mass of goose barnacles’. It was likely that, somewhere beneath the mass of barnacles there was a piece of driftwood that the barnacles had attached themselves to, but this explanation did not stop children from having nightmares about it!
Mind you, the Gower Peninsula has featured in many serpent sightings over the years. In his book Gower Journey, author A.G. Thompson mentions seeing a 30ft-long creature whilst standing on a cliff overlooking the bay. The monster had the head of a horse, complete with a mane. After staying in view for a short time, it dived into the abyss.
In the March of 1907 some fisherman were trawling off the Bristol Channel when they claimed to have seen a 200ft-long serpent that had four fins, each as large as a sail. On a smaller yet equally strange note, The Field of 23 May 1847 reported on a ‘Strange Fish’ caught alive at Holyhead Bay. The creature, although just 9in long, was said to be ‘conically shaped’, bereft of fins and scales, and sporting two large eyes. The ‘fish’ had feelers as long as its body and, according to the source, ‘It neither resembled a lobster, crab, nor any kind of shell fish seen on the coast. It is quite a curiosity.’
A baby sea serpent, anyone?
IRISH MONSTERS
In Irish lore there are said to be all manner of sea-, lake- and river-dwelling monstrosities: from super otters to horse eels, and from serpents to dragons.
In 1871 a member of the clergy observed a creature with a horse-like head off the coast of County Clare. Are we to disbelieve a man of the cloth? The monster had a mane of hair and glassy eyes. Was it in any way related to the serpent seen on 26 April 1907 off County Cork? At the time a Sir Arthur Rostron, chief officer of the Campania, which was coming in to Cobh, reported a sea monster that was only 50ft from his boat. The head of the creature then raised some 9ft out of the water. Rostron sketched the monster and passed it on to a Commander Rupert T. Gould.
On 31 July 1915, a British ship named the Iberian was torpedoed in Irish waters. Legend has it that amongst the debris a monster resembling a crocodile was seen. As the boat exploded, the creature was flung into the air: a cracking story, but most probably nothing more than a hoax. Or maybe not! A couple of decades later a Captain Hugh Shaw and his crew observed a black, shiny, long-necked animal in the River Shannon in Ireland. The creature appeared close to the boat and then turned to head upstream. Several more witnesses observed the monster.
In their book Mystery Animals of Ireland, researchers Gary Cunningham and Ronan Coghlan list several sea monster sightings in reference to the Emerald Isle. According to them, on 20 May 1950 the Nenagh Guardian reported on a strange sea creature seen a century previous between Dundalk and Sutton in Dublin Bay. It was witnessed by two men, surnames Walsh and Hogan, who whilst sailing at 6.30 p.m. spotted a creature heading towards Howth. The head of the animal resembled an eel but it certainly wasn’t one for, according to the men, the beast measured over 100ft!
In the same year, a 30ft-long creature was observed in the Bay of Kinsale as it scratched itself against a beacon! Only the shot of a rifle startled it: the monster jumped into the air with a start and came back down with an almighty splash.
There are many monster legends from Ireland, such as the one from the area of Lough Swilly, an inlet of the sea at County Donegal, which apparently is named after a creature from the Middle Ages. The creature – named Súileach – was said to have many eyes and so was probably nothing more than mere fantasy. County Donegal is, nevertheless, still known for its monsters. As the Rochester Gazette & Weekly Advertiser of 12 January 1836 reported: ‘[the] huge monster of the deep that recently cut the fishing-boat across whereby three men met an appalling death off St John’s Point ….’ Shortly after the incident, the beast was found dead on the shore. Described as ‘one of the largest ever seen in this country’, when opened up it had a ‘young one’ inside measuring 10ft. Sadly, the newspaper does not give too many details, but I am of the opinion this may be some known species of sea dweller, especially considering that ‘the produce of the fish will be applied to the relief of the families of the unfortunate sufferers’. I’m sure that, had this creature been some unknown serpent, it would have been photographed or put on display somewhere rather than eaten.
