Regular Episode
#119 – ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCHED — MORAR NESS
Loch Morar sits roughly 60–70 miles west of Loch Ness in one of the most inaccessible stretches of the Scottish Highlands, a region known as the Rough Bounds. It is, incidentally, the deepest freshwater loch in Britain at over 1,000 feet — deeper than Loch Ness — and feeds into the sea via the shortest river in the British Isles, barely half a mile long. Most of its shoreline is entirely uninhabited, a legacy of the Highland Clearances of the 19th century, when landlords evicted tenant communities to make way for deer-stalking estates.
🏔️ A Very Different Loch
Mike draws several key contrasts between Loch Morar and its famous neighbor to the east. Loch Ness is essentially a roadside attraction: a new road was cut alongside it in 1933 — the same year monster reports exploded into the press — giving thousands of motorists a clear view of its surface. Loch Morar, by contrast, has only a two-mile stretch of road overlooking its eleven-mile length. About three-quarters of the loch has no one overlooking it at all.
The waters are also fundamentally different in character. Loch Ness is famously black and peat-laden — visibility near zero, fish stocks relatively sparse (estimates put the total biomass at only 16–25 tons). Loch Morar is crystal clear, visibility down to 40–50 feet, and supports a robust food chain including substantial salmon populations. For anyone inclined to take the “could something actually live there?” question seriously, Loch Morar is the more interesting candidate on basic ecological grounds.
📜 Folklore Before the Monster
One of the most valuable things Mike brings to the discussion is historical depth. Loch Morar is one of only two or three lakes in the world with a documented monster tradition that predates the 1933 Loch Ness sensation — the others being Ogopogo in British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake and Storsjöodjuret in Sweden’s Lake Storsjön. The earliest Loch Morar reference Mike has found can be dated to around 1840, pinned to the death of a local landowner named Ian Rud Ready.
But the early stories are not straightforwardly “monster sightings.” They are embedded in Gaelic clan folklore and function primarily as harbingers of death — Morag appeared before the death of a notable person, not as a creature to be studied but as a portent to be feared. The tradition is specifically tied to the Gillies and MacDonald families of the northern shore. These early accounts come from two main sources: a 1906 volume called Tales of the Highlands by James McDonald, a kinsman of the relevant clan; and the Carmichael Collection, a body of Gaelic folklore manuscripts held at the University of Edinburgh, currently being transcribed.
The Carmichael material reveals two distinct early story types: one featuring an undifferentiated “black rolling mass” on the water, and a second more humanoid tradition describing a half-woman, half-monster figure capable of speech and of coming ashore — closer to a mermaid than a plesiosaur. Mike notes that the three-part Morag is even linked symbolically to the three elements of a Highland funeral rite (coffin, grave, burial ceremony). The Loch Ness media explosion of 1933, with its dinosaur-like template, seems to have gradually flattened these diverse earlier story types into the familiar long-neck-and-humps pattern.
🐉 The Kelpie Problem
The conversation turns to the broader tradition of Highland water creatures — not just the loch monster tradition, but the Kelpie, the demonic shape-shifting water horse of Scottish folklore. Mike is refreshingly blunt about the cryptozoological habit of strip-mining folklore for anatomical clues: the Kelpie is specifically a demonic horse that lures victims onto its back and drowns them — not a large reptile. Co-opting Kelpie legends as “distorted reports of a real monster” inverts the actual interpretive logic. Mike suggests the more defensible reading is that post-1933, real folklore was being retrofitted to match a new, media-driven monster template — what Blake memorably calls “scripteds” (cryptids whose morphology derives from film and pop-culture depictions rather than independent observation).
A related piece of Highland folklore discussed is the Grey Dog of Meeble — a spectral deerhound, roughly the size of a Shetland pony, said to haunt the tracks around Loch Morar as a death omen for a particular local family. Its origin legend involves a Napoleonic Wars soldier, a litter of feral pups, and a dog that outlived the soldier and grieved on his grave. Mike notes it as a beautiful example of how the loch and its surroundings generate a whole constellation of ominous folklore well beyond the water-monster tradition.
