IN THE WAKE OF MORAG
Australian cryptozoologist TONY HEALY looks back to the summer of 1979, when he spent four months on a Scottish lake monster safari to Loch Morar and Loch Ness.
In an extract from his much-delayed memoir, Australian cryptozoologist TONY HEALY looks back to the summer of 1979, when he spent four months on a Scottish lake monster safari. Here, he recalls his time on the bonny banks of Loch Morar in search of its elusive resident.
Remote, beautiful Loch Morar is 11 miles (18km) long, up to one and a half miles (2.4km) wide and at least 1,050ft (320m) deep – the only lake in Britain deeper than Loch Ness. Although several dozen sightings of a Nessie-like creature known as “Morag” have been recorded there since 1887, Morar’s monster tradition is nowhere near as welldocumented as that of the larger loch. The comparative lack of data might be due to the sparseness of the area’s population: only half a dozen cottages overlook the loch, and its shoreline is touched upon briefly by only one narrow road. Another factor is that many locals are reluctant to discuss Morag with outsiders.
The attention of monster enthusiasts was drawn to Loch Morar by a particularly dramatic incident that occurred there in August 1969. According to newspaper reports, two local men, Duncan McDonell and William Simpson, claimed that their boat had been rammed on the loch by a huge, three-humped water monster. Mr McDonell allegedly tried to fend the animal off with an oar while Mr Simpson fired at it with a .303 rifle.
When the story broke, several Loch Ness Investigation members, frustrated by their lack of progress, decided to try their luck with Loch Morar, believing its crystal-clear water and light boat activity would prove a better spot for surface photography than murky Loch Ness. In February 1970 they formed a new organisation called the Loch Morar Survey. A fascinating account of the Survey’s early work appears in The Search for Morag (1972), in which Elizabeth Montgomery Campbell documented 33 sightings of Morag and proved, with the aid of biologist David Solomon, that Morar is large enough, and rich enough in fish, to support a colony of sizable predators. Ms Campbell and company discovered that the monster tradition at Morar is quite ancient and that, in days gone by, a sighting of the Mhorag signalled the imminent death of a member of the Gillies Clan.
In the wake of the McDonnell-Simpson report, a Manchester Guardian journalist published what he claimed was part of an old
Scottish rhyme about the monster. Genuine or not, the little verse conveys perfectly Morar’s slightly creepy atmosphere:
Morag, Harbinger of Death,
Giant swimmer in deep-green Morar, The loch that has no bottom… There it is that Morag the monster lives.
The quarter-mile (400m) long River Morar, which connects the loch to the sea, is often said to be the shortest in Great Britain. In the 1940s, its flow was modified by a small dam, built to provide hydro-electricity to nearby villages. Although a fish ladder allows salmon and other migratory fish to reach the loch, it is difficult to imagine monster-sized creatures clambering over the dam wall. Morag enthusiasts, therefore, assume she and her family reside in the loch 365 days of the year.
Just after the narrow road from Arisaig crosses the River Morar, a still narrower road
cuts away to the right and runs two and a half miles (4km) along the northern shore of the loch to the hamlet of Bracorina. Six hundred yards further on, at the end of a rough dirt road, is a beautiful little crescent of shingle called White Beach. As the friendly folk at nearby Bracorina Cottage usually allow visitors to camp on a field just above the beach, I pulled my trusty little camper van into a prime waterfront position and climbed out to look around.
ADRIAN & COMPANY
I wasn’t the first visitor of the season. At the field’s western end, just below a small headland, was a neat line of 12 tents, and on the beach a small group of people were working on a large, odd-looking sailing boat. About 18ft (5.5m) long, the vessel was essentially just a rectangular wooden platform supported by two inflatable pontoons. As well as a large, square sail that gave it the look of a ghost ship from antiquity, the ingeniously constructed, seemingly unsinkable catamaran was equipped with a small outboard motor.
As I walked over for a closer look, a tall, unmistakable figure jumped down from the boat and strode up to greet me. It was Adrian Shine, monster hunter extraordinary. I wasn’t really surprised to see Adrian, who’d told me he expected to get to Morar that summer. I was, however, surprised and pleased that he had so many people with him. My Morar visit wouldn’t be so lonely after all.