Finally, contrary to popular belief, sharks can be seen around the coast of Ireland. For instance, in 2008 several basking sharks were noted off Cork, and one was later found dead on the shore. Then, in 2009, the Irish Times reported ‘Half-ton shark caught off the Clare coast’, after a 70-year-old man hooked a six-gill shark. The following tale suggests that stranger things are afoot, however. The Field of 13 October 1855 records ‘Sharks on the coast of Ireland’. It states:
The fishermen of the coast declare that they have seen several of these monsters of the deep on the coast of Achil Head and Clare Island. Last week a boat proceeding from Achil towards Newport laden with turf, and having a crew of two men and one woman, was suddenly capsized, and the woman was drowned, the men having held on by the boat; the peasantry declare that the boat was upset by one of those leviathans of the deep, and that the woman was carried off.
MORE SEA SERPENTS
Space here does not permit an exhaustive list of British sea serpent reports, and so I’ll now present to you instead a clutch of my favourites.
The county of Dorset is steeped in folklore and, according to researchers Mark North and Robert J. Newland, ‘one such monster was discovered on Weymouth Sands in October 1752’. The beast was said to have measured over 50ft in length. The monster was then cut up and ‘expected to make 120 hogsheads of oil’ suggesting it was actually a whale.
In the early nineteenth century, it was recorded that a serpent washed ashore at Chesil Beach. The monster had a long neck and a snake-like head but, despite a lot of interest, the creature turned out to be a camel! Even so, in his Holinshed’s Chronicles of 1577, Raphael Holinshed recorded:
In the month of November 1457, in the Ile of Portland not farre from the town of Weymouth, was seen a cocke coming out of the sea, having a great creast upon its head and a red beard, and legs half a yard long: he stodd on the water & crowed foure times, and everie time turned him about, and beckened with his head, toward the north, the south and the west, and was of colour like a fesant, & when he had crowed three times, he vanished awaie …
And so was born the surreal sea chicken of Dorset!
According to North and Newland, a ship carrying several French monks observed a monster sporting five heads, which flew in the direction of Christchurch. The beast then proceeded to torch the abbey with its fiery breath.
Chesil Beach in Dorset – a monster is rumoured to frequent the waters here. (Mark North)
Dorset’s most popular sea monster, though, is said to be called the Chesil Beach Monster after a handful of alleged sightings off Chesil Cove, Portland. In 2009 the Dorset Echo reported on ‘A monster effort for Weymouth carnival’, after craftspeople at Weymouth College constructed a replica of the monster, who is said to be called Veasta. The unusual name veasta is believed to derive from the old Dorsetshire dialect, meaning ‘feast’. Sightings of the monster date back a handful of centuries and in 1996 a stone monument depicting the beast was erected outside the Ferry Bridge Inn, Weymouth, although the stone seems to resemble a seahorse rather than a serpent.
The county of Sussex, as briefly mentioned in the Kent section, was once said to have harboured a sea serpent. Dragon folklore is rife within the county but tales of sea serpents are few and far between, and those that are mentioned seem extremely dubious. On Good Friday 1906, solicitor Charles Dawson claimed to have sighted such a leviathan in the company of three other people, as it swam in the Channel. The witnesses were on board a steamboat journeying from Newhaven to Dieppe between two and three o’clock when Dawson, through a pair of strong opera glasses, sighted an object some 2 miles away that he at first described as a ‘cable-like object struggling about’. Two other people then observed the form and whilst it never revealed a head or tail, it presented itself as a series of hoops. Dawson, in a letter dated 7 October 1907 to his friend Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, of the British Museum, commented: ‘I judged that the hoops were fully 8-feet high out of the water and the length 60 to 70-feet …’
Dawson fetched his wife and she, too, observed the serpent until it faded into the sun’s rays on the horizon. Although this story didn’t properly come to light until 1955, those who knew of the yarn believed it to be a hoax, possibly due to the fact that Dawson – an amateur archaeologist – had perpetrated several previous hoaxes.
One Sussex-related sea anomaly that has intrigued me for many years concerns the case of the Sussex shark, which was sighted in shallow water off Brighton during the September of 1785. The creature was spotted by a man swimming: it allegedly approached him at speed but its toothy attack fell short and the beast ended up beaching itself. Within minutes locals had surrounded the shark and, with hatchets and a variety of other weapons, bashed, hacked and slashed it to death. Then, upon opening up its stomach, they discovered the head of a man.
