I’ve been running this blog for a long time, and there are occasions when I feel like I’m running out of books to read. A few years ago I was a bit stuck, so did a google search for Fortean books. I had read a lot of the results, but there were a few titles that piqued my interest. One of these was Graham J. McEwan’s Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland. It took me a few years to track down a copy, and once I got my hands on one, it lay on the shelf for over a year before I actually read it.

In truth, this book was largely quite boring. It deals with 4 main categories of cryptids: big cats, sea serpents, lake monsters and black dogs. The chapters on these topics are mostly made up of reported sightings. This is thorough, but it makes for dull reading.

I’ve come across the large cat thing before. There definitely seems to be something to these sightings, but it seems certain that the majority of these cases were escaped pets. They’re not cryptids or supernatural beings. The lake monsters and sea serpents sections make repeated references to Tony “Doc” Shiels, a man who managed to see and take pictures of both the Loch Ness monsters and Morgawr. It is widely accepted that he faked these sightings and photographs. None of the water monster stuff seemed remotely convincing to me. The last big category, the black dog sightings, is perhaps the most underwhelming. People all around rural Ireland and the UK have reported seeing large black dogs roaming around at night. It’s not hard to imagine a person encountering a stray or escaped dog in the countryside at night. Dogs all look black when it’s dark. The supernatural elements of these stories are silly.

The best part of the book is the penultimate chapter in which the author lists all of the other cryptid reportings from across Ireland and the UK. These feature the Owlman of Mawnan, the shoggothic Shapeless One of Somerset and the Scottish fox that walked on two legs and wore a top hat that I encountered previously in Affleck Gray’s The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui. I think the reason this book initially appealed to me was the fact that it dealt with Irish cryptids too. I’ll try to pay a visit to the lake monster in Lough Bray and the giant black dog of Templeogue the next time I’m home. I may even go looking for the elusive Horseman of Louth if I have the time.

One of the most interesting parts of the book was on the Hexham Heads. These were a set of stone heads that showed up in the 1970s that had supposedly been carved by the ancient Celts. There were reports that anyone who took them home suffered bad luck, and one family was even attacked by a werewolf for taking them. These heads disappeared soon after they found media attention. Although I hadn’t heard of these carvings before, their story seemed remarkably familiar. I then realised that it’s the exact plot of Paul Huson’s The Keepsake, a horror novel that I reviewed a few years back.

There is some good stuff in this book, but read cover to cover, it’s not hugely entertaining. It’s more fun to flick through to search for things from your specific area of interest. Aside from the reports of sightings, the book also contains a limited amount of postulation on the nature of the creatures. I found this quite similar to the arguments in Ted Holiday’s The Goblin Universe, a book that is referenced multiple times throughout McEwan’s text.