Thirteen Monsters of Britain

A boulder-strewn block field covers the lonely summit plateau of Britain’s second highest peak, Ben Macdui in the Cairngorms. It has a terrible beauty; a sprawling, desolate landscape of wild open space where everything conspires to make you feel small. The isolation of this spot is tangible and when the summit is deserted, an air of separation from the world as a whole quickly overcomes your senses. In Britain’s most Arctic environment, survival is constantly in the balance and, although the long walk to the summit is not difficult in fair weather, the balance tips very easily. Like all mountains, the Cairngorms are fickle, occasionally spiteful, and even a slight change in conditions can throw the visitor into another world entirely.

By his own account, that was what happened to the renowned climber, scientist, and Fellow of the Royal Society, J Norman Collie, at the end of the nineteenth century. Years later, he recalled and told a meeting of the Cairngorm Club in 1925 of hearing slow, deliberate footsteps — one step for every three or four of his own — following him on the mountain.

“As I walked on and the eerie crunch, crunch, sounded behind me, I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles”

What Collie had experienced was a classic case of a brush with the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui, an enduring myth of a large, Sasquatchian, grey figure covered in short hair. Wherever the Grey Man ventures, he is accompanied by a sense of irrational panic and dread.

Although Collie, who vowed never to return to the mountain alone, saw nothing, others were not so lucky. In October 1943, while on ten days leave, soldier Alexander Tewnion reached the summit of the mountain and immediately noticed, in the swirling mist, that “the atmosphere became dark and oppressive, a fierce, bitter wind whisked among the boulders, and an odd sound echoed through the mist — a loud footstep, it seemed. Then another, and another. A strange shape loomed up, receded, came charging at me! Without hesitation, I whipped out the revolver and fired three times at the figure. When it still came on I turned and hared down the path…”

More rational minds point to a possible explanation for the terrifying sightings: the Brocken Spectre — a rare atmospheric effect caused by the projection of your shadow onto mist and cloud, sometimes accompanied by a rainbow halo called a glory. Brocken specters have sometimes been witnessed on Ben Macdui when conditions have been right, but what might be the cause of the fear that overcomes experienced climbers and scientists? Could it be the manifestation of ancestral memory of hominids from a thousand generations ago or is it the mind’s response to isolation and exhaustion? Could it be the place’s essential spirit, its genius loci, something unknowable and so much larger than ourselves that our mind struggles to comprehend and replaces with the avatar of a monster or a spectral presence? Or is it a fluke of the landscape that produces infrasound and other sensory data just out of our reach? What dreadful spirit stalks the lonely mountaineer on Ben Macdui? And, if it’s specific to the place, are there any other places that inspire such fear on these islands of ours?

The Black Dog legend is perhaps the most common local myth in Britain, but in the counties of East Anglia, one local variant particularly stands out: Black Shuck.

Along the desolate coastal flats of East Anglia, among the graveyards, by the crossroads, in its darkest forests, lurks a fear stirred first in the early medieval mind. In Suffolk, this calf-sized malevolent hound with saucer-sized glowing red eyes is a harbinger of doom and death. It often appears during electrical storms such as the one that struck both the churches of Bungay and Blythburgh on the same day and at the exact same moment in August 1577, leaving scorched claw marks on the church door at Blythburgh, at least two fatalities and a feeling of deep dread. ‘All down the church in midst of fire, the hellish monster flew. And, passing onward to the quire, he many people slew’, runs the old local verse.

Cù-Sìth is the Scottish Highland version of Black Shuck, a wolf-like creature the size of a bull, but coloured dark green. It lives in the clefts of rocks and carries souls away to the afterlife. Another spectral hound with saucer-sized eyes, the Cù-Sìth howls three times and if you haven’t reached a place of safety by the third bay, you are overcome with mortal terror and drop dead on the spot.

A peculiarly suburban version of the Black Dog is the Black Dog of Bunting Nook which prowls along a quiet, leafy lane on the outskirts of Sheffield. The dog appears from nowhere in front of cars and makes the engine stall. For some reason, it is only interested in the car’s passengers. The hound suddenly dematerialises into a green mist if it is threatened.