With his intense energy, luxuriant black beard and piercing eyes, Adrian looked like the kind of chap who, a century ago, would have donned a pith helmet and tramped off into Africa in search of the source of the Nile or King Solomon’s mines. Bitten by the monster bug in the mid-1960s, he was, by 1979, Field Leader of the Loch Ness and Morar Project (LN&MP), formed in 1974 to carry on the work of the Loch Morar Survey and the recently defunct Loch Ness Investigation. It was difficult to imagine a better organised or more cohesive group than the LN&MP. Consisting largely of keen, energetic young men and women from the south of England, and a few older hands like Adrian, Ricky Gardiner
their boat had been rammed by a huge three-humped water monster
and Barry Bell, the outfit had a strong esprit de corps and was constantly engaged in innovative projects.
Those interesting and cheerful people were at Morar for the first half of my three-week Morag hunt, and although my approach to the mystery differed from theirs, I greatly enjoyed their company through the mainly wet and blustery days. Adrian’s infectious enthusiasm probably had a lot to do with their high morale. Revelling in the foul weather, he strode around through the mud in his Wellington boots, laughing and joking, issuing orders, Mao cap at a jaunty angle, beard flying in the wind. During the mid-1970s the team built and experimented with a variety of ingenious inventions. One device, designed to search for bones in Morar’s shallows, was the Pequod: a flat-bottomed boat that could be driven and steered by a single operator lying face-down over a glass panel in the bow. Another was a miniature fibreglass diving bell in which Adrian descended several times to depths of 50ft (15m) or more in the loch’s clear water.
During the summer of 1979, however, Adrian and his crew were focusing mainly on the new catamaran, the prototype of a small flotilla of similar craft they hoped eventually to deploy at Ness as well as Morar. With its huge deck space, the craft could carry a dozen people as well as several large, hollow-tipped metal darts for lakebed sampling. Its large sail would enable it to silently cruise the loch on sonar sweeps. So roomy was the craft that a glass-walled hut could be bolted on, to form a floating laboratory. The boat’s most remarkable feature, however, was that, when dismantled, it could be carried on the roof rack of a single car.
Anxious to distance itself from hoaxers like Frank Searle, mystics like Doc Shiels and “crackpots” like Ted Holiday, the LN&MP presented itself as a down-to-earth, scientifically oriented team, willing to undertake serious projects not necessarily related to monster hunting. To this end, it sometimes collaborated with the Universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and London on scientific experiments. Its list of eminent patrons, including Lord Lovat, Lord Glendevon and Sir Peter Scott, lent the organisation an air of respectability. During the 1979 expedition the team was concentrating on lakebed sampling and on analysing the plankton content of the water. Its only overtly monster-related activity was a few experiments with a small underwater TV camera.
Although most of its members were privately fascinated by the possible existence of lake monsters, the organisation’s leaders were so keen to be seen as methodical, scientific and conservative that, in public, they constantly played down the Morag-hunting side of their activities. That awkward stance led to rather odd behaviour for monster hunters: even though they had a craft that was as ideal for surface photography as it was for lakebed probing, they never took as much as a single camera out on the loch. Neither did they mount a camera on the White Beach headland – an ideal vantage point from which to scan large stretches of water where Morag had reportedly surfaced on at least a dozen occasions. The rationale for this “no cameras” policy was that the Project officially considered surface watching to be a long-discredited “regressive method” and a total waste of time. As the Dinsdale film was still the most interesting piece of evidence ever obtained at Loch Ness, I found this bit of dogma rather disconcerting.
It seemed clear that charismatic, strongwilled Adrian was responsible for the organisation’s conservative stance. One day, as he took me for a demonstration cruise on the Project’s mighty flagship, he said that he thought of himself as an “extreme right-winger” when it came to acceptance of evidence. Nursing the tiller and puffing on his ever-present pipe, he gleefully indulged in a little low-keyed faction fighting, telling me that whereas he once considered Tim Dinsdale to be “middle of the road”, evidence-wise, he now feared that the veteran investigator was “drifting further and further to the left” because of his acceptance of the controversial Doc Shiels photos. Tut tut. No doubt Ted Holiday – and, increasingly, me – would be ranked as wrong-thinking radicals on Adrian’s “political” spectrum.
