Wednesday, 28 June 2017

A mermaid and a monster in Loch Broom?

Loch Broom is a 15 km long sea loch located on the North West coast  of Scotland. It varies in width from 0.5 to 1.5 km. It has a healthy stock of   wild brown trout and is quite shallow compared to Loch Ness. That have been reports of a mermaid and a  monster in the Loch.

Fishermen spellbound by tame fishing 'monster
 I HAVE now received from Inverness reference library a copy of the article on mermaids printed in the Inverness Advertiser on 20th January 1832. The man who reported seeing the mermaid said he was crossing in a boat from Ullapool, when opposite the Green Stone point, the crew discovered a figure, apparently that of a man, sitting upon a rock, and engaged in fishing. As it was unusual to find any person fishing on the Sabbath day, the men rowed the boat towards the object of their curiosity, and to their utter amazement found it to be partly the likeness of a human being, of which the uppermost half resembled a female, and was white as snow, and the other half was of a sky blue colour, and had fins and a tail like a fish. The monster was very tame, and the crew say that it did not seem to be afraid of them, and it had soft rolling eyes, and gazed at them for some time, occasionally turning towards some sea-maws that were flying above in the air! (Sea-maws are seagulls.) Thanks again to Donald Macdonald-Ross of Niagara who also sent me a transcript of the article. Donalds great grandmother was a Chirsty Macdonald from Reiff in Coigach and he has been doing a great amount of genealogy research. He has a homepage dealing with the history and genealogy of Coigach at http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~coigach


In August 1906 a monster was reported :
Two excise officers reportedly fired at a 90 foot (30 metre) long monster as it charged towards them at some 60 miles per hour, resulting in the creature diving. Local fishermen also spotted the monster, and it was also claimed that a 100 tonne yacht was lifted out of the water when it came into contact with the beast.
Source :Loch Broom Monster, Cardiff Times 18 August 1906
However a discussion in The Zoologist that year declared it to be a basking shark.

I wasn’t aware that basking sharks could move that fast as I thought they were slow moving. So was it Nessie paying a  visit?




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