There is something uniquely unnerving about dark water.
Stand beside a wood at night and, given enough moonlight, you can still see into it. Stand beside a lake and the surface gives you almost nothing back. A reflection perhaps. Ripples. Moonlight. Beyond that, whatever lies beneath remains conveniently out of sight. Britain has filled that darkness with monsters for centuries. Long before the Loch Ness Monster became an international celebrity, our rivers, lakes and pools were inhabited in folklore by water horses, serpents, dragons, afancod and things for which nobody seems to have found a satisfactory name. Some dragged people beneath the surface. Some merely appeared. Others occupied that peculiar territory between local story and alleged living animal.
Then the twentieth century arrived, and the monsters changed. Newspapers wanted sightings. Cameras wanted photographs. Cryptozoologists wanted surviving prehistoric creatures. Lakes acquired expeditions, sonar searches and wonderfully marketable names. Nessie was joined by Teggie in Bala Lake and Bownessie in Windermere.
But not every ancient-looking tradition is actually ancient. One British lake monster was deliberately invented to see whether folklore could be manufactured. It worked rather better than intended. So let us go down to the water.
Not into it, obviously.
I have read the sources.
Your card today is –
XIX – The Water
We should probably begin with the celebrity.
Loch Ness contains an extraordinary amount of water. Long, narrow and deep, it provides almost everything a monster story could possibly want, including dark peat-stained water and enough distance for an ambiguous shape to become whatever the observer expects it to be. Stories connecting strange creatures with the area are much older than modern Nessie. The frequently cited early account comes from Adomnán’s Life of St Columba, written in the late seventh century. In it, Columba encounters people burying a man who had supposedly been attacked while swimming in the River Ness. When another man enters the water, a beast approaches and Columba commands it to retreat. It does. This is regularly presented as the first recorded sighting of the Loch Ness Monster. But that description is rather too convenient. Adomnán was writing a saint’s life, not compiling a zoological survey, and the episode takes place in the River Ness, not Loch Ness. Its purpose is to demonstrate Columba’s holy power over a dangerous creature. Treating it as a straightforward eyewitness report of the modern Loch Ness Monster removes the story from the medieval religious context in which it was written. There is nevertheless something important here. The idea of dangerous supernatural creatures inhabiting Scottish waters is very old indeed. What is not ancient is the creature most people now picture when somebody says Nessie.
The modern Loch Ness Monster phenomenon exploded in 1933, after reports of an enormous creature in or around the loch attracted press attention. Soon descriptions, photographs and investigations followed. The familiar long-necked, small-headed creature increasingly resembled a plesiosaur, an animal that had been extinct for around 66 million years. The Natural History Museum notes that earlier descriptions of Loch Ness creatures were more whale-like or eel-like, and that the plesiosaur image became established particularly during the 1930s. Natural History Museum
Then came one of the most famous monster photographs ever taken. The so-called Surgeon’s Photograph, published in 1934, appeared to show a small head and long neck rising from the loch. It became an icon. It was also a hoax. Whatever might or might not inhabit Loch Ness, the photograph that helped teach generations what Nessie was supposed to look like cannot be treated as evidence for it. Yet the image became so culturally powerful that it influenced the monster itself. Once people knew what Nessie looked like, ambiguous shapes on the water could be interpreted accordingly. The Natural History Museum points directly to the photograph’s role in solidifying the plesiosaur-like image. Natural History Museum
And that is where water monsters become especially interesting. They do not merely live in lakes. They live in expectations.