The shark – said to have been a tiger shark – measured 12ft in length, and its appearance caused great panic for many years after. According to The Times of 6 August 1802, ‘Nothing of the kind has been heard of since.’ Researcher Paul Chambers, who wrote of the incident for Fortean Times magazine in December 2009, stated that if this indeed was a tiger shark then it was a most unusual case, as such a fish is ‘predominantly a warm water species whose nearest proven occurrence is in the Bay of Biscay, France’. One such specimen was reported from Cornish waters in the late 1960s, and so it seems that, although rare, finding such a species around Britain is not impossible. There is a possibility, of course, that the shark that ‘attacked’ the swimmer wasn’t a tiger shark at all, but something more docile like a basking shark. Sadly, due to the quick intervention of the locals, we will never know for sure.
Another, albeit mythical monster said to haunt Sussex is the kelpie, or water-horse. As reported at Rye in 1926, a courting couple were dog-walking across a misty field when they heard the sound of galloping hooves heading towards them. When they peered into the gloom they saw a horse-like creature with wild staring eyes that then thundered past them. The male witness was so intrigued that he sent the dog after it, but the animal refused to follow and so the man decided to chase it. He then watched in amazement as the monster bounded over a high fence and leapt into a murky pool. To see such a beast is a bad omen; as L. Grant in his A Chronicle of Rye states, ‘The kelpie is a sly devil, he roars before a loss at sea and frightens both old and young upon the shore.’
Such a beast has also been seen cavorting along the beaches, which are situated just 2 miles from the village. This brings to mind a tale concerning what became known as a ‘thunder horse’ in the folklore of Scarborough in north Yorkshire. The appearance of the monster was recorded in Chronicon de Melrose, compiled by the monks of the Cistercian Abbey of Melrose. The hideous creature was said to have appeared during a great storm over York in 1065 and was seen ‘always flying towards the sea to tread it underfoot’, accompanied by a terrible soundtrack of booming thunder and crackling lightning. The great horse was said to have left an enormous impression on a mountain at Scarborough, before plunging into the foaming sea.
Off the Northumberland coast there has long been legend of a sea monster called the Shony. The Vikings used to live in fear of such a creature, as it was known to lurk beneath ships in the hope a sailor or two might fall overboard into its waiting jaws. The Shony has always been the stuff of local superstition and was even blamed for several strange deaths recorded from the twelfth century. Those souls brave enough to venture across the causeway between Northumberland and Holy Island would, according to folklore, be picked off by the bloodthirsty monster. In one incident, several bodies were washed ashore and an inspection revealed that the eyes and innards of the victims were missing. Of course, there is a possibility that the unfortunate dead had suffered such appalling mutilations after being smashed onto the razor-sharp rocks, whilst crabs, and then birds, may have scavenged on the eyeballs. Yet, as is the case of so much other folklore, it is far more enthralling to seek a more dramatic, and in this case monstrous, explanation.
The Shony loiters in the darkest depths of the North Sea, but has reportedly been seen off Marsden Bay more recently. On 17 August 1906 the Sunderland Echo spoke of a ‘Bather’s alarming experience’ after a man, noted for his swimming ability, had been in the waters off Seaburn when he was struck by some unseen form, which briefly paralysed his right arm. Whilst nobody ever found the cause, the Shony was held responsible. The following year, on 14 September, the Western Daily News covered the story of ‘The Sea Serpent’ with a letter from an A.C. Mason. It stated that, whilst in the company of a friend perched upon the rocks of Gulla Stern Cove, Tintagel, they saw a ‘black object’, which moved through the calm water. One theory put forward was that the sightings were of ribbon fish, also known as oar fish, but I’m unaware of black specimens.
Researcher Mike Hallowell, in his excellent book Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Northumberland & Tyneside, records several encounters involving the Shony. One incident concerned the crew of a steamer named the Black Eagle, who in 1946 spied a long head and neck that raised some 6ft out of the water. Several crew members set out in a motorboat but the creature eluded them. In 1998, Mike Hallowell thought he, too, might have seen the creature. On 11 August he, his wife and his father were travelling in the direction of Whitburn on the coastal road when Mike and his wife, looking out across the water, observed a dark hump that broke the surface and then slowly plunged back into the deep. When Mike arrived home some time later, he found out through the local Shields Gazette that the object may well have been a bottlenose dolphin, but the mystery didn’t end there. Mike then received a call from a friend who said that, whilst in the local fish and chip shop, he had overheard two men arguing about the identity of a creature, which one of the men claimed was big enough to have swallowed the dolphin that everyone was talking about.