But while I thought the Project members unnecessarily cautious when it came to accepting evidence, I also thought there was plenty of room – and a definite need – for a disciplined, conservative group such as theirs within the motley ranks of monster hunters. The team’s
leadership rejected virtually all of the still photographs that were generally put forward as evidence for Nessie’s existence, and most of the points they raised about them were valid.
A SELECTION OF SIGHTINGS
Although the people who live around the loch are sometimes reluctant to discuss the monster with outsiders, perhaps because Morag was once considered to be a “harbinger of death”, I did manage to meet and interview several eyewitnesses.
John MacVarish was known to have had three sightings. It took a while, but I eventually cornered the quiet, middle-aged man on the wharf at the nearby coastal village of Mallaig and persuaded him to share his recollections. His first experience occurred in ideal conditions – on a bright, sunny mid-morning in August 1968. He was out in his boat, on dead calm water, halfway across the loch opposite Bracorina, when he saw what he took at first to be a man standing up in a boat, then realised it was a long neck protruding five or six feet (1.5 to 1.8m) out of the water. As he drew closer, he saw that the neck, about 18 inches (46cm) wide at the bottom, tapered up to a small, dark, snake-like head. The creature, apparently unconcerned at first by the boat’s proximity, proceeded along slowly, leaving a short wake behind its neck. It remained in sight for about 10 minutes, until John got to within 300 yards, then “settled down slowly into the loch.”
John’s second experience, which occurred on another bright, sunny day in August of the following year, was considerably more dramatic. At midday, as he and James Hanratty were boating through the western end of the loch, they saw a creature they estimated to be a full 30ft (9m) long, cutting through the water
at great speed. About 500 yards away at first, it was between the islands and the southern shore, and most of its back, in a three-hump aspect, was visible, with no water separating the light-brown humps. As they approached, the huge beast turned and sped towards them, just below the surface, passing within 30 or 40 feet (9 to 12m), raising a large, churning wake before diving into deeper water.
An even more dramatic story was shared with me by Charles Simpson, a leading citizen of Mallaig. On 27 November 1975, Mr Simpson and his late brother Donald were driving from Mallaig towards Bracorina on a bird watching expedition. As the tiny River Morar leaves the loch, it flows over a narrow gravel bar, so that for a short distance it is only a couple of feet deep. At 3pm, just as they were passing that spot, Charles, who was watching the road ahead, heard his brother suddenly gasp and choke as if unable to breathe. “I was terrified that he’d taken a heart attack, but then he braked and pointed to the river. ‘This will startle the world!’ was all he could say at first. When I asked what that meant he said, ‘Did ye not see it?’”
What Donald had seen was a powerful, 20-ft (6m) long animal that rose out of the river, lurched across the shingle bar and sank into the deep waters of the loch. Although the episode took only a couple of seconds, it made a profound impression on the witness – a man who had previously been very sceptical of the Morag legend. “Donald said it had smooth brown skin, ‘like a drum’,” Charles continued. “He particularly noticed the muscles in its powerful hind quarters as it ‘humped itself’ over the ridge. He saw no ears or eyes, but he said there was what looked like a ‘trunk’ trailing along the side of the body.”
As night fell over Mallaig, Charles took me to see his late brother’s widow, Jessie Simpson. A kind, motherly lady, she insisted I stay for a delicious home-cooked meal, and later showed me a painting of what her husband had seen in the river. The painting had been done by a neighbour, Willie Kirk, under Donald Simpson’s close supervision. “Donald said it wasn’t exactly right,” she explained, “but that it conveyed the general impression of what he saw.”
On my second visit to Loch Morar, in 1999, I was lucky enough to meet Willie Kirk, the talented neighbour who had executed the painting. Mr Kirk, who kindly granted me permission to publish the illustration, recalled that Mr Simpson said it was a fairly good depiction of what he saw. Donald had been certain that there had been a trunk-like appendage, but the sighting was so brief, and so unexpected, that he couldn’t be sure whether the “trunk” was trailing backwards along the creature’s side from the front, or whether it originated at the back and was swung forward alongside the body. Donald said that Willie had depicted the powerful hindquarters fairly accurately. Rotating his shoulders and elbows,
morag was once considered to be a harbinger of death
he’d demonstrated how the creature had “humped itself” over the gravel bar, by shoving and lifting with its hind legs or flippers.