Travel south into Wales and we meet another creature, Teggie. Llyn Tegid, better known in English as Bala Lake, has its own modern monster tradition. Reports describe humps, disturbances and large creatures moving through the water, and eventually the resident mystery acquired the inevitable friendly name. But there really is older folklore attached to something monstrous beneath Llyn Tegid. In Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales, published in 1909, Marie Trevelyan recorded a story that the lake was bottomless. An expert diver supposedly attempted to discover its depth and returned terrified, claiming that a dragon lay coiled below and could have swallowed him. That is a glorious image. It is also evidence for an older monster tradition at the lake, but not necessarily evidence that people in earlier centuries believed in the modern cryptid called Teggie. The older dragon story and later sightings have become joined together retrospectively. Wikipedia
This happens constantly in folklore. A place already associated with strange water acquires a modern monster. The modern monster then inherits the old stories. Within a few generations, it can become difficult to see where one tradition ended and another began. Welsh folklore provides plenty of material for that process. The afanc, variously imagined as a water monster and sometimes described in terms resembling a crocodile, beaver or other creature, belongs to Welsh legendary tradition and has become associated with several bodies of water.
But water creatures do not need to be zoologically consistent. That is a modern demand. Folklore is perfectly happy for the thing beneath the surface to change shape. The Scottish each-uisge, for example, belongs to a different tradition entirely. This supernatural water horse could appear attractive enough to approach or ride, before carrying its unfortunate victim into the water. That creature was not an unknown animal waiting to be classified. It was dangerous water given legs.
And that distinction matters when we begin looking for Britain’s lake monsters. Because folklore and cryptozoology ask different questions. Folklore asks:
What stories do people tell about this water?
Cryptozoology asks:
Is there actually an unknown animal in it?
The two can overlap, but they are not interchangeable. And nowhere is that more wonderfully demonstrated than in the Lake District. Windermere has acquired its own modern monster, usually called Bownessie after Bowness-on-Windermere. Sightings have included unexplained wakes, humps and shapes in the lake. But another supposed northern lake creature has an even better story. The Eachy.
It sounds old. It looks old when written down. It was supposedly a northern British lake monster with a folklore pedigree. Except Charles Paxton invented it. In 2006, Paxton anonymously proposed a Wikipedia entry describing a monstrous aquatic humanoid called an Eachy. He supplied historical sightings and even a scholarly-looking reference to a book called Folklore of Northern Britain by M. J. Gould. The book did not exist. Neither did the tradition. Paxton was conducting an experiment. He wanted to discover whether a cryptozoological tradition could effectively be created simply by putting one into circulation.
The fake creature spread. The story migrated onto websites. Extra details accumulated. Merchandise appeared. The Eachy eventually escaped into printed material, acquiring precisely the sort of apparent cultural history that its inventor had fabricated in the first place. Skeptical Inquirer
There is an exquisite complication. Real historical reports of strange things in the relevant lakes subsequently turned up. Paxton discovered that tourists had apparently reported something unusual at Bassenthwaite in 1973. Meanwhile, an entirely independent modern monster tradition developed around Windermere, producing Bownessie. His fake monster had been released into waters that already contained enough ambiguity to grow monsters of their own. Skeptical Inquirer
The Eachy experiment tells us something enormously important about researching folklore online.
A citation can manufacture a past.
Give an invented creature a plausible name, an old date and an authoritative-looking reference and the internet can begin copying it. The tenth website repeating the story appears to confirm the first, when all ten ultimately descend from the same unsupported claim. Eventually somebody writes it in a book. Now the website can cite the book. The circle closes. Suddenly our invented monster has history.
That does not mean Britain’s water-monster traditions are all fabricated. Quite the opposite. Some are demonstrably old, and water beings occupy an enormous place in British and Irish traditional belief. It means we need to distinguish between the age of a place’s folklore and the age of the particular monster currently attached to it. And we should also distinguish folklore from zoology.
The surviving-plesiosaur explanation for Nessie is especially problematic. Plesiosaurs were marine reptiles, not dinosaurs, and disappeared in the mass extinction 66 million years ago. No credible evidence demonstrates that a population survived into modern Scottish freshwater. Natural History Museum A single monster would not solve the problem either. Animals reproduce. A viable population would require food, breeding animals and a biological history stretching across an almost incomprehensible span of geological time.