Interestingly, the Western Isles has a Shony, too. In the folklore of the Isle of Lewis the Shony was a god of the sea, and locals would wade into the sea and offer up a jug of ale, in the hope that the seaweed for the coming months would be abundant so as to enrich the ground.
In the December 1750 edition of The Gentleman’s Magazine, there is mention of a sea serpent being seen off the Norfolk coast. The report reads:
The creature was about 5-feet long from what could be viewed of it above the water, with a head like a dog and a beard like a lion. The skin was spotted like that of a leopard. It passed in a leisurely fashion finally disappearing beneath the waves to the great amazement of all those watching from the shore …
Some have theorised that this serpent may well have been a leopard seal – a highly aggressive predator usually found in Arctic waters but also known off Australia, Tasmania, South Africa and New Zealand. The body of a leopard seal is dark grey but the throat area is spotted.
In 1912 an animal that clearly wasn’t a leopard seal was sighted by Lilias Haggard who, in a letter to her father, author Sir Henry Rider Haggard, commented: ‘I happened to look up when I was sitting on the lawn, and saw what looked like a thin, dark line with a blob at one end, shooting through the water at such a terrific speed … I suppose it was about 60-feet long.’ One of the more recent sightings of the serpent occurred in 1978 when a holidaymaker taking a stroll on Kessingland beach was astonished to see the head – which resembled a seal – of a large, many-humped creature that disappeared into the depths after a few seconds.
In 1931 there was a report of a monster off the Suffolk coast. The sighting was made by a woman named Sybil M. Armstrong who, whilst accompanied by her children’s governess and cook, saw a dark object at a distance of 400yds moving through the calm water. The serpent appeared, like so many others, to have many humps trailing behind a head.
On 1 March 1934 the Daily Telegraph ran the headline ‘Coastguard meets monster by night’, after an astonishing sighting of an unknown creature ashore at Filey in Yorkshire. The witness, a coastguard named Wilkinson Herbert, was walking along the rocks at Filey Brig on a moonless night when he heard the strangest guttural growling up ahead. Mr Wilkinson flicked his torch on and came face to face with a huge neck that reared up some 8ft into the air, and two saucer-like eyes that glared down at him. The startled witness had the sense to shine his torch toward the body of the creature and realised it was some 30ft or so long. So horrified was he that he threw a handful of stones at the monster, causing it to groan and slowly move away. The fiend then plopped into the sea, its eyes reflecting the torch beam brightly. Whatever Mr Wilkinson had seen, it was no ordinary creature. ‘I have seen big animals abroad,’ he exclaimed, ‘but nothing like this.’
Weirder still, the sighting seemed to bring other local folklore legends to life. For many years there had been a legend that a dragon had perished in the local waters and its great bones became the rocks that now sit at Filey Brig.
The seaside town of Skegness in Lincolnshire also has a serpent legend. In 1966 a Mr Ashton was walking along the seafront at Chapel St Leonards when, at a distance of 100yds, he spotted a snake-like head trailed by several humps moving through the water. A few decades previous, a Mr R.W. Midgeley reported seeing a monster during holidaying in Trusthorpe. Whilst peering over the sea wall, he was startled to see a creature some 400yds from the water’s edge. Again, there were the semi-submerged hoops, which Midgeley saw before it sunk without a trace.
In 2002 an amateur palaeontologist found the skeleton of a 4m-long ‘monster’, south of Filey. The bones of a plesiosaur dating back to the early Cretaceous period were protruding from the base of a cliff and they caught the eye of Nigel Armstrong from Doncaster. According to plesiosaur expert Mark Evans, this find was a rather unique one. He remarked, ‘We know about early plesiosaurs from the Jurassic period and ones from later on in the Cretaceous, so this new specimen fills a gap in our knowledge very nicely.’