Donald Simpson, like his brother and widow, seems to have been a very fine person. Citizens of Mallaig to whom I spoke said he’d been a pillar of society – an elder of the Church, respectable and very well liked. Just as importantly, he was a recognised authority on the area’s wildlife. He was also too close to have been mistaken. When I visited the spot, it became clear that the creature could have been no more than 40 feet (12m) from the road at the time of the sighting. As soon as I set eyes on Willie Kirk’s painting, I was put in mind of the creature seen crossing General Wades Military Road, on the eastern shore of Loch Ness, by Mr and Mrs George Spicer on 22 July 1933 (see FT308:42, 347:55).
Whereas the creature seen by Donald Simpson was only half out of the water, there is another story, recorded in 1961 by R Macdonald Robertson, in which Morag is said to have actually ventured ashore. The incident supposedly occurred sometime around 1950 when Mr Alexander Macdonell was transporting a group of children from Meoble to Morar in the estate boat: “… just as they were passing Bracorina Point, some of the children shouted out: ‘Oh look! What is that that big thing on the bank over there?’ Mr Macdonell described the beast as being ‘about the size of a full-grown Indian elephant’, and said it plunged off the rocks into the water with a terrific splash.”
As both Macdonell and Robertson had passed away by the time she began her research in the late 1960s, Elizabeth Montgomery Campbell considered that the story should “be treated as apocryphal” until one of the children came forward to confirm it. There has been no word from those kids as yet, but in light of of the Spicers’ experience and other reports of creatures lumbering around on the bonny banks of Loch Ness, I’m not entirely sceptical of the story.
I found one multiple-witness Morag episode particularly interesting. In The Search for Morag, Elisabeth Montgomery Campbell told how, at about 11 o’clock one morning in July 1964, Adam Malcolm, his wife and a friend watched a monster from the window of their house at Bracorina. Mr Malcolm, a Perthshire headmaster, estimated that the creature, which was lying in the water between Lettermorar Rock and Lettermorar House, was about 14ft (4m) long. There was nothing particularly odd about the appearance of the creature – it was the familiar one-hump, “upturned boat” shape – but there was something decidedly strange about how it came into view.
“The most curious thing about the whole incident,” Mr Malcolm told Campbell, “is the way three people were drawn, independently, to look out at the same time, and the feeling was experienced of something benign – something beyond explanation or definition.”
As the Malcolms were in the habit of visiting Bracorina every summer, I located them easily enough, and, although her husband was reluctant to talk about it, Mrs Malcolm kindly provided me with a few more details of the sighting.
On that morning 15 years earlier, she said, Mr Malcolm had been reading in the sitting room of the cottage when he experienced quite an eerie sensation: the hair on the back of his neck actually rose, and he felt a sudden strong compulsion to turn and look out the window. Simultaneously, Mrs Malcolm and a friend – who were in different parts of the house – felt drawn to the sitting room. They entered just as Mr Malcolm turned to the window – and all three saw the creature on the loch.
The local clans had always considered Morag to be sinister and menacing, but the Malcolms and their friend gained the strong impression of something quite benign: “It was a strange feeling, and I know it sounds odd, but it was as if the creature was showing us that it simply belonged there – as a part of the loch, a part of nature.”
NEXT MONTH: I meet the Hermit of Loch Morar – and the monster gets up-close and personal...
NOTES
1 Pronounced “Vorack” in Gaelic. “Morag” is a relatively recent, anglicised version of the name.
2 LN&MP Report, 1980, p2.
3 Rupert T Gould, The Loch Ness Monster, pp4346; Constance Whyte, More Than a Legend, pp77-79 and FW Holiday, The Great Orm of Loch Ness, p31.
4 R Macdonald Robertson, Selected Highland Folktales, quoted by Elizabeth Montgomery Campbell in The Search for Morag, 1972, pp116-117.
5. Ibid, p127.
✒ TONY HEALY is an Australian author and researcher who has investigated all kinds of high strangeness around the world. He is the co-author, with Paul Cropper, of Out of the Shadows: Mystery animals of Australia (1994) and The Yowie: In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot (2006).