Joining the hunt for the Lough Neagh monster!

COULD there be a mighty leviathan lurking in the murky depths of Lough Neagh?

Gnarly old fishermen have certainly spoken in hushed tones about weird things they have seen out there. Monstrous things capable of scuttling a boat with a swoosh of its mighty tail.

Back in April 1958 ‘strange objects’ were spotted near Sandy Bay just off Rams Island.

A team from Queen’s University said they were on the case. If the Lough Neagh monster was real, they were going to find it.

The intrepid team of ‘zoologists and biologists’ camped out on the island, but their quarry did not put in an appearance.

But that all changed the following afternoon...

Uttering ‘long, low wails’ the green scaled giant rose from reeds surrounding the island.

Armed with ropes and harpoons the team swung into action and after a few minutes of ‘dramatic splashing’ they had it under control.

As well they might - as it was a Rag Week ruse dreamed up by the students.

They had sunk the 30-foot creation, fashioned out of water proof sacking and bamboo and summoned it from the water on cue with compressed air.

The defeated brute was later dragged to Belfast where it was to be paraded triumphantly through the streets as star of the Rag Day procession.

But the monster had the last laugh.

Travelling with Neaghsie was ‘a beauty’, 18-year-old Jackie Lyons and Engineering student Harold Morrow. When a number of onlookers ‘made a grab’ at Miss Lyons, Harold leapt to her defence and toppled to the ground, requiring a trip to hospital. The float and its fake lake dweller was abandoned.

For the serious monster hunter, it was another dead end - the elusive monster reduced to a laughing stock.

But that was not the end of the story. In 1966 an Ulster MP suggested that they should ‘consider getting a Lough Neagh monster’.

Tourists, he said, would ‘break their necks to try and get an eyeful of it’.

How they would acquire such a behemoth was not so clear.

Besides, wrote one reporter that year, they already had one - albeit on terra firma - in the shape of a phantom dog prowling the shoreline.

“Many residents around the lough shore will tell you of the black dog as big as a donkey and with eyes like lumps of blazing coal seen year in and year out,” he said.

“A lot of loughsiders don’t treat this overgrown dog as a joke. It has on numerous occasions scared the living daylights out of a lot of them.”

That may be so, but for the truly inquisitive it is that vast expanse of water that is the real hunting ground.

And to qualify, it must be more than just a mere fish - regardless of the size.

Back in the 1940s excited anglers were buzzing at news of ‘monster fish’ in the Lough, but for them that could mean a 16 pound trout or a 70-pound pike.

Eighty-three years ago one specimen was hauled out of the waterway and dragged off to a local grocer to be weighed. A witness, ‘an honest man apart from a weakness for poaching in his youth’, swore that it tipped the scales at 114 pounds.

That’s a lot of pike, but it’s still small fry compared to the sort of monster we are after.

Cynics may sneer that it’s all fantasy - an attempt to cash in on a certain Scottish loch.

In 1933 the Northern Whig turned the tables on them, arguing that ‘the newly arrived’ Nessie was actually pinched from local lore.

“Let not Loch Ness plume itself prematurely upon the distinction of being the only possessor of a mysterious monster,” said the scribe.

“Lough Neagh not only by shore traditions but by ocular evidence, boasted its monster or monsters long before the Scottish lake thought of claiming anything of the kind.

“Let us remember that there is more ‘sea room’ for monsters or mysteries in the Irish than in the Scottish water.”

Lough Neagh, he said, was an ‘inland sea’. Loch Ness, by contrast, was ‘more like a wide canal’.

Local sightings, he added, were many and vivid.

“I do not mean the monster doloughans or great lake trout. They were real, honest to goodness monsters that according to the descriptions I received of them from eye witnesses would say ‘not an inch’ if asked to concede dimensions to today’s monster of Loch Ness.

“These were not the fanciful creation of dreamy poets gazing down into the waters of the lough seeking the fabled ‘round towers of other days’.

“Monsters cleaving the waters of the lough were 25-years-ago - at least in the belief of fishermen who have lived their lives on the lough shores and drawn their livelihood from its depths - realities as terrible as they were mysterious.”

And some of the ‘veterans of brotherhood’ shared their frightening experiences with an eager press pack.

Back in 1908 one fisherman was plying his trade. The hour was growing late, but the water was flat as a mirror - and the fish were biting.

Indeed he had just stuck his iron into a big doloughan when he observed a dorsal fin breaking the surface and racing towards his boat.

“The monster with a snap of his great jaws like the crack of a whip tore away the fish and plunged below the surface.”

A few years later another veteran had a terrifying encounter in the ‘lonely mid lough’, and he managed to get an even better view of the beast.

“It suddenly popped up at the boat’s stern, an enormous head like that of a giant eel with huge, wicked, staring eyes - and swallowed at a mouthful an Irish terrier that had been knocked overboard by the sail when the boat gybed,” he recalled.

“The monsters upward and downward plunges rocked the boat so violently that I fully expected it would be my fate to follow the way of the luckless terrier had gone.”

There was another sighting of a beast from the deep in July 1923.

The salty old sea dog had just left Antrim Bay as he had done countless times before - but this fishing trip was to be anything but routine.

“It came up from the depths not far from my boat,” he recalled.

“It had a head bigger than a bull, with a great pair of staring eyes and tusks like walrus.

“On its back stuck up a sort of fin the size of a yacht’s gaff top sail and as it swam towards me it left a wake behind.

“I was almost paralysed with fright.

“However, I jerked out an oar and prepared to sell my life dearly.

“But just as it seemed to be coming head on to me it suddenly dived and left the place where it had been boiling with foam.

“I never saw it again but I have heard other chaps say they’ve seen it too.”

Notice the similarity in the accounts. The dorsal fin. The terrible eyes. Intriguing for serious students of sea serpentry.

The reported eye witness statements, taken together, are quite compelling but they lack the heft of evidential proof.

There are no reports of huge bodies washing ashore. There are no photographs, like the famous shot of Nessie (left) that put that Loch on the map.

But some still maintain that it could be true.

Writing in 1957 C Douglas Deane suggested that the Lough had yet to reveal its biggest secret.

“It is a place that could break the heart of a fisherman, for beneath that gleaming surface ruffled by the shoulder of a breeze live fish so big and powerful that a man may never need to lie...”

In 1966 the Northern Whig came to a similar conclusion.

“Is it real? Who knows. Sure there may be a real live monster swimming about Lough Neagh which hasn’t been spotted yet.

“They say Finn McCool, the giant, made the Lough. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of his pet monsters are still kicking around with enough wit to keep their ugly snouts from the gaze of man.”

Maybe, but for now it remains another fisherman’s tale.