Serpents have been reported off the Thames Estuary, too. One such beast was recorded in 1923 in an area known as Black Deep, which had been closed to shipping for some eight years. The crew of a ship called HMS Kellett, captained by F.D.B. Haselfoot, described seeing a long neck that rose out of the water some 200yds away. As recently as 1993 a creature with a long neck was seen at Leigh-on-Sea by several witnesses.
An unusual creature washed up on the Norfolk coastline in the eighteenth century. (Joyce Goodchild)
Do prehistoric survivors roam the waters around Britain? The jury is still out until a fully formed specimen turns up on shore or in the nets of fishermen.
MERMAIDS FROM THE BLACK LAGOON
The mermaid is a creature embedded in legend and a fantastic being, which, alongside the unicorn and the dragon, remains one of the most celebrated of mythical figures. But what are we to make of the alleged encounters with these denizens of the deep?
Let us hop into a time machine for a moment and drift back to the year 1204, to the small Suffolk town of Orford. It was here that a legend began of a strange humanoid that was caught up in the nets of a fishing boat. Many people gathered on the quay to observe such a hideous spectacle – a wild man of sorts that had come from the depths. The body of the being was covered in hair but its head was bald, and so bizarre was this catch that the governor at the castle was informed. The creature made its way to the castle and was met by the governor, who had the docile creature shackled and secured within the castle dungeon. Despite being housed in such grim conditions, the wild man showed no malice and was happy to feed off fish. Eventually, he was given freedom to roam the castle, although some of the servants and guards on duty were uncomfortable with this and rather appalled by the creature. The fact that he had no way of communicating didn’t endear him to the locals, either.
Ultimately, so much friction was caused between the governor (who had grown fond of the wild man) and his staff that those in opposition to him began to bully, prod and provoke the creature. When the governor was away, the Orford merman was taken outside and beaten. Upon his return, the governor declared he was disgusted at such behaviour and became even more intrigued by the beast. He was said to have even taken the merman to mass.
The novelty of the wildman gradually wore off for the governor, though, and the lack of response to his teachings made him feel frustrated. So the governor decided to section off an area of the water where his subject was first captured and allow the hairy creature to return to its watery abode, whilst still being able to monitor it. This plan relieved the castle staff and some of the locals but one afternoon the wildman escaped through a hole in the netting and swam out to sea. Some claim he continued to loiter in the waters around Dunwich cliffs – maybe the creature had become fond of his new surroundings – but gradually the sightings decreased and the merman of Orford became a legend.
The Mermaid – fact or folklore? (Illustration by Simon Wyatt)
Was a mermaid killed and buried in Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides? (Terry Cameron)
There are so many stories of mermaids and mermen, and even tales that claim there have been many interactions between them and humans over the years. Another popular mermaid story comes from Benbecula, which has been mentioned previously in this book. In 1830 a peculiar creature was spotted off the island of Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides by a group of people cutting seaweed. The figure, which appeared to be female in form, was cavorting in the waves, seemingly comfortable with the human presence. Several of the male witnesses decided that they would try to capture the being. The creature – a classic example of a sprightly mermaid – eluded its pursuers until some children began to throw stones at it; one of which struck the creature on the head, causing it to sink into the depths.
Sadly, a few days later the mermaid washed ashore in Nunton some 2 miles away. People gathered round to view the weird specimen that was described as having the upper portion of a well-fed 4-year-old child, but sporting an abnormally developed breast. The skin of the creature was very pale, the hair upon its head long and dark, and the lower part of the body resembled that of a salmon but was bereft of scales. In the volume Carmina Gadelica it is recorded:
Mr Duncan Shaw, factor for Clanranald, baron-bailie and sheriff of the district, ordered a coffin and shroud to be made for the mermaid. This was done, and the body was buried in the presence of many people, a short distance above the shore where it was found.
The actual spot of the grave has never been found. An alleged headstone found in Cuile Bay proved to be nothing of the sort, but it is possible that the mermaid story may have been fabricated to give the lonesome stone some meaning. Others, in speaking of and researching the legend, claim that the grave is elsewhere, such as the graveyard of the Chapel of St Mary, east of Cuile Bay. Many of Benbecula’s inhabitants have been laid to rest in the churchyard so maybe the mermaid was, too. Whatever the truth is, the story of the Benbecula mermaid is classic folklore, though we wish it was more. Maybe there is a grave to be found – but even those who actually believe the story are to some extent of the opinion that the creature was possibly a deformed child or some strange animal.
