morag

Loch Morar lies 70 miles to the southwest of the infinitely more famous Loch Ness. Eleven miles long and a mile and a half across at its widest
point, it is separated from the sea by a quarter-mile, sits 30 feet above sea level, and averages 200 feet in depth. According to reports that go back
decades and possibly centuries, it hosts a monster much like that reported at Ness and other Scottish and Irish lochs. Sightings of Morag, as the
creature has been named, occurred throughout the 1800's and 1900's. Some link the sightings to folk traditions of the Water Horse or Kelpie of
Morar.

On April 3, 1971, Ewen Gillies, a lifelong resident of a house overlooking Loch Morar and a member of a family with centuries-old roots in the
region, saw the creature for the first time. Alerted by his 12-year-old son John, who noticed it a few minutes earlier while walking down a road near
the shore, Gillies stepped outside and looked out on the water. It was a clear, sunny morning, around 11 o'clock. Not quite half a mile away a huge
animal lay in the water, its three or four-foot neck pointed straight up and curving slightly at the top. The head was barely distinguishable from the
neck itself. Two or three humps, moving up and down slightly, ran along its back. The skin was black and shiny. The creature was approximately
30 feet long.

Gillies went into the house to retrieve a camera. He took two pictures from an upstairs window just before the creature lowered its head,
straightened its body, and sank below the water. The pictures did not turn out, but no one accused Gillies, a respected member of the community,
of making up the story.

Early History

He and his son had seen Morag. The name comes from the Gaelic Mhorag, traditionally believed to be the spirit of the loch and conceived of a
shape-changing mermaid whose appearance was an omen of death if glimpsed by a member of the Gillies clan. With the passage of time and the
thinning of population in this wild, remote region, the older folklore faded from memory, and Mhorag (actually pronounced "Vorack") became Morag,
a strange but not supernatural beast seen by some but seldom spoken of.

Perhaps because Morag the animal is lost to view or seen only in distorted from through the folkloric fog that hangs over the loch's history,
researchers have had a hard time tracing reports beyond the late nineteenth century. In the early 1970's investigator Elizabeth Montgomery
Campbell interviewed elderly resident who recalled sighting in their youth. Campbell also learned of a "persistent tradition of hideous hairy eel-like
creature that were pulled up by fisherman long ago and thrown back into the loch because they were so repulsive."

Folklorist R. Macdonald Robertson collected this story, describing an undated event from early in the century, from Alexander Macdonnell:

Some years ago, we were proceeding one morning down the loch in the estate motor launch

from Meoble or Morar pier with some school children and other persons on board. As we were

passing Bracarina Point, on the north side, some of the children excited shouted out: "Oh look!

What is that big thing on the bank over there?" The beast would be about the size of a full grown

Indian elephant, and it plunged off the rocks into the water with a terrific splash.

Robertson noted that "Loch Morar's monster is said to have been seen by a number of persons of unquestionable veracity." A typical sighting is
expressed in the words of one witness: "a huge, shapeless, dark mass rising out of the water like a small island." Some who saw the shape
thought it was, as they told travel writer Seton Gordon in the 1930s, a "boat without sails towing one or two smaller boats after it." These were
ghost ships, they assumed. Modern witnesses at Morar, Ness, and elsewhere often say the creature's back looks like an "unturned boat."

In September 1931 young Sir John Hope, who as Lord Glendevon would go on to become a privy councilor and undersecretary of state for Scotland,
had a curious experience which, while it involved no direct sighting, clearly suggested the presence of some huge unknown animal in the loch. He,
his brother, a friend, and a local guide had gone out on a boat to fish in a deep part of Morar. Hope, who was holding a long trout rod, felt something
grab his line, dragging it "directly downwards at such a pace that it would have been madness to try to stop it with my fingers. In a very few
seconds the whole line including the baking had gone and the end of the rod broke." Whatever had taken the bait, it was "something… heavier than
I have experienced before or since."

It could not have been a salmon which, even if there were one that size in the loch, would have traveled parallel to the surface rather than making a
steep vertical descent. Such descents, however, are described in any number of lake monster reports. The only other conceivable candidate is a
seal, but no seals are known to exist at Loch Morar. Glendevon says that when they asked their guide what the animal could have been, "he
mumbled something and said he thought we had better go home," Glendevon suspected that he knew more than he was telling.