There are much more ordinary things capable of producing extraordinary sightings. Large fish. Otters. Swimming deer. Birds. Floating timber. Boat wakes. Wave effects. Eels. Even an animal correctly identified at close range can become monstrous when only part of it is visible at a distance. Water is particularly good at removing scale. A hump fifty metres away provides remarkably little information about how large the unseen body beneath it might be. And human perception hates incomplete information. So we complete it. That does not make witnesses foolish. It makes them human.
There is also a reason these stories cluster around particular landscapes. A dark lake beneath mountains already feels different from a municipal reservoir beside a dual carriageway. History, isolation, weather, local tradition and expectation all shape an encounter before anything breaks the surface. Perhaps this is why Britain’s water monsters refuse to disappear. Scientific investigation can test claims about unknown animals. Historical research can expose invented traditions. Photography can reveal hoaxes. DNA can identify the species actually inhabiting a lake. And still, when something large moves beneath dark water, we look.
Because the oldest part of the story was never really about zoology. It was about not knowing what is underneath you. Our ancestors knew perfectly well that water could kill. A calm surface could conceal depth, current, weeds, mud and sudden drops. Children were warned away from dangerous pools with stories of creatures that grabbed ankles. Horses emerging from water could become death itself. Dragons occupied bottomless lakes. The monster gave the danger a face.
Modern cryptids do something slightly different. They give the unknown a body. We measure it. Photograph it. Give it a nickname. Launch sonar at it. Search for DNA. But beneath both traditions lies exactly the same human impulse. We stand on the bank. Something disturbs the surface. And for one deliciously horrible moment, we wonder whether the old stories were warning us about something after all.
Britain did not need Nessie to teach it that things lived beneath the water.
We had been warning one another about that for centuries.
XVIII – The Water
The Water is the card of hidden depths, uncertainty and everything that remains unseen beneath an apparently calm surface.
When it appears, resist the temptation to mistake lack of evidence for evidence of nothing. Something may be developing beyond your immediate view. Feelings may be deeper than they have been expressed. A situation that appears simple may have history beneath it.
But The Water carries the opposite warning too.
Not every ripple is a monster.
When information is incomplete, imagination rushes in to finish the picture. Fear can do this particularly efficiently. One ambiguous sign becomes another, assumptions become facts, and before long you can find yourself responding to something that exists mainly because you expected to see it.
This card therefore asks for curiosity without credulity.
Look beneath the surface where you can. Check the old story. Trace the source. Test what can be tested. Accept that some things will remain unresolved without allowing the mystery itself to become proof.
When The Water appears, ask yourself: What do I genuinely know lies beneath the surface, and what have I put there myself?
Then decide whether you really need to go swimming.
Sources
Adomnán of Iona, Life of St Columba. The famous early account of Columba confronting a water beast concerns the River Ness and belongs to a medieval saint’s life. It is valuable evidence for an old story associated with dangerous water, but should not simply be treated as an eyewitness report of the modern Nessie.
Marie Trevelyan, Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales, 1909. Records the Llyn Tegid tradition of a diver encountering a dragon-like creature coiled beneath the lake, providing an important older folkloric strand behind later monster traditions associated with Bala. Wikipedia
Natural History Museum, “What is a plesiosaur?” Particularly useful for separating the real palaeontology from modern monster imagery. It explains the extinction of plesiosaurs and traces the way Nessie’s now-familiar plesiosaur appearance crystallised during the twentieth century. Natural History Museum
Charles G. M. Paxton, “Creating a Monster: The Case of Eachy”, Skeptical Inquirer, 2022. Paxton’s own account of deliberately inventing the Eachy tradition in 2006 and watching fabricated information spread into websites, merchandise and print. It is an unusually valuable case study in how supposedly traditional folklore can be manufactured and subsequently repeated as fact. Skeptical Inquirer
Charles G. M. Paxton and Ian J. Winfield, “Some statistical aspects of the long-term gill net monitoring programme for pike Esox lucius in Windermere”, Freshwater Forum 14, 2000. Relevant background to Paxton’s choice of Windermere for the Eachy experiment. The lake had been subject to extensive biological study, making it an especially interesting setting in which to manufacture an unknown monster tradition.