In the late 1700s there was a mermaid encounter on the Highland’s north coast at Sandside Bay. On 8 September 1809, The Times featured the eyewitness account of schoolmaster William Munro who mentioned how his attention had been drawn to a nude female sitting on a rock out at sea. The figure seemed to be combing its hair; the light brown hair floating on its shoulders. After watching the figure for a few minutes, the witness was shocked when it dived into the sea. Strangely, in the 1800s a mermaid with a monkey-like appearance was seen by six fishermen and a naturalist off the island of Yell, which is part of the Shetland Islands. The being became entangled in their lines and when observed was described as being about 3ft in length with the top half resembling a human, although the face was like that of a monkey and the lower half of the creature was of a fish and grey in colouration. The creature lay before the stunned witnesses, who noticed how it seemed to surrender to them, emitting a low moan, before the men released it back into the sea.
Mermaids have allegedly been captured quite often. In the 1800s a Captain Eades exhibited one such form in a London coffee house and made good money out of the shrivelled specimen until it was revealed, after some debate, to be a fake. Many alleged mermaids put on display in the last 200 years have certainly been nothing more than ghastly products of the human hand. Such creatures are usually an amalgamation of a monkey (top half) and a large carp (bottom half) fused with wires and papier mâché. These forms may have lost their ability to shock but they have fooled people for many years. In early 2012 I came across a photo of an alleged mermaid that was said to have been housed in a public house in Gillingham, Kent. The Evening Post featured several letters from readers in the January of 1969 claiming that such beings were real, with one man demanding that a mermaid had been witnessed by his father who was serving with the Royal Navy in the South Sea Islands. The mermaid had been killed and floated to the surface after a depth charge had been dropped.
In the 17 January 1969 edition of the Evening Post a Mr Keightley wrote in, stating that he once owned two photographs of mermaids originating from 1931. ‘One photo shows a male merman,’ he wrote, ‘beside a fishing vessel, and a female, and on the boat a youngster.’ The letter provoked a fiery response from a Mrs Bonneywell, who stated quite matter-of-factly that mermaid legends had simply spawned from encounters with dugongs and manatees, which are large marine mammals. Even so, on 21 January a C.R. Taylor wrote to the newspaper, saying they had seen a stuffed mermaid some forty years previous in Gillingham Park: ‘the head was partly covered by wisps of red hair, the teeth were pointed and the eye sockets very round. It was rather repulsive … 20-inches long’. It was owned by a man who had a private collection of similar curiosities.
On 28 January a Mr Tubby added his two-pence worth, stating that the ‘man fish is a man hoax’ and that such specimens were constructed by the ‘Chinese in Shanghai about 1920/30 and sold to tourists’. This was confirmed on 3 February when a Frederick Sanders mentioned another exhibit in a Chatham pub. These types of wiry oddities seemed far removed from the angelic-looking sirens of folklore, which were said to sit atop rocks and lure sailors to their deaths.
In Dorset folklore there is mention of a mermaid being washed ashore on Cogden Beach, Burton Bradstock in 1757. It was seen by a local historian, Revd John Hutchins, who in his 1774 volume The History And Antiquities of Dorset wrote:
A mermaid was thrown up by the sea, between Burton and Swyre, 13-feet long. The upper part of it had some resemblance to human form, the lower was like that of a fish; the head was partly like that if a man, and partly like that of a hog. Its fins resembled hands: it had 48 large teeth in each jaw, not unlike those in the jaw bone of a man.
Above the delightful Church Ope Cove there once sat the Mermaid Inn, which is now a private residence. The pub sign showed a rather voluptuous-looking mermaid leaning seductively on a rock. This sign commemorates an incident that was said to have taken place in 1756, when a mermaid washed ashore and eventually died. As Mark North and Robert J. Newland point out, however, ‘this incident must have happened many years ago, for the church was abandoned in July 1756 and now lies in ruins.’