🚤 The Most Dramatic Sightings
What distinguishes Loch Morar from most lake-monster cases, Mike argues, is a small number of unusually close-range, physical encounters — the kind that resist the standard skeptical explanation of misidentified wave effects or distant misperception.
The most famous is the MacDonald-Simpson sighting of August 1969, in which two local fishermen — by all accounts highly respected in their community — were traveling the loch in a small motorboat when something with three humps converged on and bumped against their vessel. One man pushed against it with an oar while the other fired a rifle shot in its direction. The witnesses themselves suggested a giant eel as a possible explanation — not a prehistoric reptile. The report only reached the press because a relative talked, much to the men’s annoyance.
The month prior, a holidaymaker from Edinburgh named Robert Duff, fishing in Meeble Bay, looked over the gunwale through 20 feet of clear water and reported seeing what he described as a large lizard-like creature on the bottom, with four legs and visible digits. A third case, from 1931 — pre-Nessie — involves Lord Glenconner, a sporting visitor, whose fishing line was taken by something of extraordinary weight that paid out his entire reel before diving to depth. His ghillie advised him not to talk about it.
🔍 Expeditions and Investigations
The MacDonald-Simpson sighting caught the attention of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau, which had been operating at Loch Ness for several years with mounting frustration at the lack of results. A woman named Elizabeth Montgomery Campbell led a spin-off survey — the Loch Morar Survey — from 1969 to 1971, reasoning that the clear water and isolation might yield faster results.
Adrian Shine, the legendary investigator (and possessor of what Mike calls one of the most spectacular beards in cryptozoology, making even Darwin look like an amateur), began his career at Loch Morar — not Loch Ness. His early work there included constructing a small one-man submersible pod, sinking himself 20 feet to the bottom, and waiting for a monster to swim overhead silhouetted against the surface. When that didn’t pan out, he surveyed all 22 miles of shoreline in a glass-bottomed boat looking for carcasses. Shine eventually relocated to Loch Ness in the early 1980s, primarily for fundraising reasons, and no significant investigation of Loch Morar has been conducted in the 35–40 years since. Shine’s current work at Loch Ness — fish stock surveys, ecological studies — is described as genuinely good science, and his view on the Loch Ness monster is that a sturgeon explains many of the more credible reports once the long-neck-and-head elements (likely imaginative elaboration) are set aside.
🏡 The Boleskine Aside
In a brief tangent, Blake raises Boleskine House — the Loch Ness-side estate associated with Aleister Crowley and later purchased by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. The house suffered a serious fire in late 2015 that destroyed more than half the structure; no foul play was suspected. Blake flags it as a future episode topic. Mike teases a forthcoming story about Glamis Castle and its legendary secret room — which inspired the 1953 film 🎬 The Maze 💵 — as another potential MonsterTalk episode.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Borderlands 💵 by Mike Dash
– 🎬 The Maze 💵 (1953 film, inspired by the legend of Glamis Castle)
🔗 Related Links
– Loch Morar — Wikipedia
– Morag (folklore) — Wikipedia
– Loch Ness Monster — Wikipedia
– Loch Ness Investigation Bureau — Wikipedia
– Highland Clearances — Wikipedia
– Kelpie (folklore) — Wikipedia
– Boleskine House — Wikipedia
– Glamis Castle — Wikipedia
– Carmichael Watson Collection, University of Edinburgh
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
Writer and researcher Mike Dash (Spring Heeled Jack) returns to talk about the less famous Scottish lake monster alleged to live in Loch Morar. While not as widely known as Nessie, Morag (as she is known) has her own fascinating history.
Items of Interest
- Borderlands
- Mike Dash articles at Smithsonian
- The Maze (1953), inspired by the legend of Glamis Castle (see Mike’s article) which we’ll discuss in a future episode.
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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