Morag: Ghost of a Dinosaur
Loch Morar, Scotland -- We are hunting the ghosts of dinosaurs.
[Original headline: Haunted by a monster ]That's one theory on the monster or monsters rumored to inhabit Loch Morar, Britain's deepest lake. Folks here call the creature the Morag or the Mhorag, and describe it much like witnesses describe the Loch Ness monster: a humped body with four large flippers, a long neck and a snake-like head -- a critter roughly matching the Mesozoic plesiosaur.
The locals have many sightings to go by. Two lads from Newcastle came fishing here two years ago. Out on the loch they circumvented a rock. Then what they'd thought was a rock raised its long neck and dived, disappearing into the black depths. The two young Englishmen immediately returned to shore and turned in their rented boat, though they'd paid for a full day's use.
"It's bloody dangerous out there," one said.
Sightings date back to the 1800s. Old-timers used to call the eerie humps they saw sliding across the water "funeral boats," dark omens of death.
Among the more recent witnesses was a woman who saw the creature flopping through shallow water on its flippers. Someone else saw two long necks cruising down the loch, side by side, thrust from the water like fence posts. A boater docking his craft saw the monster on the bottom below, before it silently slipped off the shelf and plunged into the deep. A diver seeking a lost anchor found diamond-shaped prints in the shallows; he followed them through the mud to where they dropped off into the dark.
The loch's exact depth is undetermined, but it's definitely more than a thousand feet, deeper than Loch Ness, but not nearly as famous. Unlike the towns along Loch Ness, Loch Morar's more remote communities make nothing of their monster. They've no visitor center, no gift shop. Were this America, some eager merchandiser long ago would have put a Moragarama upon one of the loch's lovely islands and charged visitors 20 bucks apiece, which under the current exchange rate would in Scotland be about two quid, five drams and a kipper, I think. Over time, that means mucho dinero.
Yet the Morarans decline this Jurassic perk. They've no "I Saw Morag" T-shirts, no rubber Morag-head hats. Loch Morar malt whisky doesn't call itself "The Monster Mash." Why? "We don't want some tacky tourist center here," said a resident.
That leaves Loch Morar a scenic, rugged, undeveloped lake on Scotland's west coast, with a rocky trail running along its northern flank. That's the path we took to look for the monster, but we haven't seen the thing.
Some maintain there's nothing to see. "That's rubbish," scoffed one local when asked about the monster matter. The more whisky a witness drinks, the bigger that monster gets, he said. "Put more water in your whisky" is a common retort to anyone claiming to have seen the Morag.
Maybe there's no Morag to see. Maybe what people see is merely a reflection of the monsters that used to be -- "the ghosts of dinosaurs," surmised one resident.
If the ghosts of dinosaurs still drift through the depths of Loch Morar, they don't surface for the amusement of American tourists.
Perhaps that's just as well. Two inquisitive American tourists may be all the locals can tolerate.
Note: Morag, the monster of Loch Morar, was historically known as the Great Worm. In 1970 a scientific team surveyed the waters and on July 14 they had their own encounter. Biologist Dr. Neill Bass and two colleagues went for a walk on the north shore of the loch. Suddenly a "black, smooth-looking hump-shaped object" surfaced some 300 yards away before submerging vertically. Thirty seconds later and there was another disturbance in the water that left behind it "a spreading circular wake or ripple which radiated across the waves to about 50 yards diameter," recorded Bass. G¬