The Orkneys have several mermaid legends: one such tale comes from the 1890s at Newark Bay, where a frequent visitor to the shoreline would be witnessed by hundreds of locals as it frolicked amongst the waves. In the same century, in 1833, an Arthur Nicholson wrote that, in the company of three other men, he had hooked a mermaid whilst fishing 30 or so miles off Cullivoe on the Shetland Islands. The creature, said to have measured 3ft in length, ‘had breasts as large as those of a woman’ but the ‘whole front of the animal was covered with skin, white as linen, the back with skin light-grey colour, like a fish’.
In 1913 another mermaid was sighted off the south coast of Hoy and was observed by the crew of a fishing boat who had seen the figure rise from the depths of Pentland Firth. At Burra Firth, Unst, in the Shetlands, it is said that two giants named Herman and Saxie fell in love with a mermaid. She, however, could only offer herself to one, and then they disappeared out at sea never to be seen again.
At Busta there is a fantastic mermaid legend concerning Thomas Gifford, who was said to be the richest man in Shetland. One afternoon in 1748, his four sons were in a boat rowing to the inlet of Busta when suddenly the boat stopped. The men looked at each other in worry and muttered a prayer, and were thankful when the boat began to move again. But suddenly all the men present became entranced by three creatures, which swam astern of the boat and then faded out at sea. The next day, three of the men climbed back into the boat to visit a relative. The fourth man, who was scared by the previous night’s encounter, had refused to go with them and said he would ride his horse instead. However, when it transpired that his horse had vanished overnight, he agreed to set sail with his brothers. Shortly afterwards all four men drowned when the boat swayed violently and capsized, despite the fact it had been a calm day. Had this been a mermaid’s curse?
Sign from the now demolished Mermaid Inn in Dorset. (Mark North)
Church Ope Cove – a mermaid was said to have washed ashore here a few centuries ago. (Mark North)
In the county of Caithness there is a tale, often told, of a local fisherman who fell in love with a mermaid. So besotted with the man was the fish woman that she bestowed upon him many jewels, which in turn he gave to human females he admired. Naturally, this upset the mermaid who, as an act of revenge, took the man to a cave where she was said to hide all the treasure that had come from wrecked boats. The man greedily eyed the stash but as soon as the mermaid began to sing to him he fell asleep. When he awoke he found himself chained up in the cave and eventually died. Whatever you do, do not mess with a mermaid!
In the village of Port Gordon, situated on the Moray Firth in Banffshire, there is a remarkable story that dates back to the 1800s. It concerns a group of fishermen who were frequently pestered by a warty, green-haired merman who they considered to be an omen of ill luck. Every time their boat set sail they would see him, and so troubled by his presence became the fishermen they headed back to the shore; always suspending their trawl for another time.
In 1900 a Scotsman named Alexander Gunn saw a mermaid at Sandwood, the local haunt of a ghostly seaman. He was walking his dog when he noticed his pet beginning to act oddly: she started to growl and it was then he saw was a beautiful woman with reddish hair. Upon being disturbed by Mr Gunn, the woman threw him an angry look and dived into the water.
In 1947 a fisherman saw a mermaid in the sea off the Island of Muck. The mermaid was perched on a herring box combing her hair and again, plunged into the depths when disturbed.
In Irish folklore it is claimed that the Cantillon family of Kerry would take their dead, in coffins, to the shores of Ballyheigue Strand. There they would be left until nightfall, when the sea beings came and took the casket to the bottom of the sea. These types of stories bring to mind the Finn Folk of the Northern Isles who, appearing as beautiful mermaids, would lure handsome young men to their watery abodes.
In Wales there is a fascinating yarn attached to Conway Bay, for it is here that a mermaid was found washed ashore by several fishermen. She asked them, kindly, to take her back to the water but they did not act in accordance with her wishes, and so before she died she placed an eternal curse on the area, which has been blamed for several fish famines.
In July 1826 a Welsh farmer from Llanllwchaiarn had taken a stroll to the coastline, which was only a few hundred yards from his house, when he noticed under the glow of the setting sun a woman who was washing herself in the sea. The farmer thought that it must be a local woman and so, out of politeness, turned his back on the woman. After a while the man, with curiosity getting the better of him, decided to creep down past the rocks to get a better look at the woman, whereupon he realised she was in fact a mermaid. So excited was the witness that he crawled back up the rocks to tell his family. They all then descended the path and watched, until the man’s wife got too close and the mermaid, seeing her, dived into the water. The family saw her several times after this, but on most occasions she stayed out at sea, grooming herself near a rock before disappearing beneath the waves.