The Bunting Nook dog isn’t the only thing to materialise around vehicles. Between Cherry Brook and Postbridge in Devon, a lonely stretch of the B3212 runs over the leviathan folds of Dartmoor, where — once more — wide-open spaces contrive to give the traveller an almost claustrophobic sense of their self as a thing of little consequence in nature’s grand order. There have been numerous reports on this stretch of road of a presence and on a number of occasions, drivers, motorcyclists, and cyclists have fallen prey to a mysterious pair of hairy hands that grab the steering wheel or handlebar and attempt to steer the hapless traveller off the road.

If black dogs with saucer-eyes and an invitation to the afterlife seem frankly medieval, you might be more of a cat person. Our modern age has thrown up quite a few new reasons to be afraid for your life in the countryside and the most famous of these is the Beast of Bodmin.

Numerous local sightings of a very large black cat are now believed in some quarters to be not so much as a spectral feline and more a very-real panther or puma, possibly a zoo escapee or illegal release. Sightings of the Beast of Bodmin Moor are only the most famous examples of alleged wild cat sightings in Britain. Early reports of the similarly alliterative Beast of Buchan from Aberdeenshire show that it has been a part of local life since the 1930s. All over Britain, big cats have been captured or shot over the years. Pumas in Scotland, Canadian and Eurasian Lynxes, a serval or ocelot from the Isle of Wight, and a clouded leopard in Kent. It is believed that many of those captured were domesticated to some extent; one of the Scottish pumas apparently enjoyed being tickled.

It’s hard to imagine anyone tickling the Owlman of Mawnan. At the end of a mile-long sheltered narrow lane, the small churchyard of Mawnan is typical of many in Cornwall — a sacred spot long before the 13th-century church was built here with commanding views over the mouth of the Helford River. But here, and in an adjacent wood, sightings of a flying creature about five feet tall, half-man, half owl with glowing red eyes, silver feathers, and crab-like claws have terrified tourists since the 1970s. Oddly, all but one of the dozen or so eyewitnesses of the Owlman have been girls or young women and most of them were under 16.

Cornwall hardly needs the Owlman — the county is home a menagerie of supernatural creatures, not the least of which is the Spriggan of West Penwith — a grotesquely ugly hobgoblin that guards treasure at burial mounds, but isn’t averse to the theft of human property and, occasionally human infants, substituting them for a changeling in their crib. Generally, spriggans can be characterised as spiteful piskies, leading travellers into swamps or over cliffs.

As disturbing as spriggans may be, the most terrifying creature of the landscape of Britain is a resident from the opposite end of the country. Around the waters of the Orkneys, a skinless human horse, a being of rage and pestilence, the Nuckalavee, lives. The Nuckalavee has the head of a man only ten times larger and a body of rippling, rotting sinews and exposed veins that run with yellow blood. Some accounts of the Nuckalavee speak of flippers on its front legs. This sea-dwelling nightmare beast wilts crops with its breath and makes livestock sick whenever it comes onto land, apparently inflamed by the smell of burning seaweed and set to exact its revenge on whatever hapless soul is unfortunate enough to witness its arrival. Like many British monsters, however, if you want to escape from its demonic presence you need to leap across a freshwater stream or river.

Freshwater, however, has its own monsters and one of these is the most well-known of all: The Loch Ness Monster, “Nessie”. Loch Ness contains as much fresh water as all the lakes of England and Wales combined, but the peat of the surrounding countryside makes it as notoriously murky as the legends that surround its most famous character (and most of the photographs taken of it). One curious fact about modern Scottish lake monsters is that they are often described as dinosaur-like, but before the discovery of dinosaurs, almost every large body of water in Scotland had a Kelpie which, like the Orcadian Nuckalavee, had a horse-like form. Kelpies may well have been part of a cautionary tale tradition to keep children away from rivers in case ‘the kelpie got them’.

The derivation of the Grindylow, a water-dwelling bogeyman from Yorkshire or Lancashire, with long sinewy arms, whose fame for drowning children in bogs and pools are shared by a number of Northern English river monsters like Jenny Greenteeth and Peg Powler, who inhabits the River Tees. Welsh lakes have their own version, the Afanc, the description of varies from a small humanoid creature to a crocodile or a beaver and which preys upon anyone foolish enough to swim in their lakes.

Since prehistory, when we first started telling stories to one another, we have paid close attention to the landscapes in which those stories have been set, the places our stories have populated with other beings; monsters, supernatural essences, and atmospheres. We imbued the landscape with meaning, with rituals, and with a personality of its own. The age of reason, the emergence of science and rationality should have shone a light into the shadows and yet, something still stirs in the British countryside. Dare you go out and feel it for yourselves?