After 1933, the year the Loch Ness monster emerged into world consciousness, note was taken of Morag, and a few witnesses came forward to
describe observations either of large, fast moving humps in the water or of a long necked creature, usually said to be 30 feet long. But as a
cyptozoological mystery Morag is far less richly documented than Nessie, the focus of a nearly unending investigation spanning six decades.
Photographs, sonar tracking, and a large body of eyewitness testimony have afforded Ness's monstrous denizen a credibility Morag connect begin
to claim.

In February 1970 several members of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau formed the Loch Morar Survey to pursue the biological, operational, and
historical aspects. Over the next few years they made sporadic investigations as limited time and funds permitted. Only July 14, 1970, one
member, marine biologist Neil bass, spotted a "hump shaped black object" in the water at the north end of the lake. He called to his associates,
but the hump had vanished by the time they started to look for it. "Following this, within half a minute," Bass reported, "a disturbance was
witnessed by all of us… followed by radiating water rings which traveled motion was inconsistent with an eel's; in any case it would have to be a
"very, very big eel! My personal opinion is that it was a animate object, of a species with which I am not familiar in this kind of habitat." The survey
produced a great death of eyewitness testimony and a well-regarded book, The Search for Morag (1974), by two members of the expedition,
Elizabeth Montgomery Campbell and David Solomon.

The most dramatic Morag encounter to date took place on August 16, 1969. It is also the only sighting ever to be reported in newspapers all over
the world shortly after its occurrence. It happened as two local men, Duncan McDonell and William Simpson, were on their way back from a fishing
trip at the north end of the loch. It was just after 9 p.m. The sun had gone down, but there was still plenty of light. Hearing a splash behind them,
McDonell, who was at the wheel, turned to determine its cause. To his astonishment, it turned out to be a creature coming directly toward them, at
a speed later estimated to be between 20 and 30 mph. Within seconds it struck the side of the boat, then stopped or slowed down. Though
McDonell had the impression that the collision had been accidental, that did not allay his fear that the creature, simply by virtue of its bulk, could
cause the boat to capsize. He grabbed an oar and tried to push it away. Meanwhile Simpson had rushed into the cabin to turn off the gas. He
returned with a rifle and fired a single shot at the beast, who no apparent effect. It slowly moved away and sank out of sight. These events took five
minutes to run their course. When interviewed by representative from the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau, the two agreed that the creature had
been some 25 to 30 feet long, with rough, dirty brown skin. Three humps or undulations, about 18 inches high, stood out of the water, and at one
point McDonell spotted the animal's snakelike head just above the surface. It was, he thought, about one foot across the top.

Theories

Morar lies in a glacially deepened valley on Inverness-shire's west coast. Twelve thousand year ago, as the ice retreated, sea water is believed to
have invaded the lake, bringing with it an abundance of marine life. Even after the sea water retreated, for a few thousand years the sea animals now
in the loch may have had fairly ready access to their oceanic home, because the loch level and the low-tide level were only one-third then what they
are today. The sea level at high tide would have been within a few feet of the loch level.

There is no doubt that Loch Morar possesses an adequate food supply- fish, plankton, and detritus- to support a population of large animals, it is
also one of nine Highland takes with "monster" traditions and reports (Besides Ness, the other are Oich, Canisp, Assynt, Arkaig, Shiel, Lochy, and
Quoich.) Most sightings at Morar and elsewhere describe creatures bearing an undeniable resemblance to the supposedly long-extinct plesiosaur.
If such animals survive, however (and there is no confirmation of this in the fossil records), they would have had to adapt to far colder water
temperatures then their ancestors could handle. Roy P. Mackal, a biologist with a keen interest in lake monster, argues that Morag, Nessie, and
their relatives are zeuglodons, primitive, snakelike whales generally believed to have ceased their existence over 20 million years ago.

If the idea of relic giant prehistoric reptiles and mammals seems too fantastic to be considered, plesiosaurs and zeuglodons at least look like what
people usually report when they recount their observations of the monsters of the Highland loch. "Conventional" explanations pointing to sharks,
seals, eels, or even mats of vegetation typically begin with the outright rejection of the witnesses' testimony and the implicit assumption that these
individuals could not have seen what they said they saw; thus they saw something else, which the explainer is always willing to supply even when
it defies nearly every word of the testimony. Such an approach may have its uses on occasion, but more often than not takes us only so far. Often
it is easier to believe that the witnesses are lying outright than they are suffered from such massive breakdown of their perceptual apparatus.