In the booklet Myths & Legends of Wales, Tony Roberts states that the most likely place to see mermaids is Pembrokeshire. Many years ago, a fisherman from St Dogmaels was fishing off Cemaes Head in his boat when his attention was drawn to a movement at the base of one of the cliffs. To his amazement, he saw a mermaid combing her hair and so decided to float his vessel softly alongside and then apprehend her. The fisherman dragged the mermaid aboard but, according to folklore, she begged the man to let her go in fluent Welsh. Of course the fisherman, now with the catch of his life, was reluctant but she granted him three wishes in an hour of need if he would release her, to which he finally agreed. One day when the fishing was particularly bad the man was surprised to see the mermaid, who shouted to him to take up his nets. Moments later a terrible storm broke out, forcing him back to shore. Several other fishermen drowned that day because they were not privileged enough to hear the warning.
Is that a mermaid on a Welsh beach? No, it’s a piece of driftwood. (Found and photographed by Simon Wyatt)
In 1791 a farmer, Henry Reynolds of Pennyholt, had a startling encounter with a Pembrokeshire merman. He spotted the creature at Linney Stack and noticed how it had pale skin and the tail like that of a conger eel. The figure was washing its hair and so Henry decided to go back and get his friends but by the time they returned, the merman had gone.
In 1934 there was a very eerie encounter at Holy Island, Northumberland. It involved two fishermen, Bob Armstrong and Jackie Stokes, who, whilst out fishing in their small boat, noticed several figures seemingly walking on the water. In the distance, under the eye of the moon, there appeared to be several men, women and children floating on the surface of the water. Were these figures ghosts, finally given up by the sea, or had the fishermen observed a family of merfolk?
Cornwall has quite a few mermaid legends. The most well known originates from Zennor, a village and civil parish in the county. The story goes that for a few years, albeit sporadically, a beautiful woman would visit Zennor church and each time she returned she had never seemed to age. A local man became enchanted by her, and vice versa, and he followed the mysterious woman out of the village and was never seen again. However, one afternoon a boat had cast its anchor off Pendower Cove when a beautiful mermaid rose out of the water to tell the captain that the anchor had in fact dropped on a secret door in the sea that gave her admittance to her abode where her children waited for her. The captain gladly raised the anchor but was quick to gather his men and move the vessel away from the spot, knowing full well that to see a mermaid was considered very bad luck. Ever since that encounter a carving has existed in Zennor church as a warning to the young men of the future.
Mermaid legends seem to have an element of repetition about them: in most yarns they are considered bad omens and in many cases the fishy females grant wishes, should the witnesses help them. Another of those types of tales comes from Cury in Cornwall, where it was once said that a man observed a creature sitting on a rock in a cove near Lizard Point. The mermaid asked the man if he could help her back to sea and, as he obliged, she granted him one wish. The man said that he wished he could help his neighbours and so, with that, the mermaid told him to return to the spot at another tide and she would give him her comb. All the man had to do was comb the waves and this would evoke the mermaid. So, when the man returned to the area he combed the waves and the mermaid appeared, and not only granted him his wish but gave him a gift for detecting stolen goods and an ability to ‘charm disease’.
This, dear reader, is where I leave you. Thank you so much for accompanying me on this strange voyage, I hope you have enjoyed these nautical tales of terror. No doubt, like so many fishermen’s yarns, they are exaggerations, but be careful not to dismiss all of these stories so hastily. By all means take them with a pinch of salt, but to scoff at such folktales may at once invoke the wrath of your local mermaid! The sea is very much a wondrous abode for folklore to dwell, but it is also a place of power, which instils great fear. It is because of this deep, inner dread of the roaring waves that we appreciate and crave the maritime mysteries of Britain so much.
This ‘serpent’ skull, believed to be that of Cornish sea giant Morgawr, turned out to be from a whale. (Jonathan Downes)
The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.
Vincent van Gogh