IN THE WAKE OF MORAG, PART TWO
In the concluding extract from his memoir, Australian cryptozoologist TONY HEALY looks back to the summer of 1979, when he spent four months on a Scottish lake monster safari. This time, he meets the Hermit of Loch Morar and has a possible close encounter
In the concluding extract from his long-dalyed memoir, Australian cryptozoologist TONY HEALY looks back to the summer of 1979, when he spent four months on a Scottish lake monster safari. This time, he meets the Hermit of Loch Morar and has a possible close encounter with Morag...
In the summer of 1979, Morag wasn’t the only strange and elusive entity in the vicinity of Loch Morar: two LN&MP (Loch Ness and Morar Project) members told of encountering a mysterious American who claimed to be living in a cave on the northern shore. He was, they said, a tall, Nordic type, with unkempt blonde hair and slightly wild blue eyes – “sort of like a Mormon missionary gone feral.” Before melting into the landscape, he’d said he intended to stay at the loch until he scored a clear picture of Morag.
THE HERMIT
The fellow proved almost as difficult to find as Morag herself, but one day, as I explored a rocky, bracken-covered ridge, I stumbled upon his camp. Beneath a large, flat-topped boulder, a tiny natural cave had been slightly enlarged by rough stone-work. A small peat fire smouldered near the narrow entrance. The little dwelling would have been homely enough had it not been for several evil-looking, bleached sheep skulls leering down from atop tall stakes beside the entrance. Wishing I’d brought along some holy water, garlic, or a silver crucifix, I stepped forward hesitantly, then jumped slightly as a tousled blonde head poked enquiringly out of the entrance.
The American was, if anything, even more startled than I was. In the 10 weeks he’d been at Morar, not one other person had found his cave. For a hermit, though, he was pretty friendly – particularly after he realised I was a fellow monster enthusiast.
As he brewed some coffee, he introduced himself as Todd Martin, a 22-year-old native of Lincoln, Nebraska. The sheep skulls, he explained, were intended to scare off any crofter’s children who might stumble on his camp while he was away. He had been obsessed with Morag since a visit to Scotland in 1977. In August of that year, while hiking through the area, he’d camped for a night on a small peninsula on Morar’s northern shore. At 8:24 that evening, as he sat outside his tent, he’d seen a disturbed patch of water moving around the point and into Tarbet Bay. “There was no wake, but I could see that something big was lifting the water. It was as if a porpoise or shark was just under the surface, but there was no fin or any part of a body visible. I now know there’s a ridge of rock just there. Apparently, the animal had to come close to the surface to get over it.”
The disturbance covered a distance of about 200ft (60m) at something like a fast walking pace and came tantalisingly close to Todd’s vantage point, so close that he could have dived off the rocks and grabbed whatever it was – “If I’d been feeling suicidal.”
For the next two years, back in Nebraska, he worked long and hard, saving for a return visit to Morar. “I figured that since I’d had my first brush with Morag after only a couple of hours, then I’d surely get a photo of it if I stayed a month or two. So now,” he laughed, “I’ve been here for 10 weeks, watching all day, every day – and I haven’t seen a bloody thing! Sometimes it gets so frustrating that I climb up on a rock and just yell my head off!”
Todd’s cave, perched hundreds of feet above the water, boasted an absolutely unrivalled view of the loch. Indicating that vast sweep of water – several square miles of it visible at a single glance – he shook his head ruefully. “Whatever these bloody things are,” he laughed, “they sure know how to hold their breath!”
I took an immediate liking to the young adventurer. Although obsessed with the Morar mystery, he could still see the funny side of it. Like me, he was monster hunting for the hell of it; he was doing all he could to nail the elusive Morag, but it wouldn’t kill him if he failed. It was just as well he had a sense of humour, because the trial and tribulations of rough camping at Morar would have tried the patience of a saint. In the 10 weeks he’d been there he’d enjoyed only 10 sunny days. Water had oozed into his cave so often that he’d been forced to dig a gutter across the floor; his clothes were always damp and his equipment covered with mould. “I’ve killed about two dozen mice in here too,” he grinned, “but the only time I came close to freaking out was when I found four enormous slugs inside my sleeping bag!”
After we finished our coffee, he showed me around his rocky domain. From a nearby hilltop, it was possible to see the entire western half of the loch with all its islands and bays. Only a few hundred yards beyond the western end was the coast, and way beyond that, their looming peaks wreathed in mist, were the islands of Rum and Eigg. As well as watching from his eyrie, the intrepid American often drifted around the loch at night in a tiny rowboat, clutching a camera equipped with a massively powerful flash.
After our first meeting I often dropped in at Todd’s place to swap stories and do a bit of surface watching. In early August, for a change of scenery, we spent a few days under canvas at South Tarbet Bay – where he’d seen the disturbance, exactly two years earlier.
In the summer of 1979, fisherman who knew Morar well were complaining about the scarcity of fish in the loch. Salmon, particularly, were extremely rare, mainly because of netting out to sea. Some LN&MP members fretted that the monsters might die of starvation before they could be proven to exist. Under the circumstances, Todd and I thought a little judicious baiting of the loch might be a good idea, so we obtained 10 gallons of fish blood and guts from a cannery at Mallaig, toted it laboriously to Tarbet Bay, and poured it into the water. The cannery foreman had also given us a large salmon, which, although a little too ripe for human consumption, might appeal to a peckish plesiosaur.
“whatever these bloody things are, they know how to hold their breath!”
As a huge, yellow Moon rose over the loch on the night of 14 August, we sat in Todd’s tiny boat and sowed Tarbet Bay and the surrounding water with large, gory chunks of salmon. The loch was so smooth, and the Moon so bright, that as I dropped them overboard the large red and silver portions remained visible for many feet as they tumbled through the clear, still water.
It was the perfect night for a monstrous encounter, and, as we moved slowly out of to the middle of the loch, I couldn’t rid my mind of Tim Dinsdale’s favourite Morag story. According to one of his informants, one dark night some years earlier, on this same stretch of water, three fishermen were nearly drowned when a huge creature rocketed up from below, smashing into the hull of their boat and throwing them high into the air. The terrified trio barely managed the long swim, through icy waters, to shore. Although Tim had made discreet approaches, he had not, as of 1979, managed to interview the men, who, being local gentry, were shy of publicity.
That creepy story played havoc with my peace of mind as Todd and I drifted across the vast, mirror-calm belly of the loch. To make matters worse, we strove to further freak each other out by relating ghost stories of our homelands and by discussing the local spooks. We spoke of the spectral, headless woman who supposedly terrorised people at the western end of the loch, and, as we drew closer to the southern shore, we recalled the legend of the dreaded Grey Dog of Meoble. That enormous, fiery-eyed demon hound was said to haunt the woods between Arisaig and Morar. That southern side of the loch has produced two other very creepy stories. In the shallows close to Meoble, quite a long stretch of the lakebed