GUEST BLOGGER RICHARD HOLLAND: A cuddly cryptid

The CFZ blogging family would like to introduce you to a new guest blogger: Richard Holland, editor of Paranormal Magazine, and all round good bloke. He intends to be a regular visitor tho these pages, and I am sure that you will all agree with me that this will be jolly good news for all of us..

I have just one mystery beast sighting of my own. But it wasn’t very impressive. It was rather small and cuddly, in fact.

Early spring last year I went to take another look at an important holy well local to me in North-East Wales. Ffynnon Degla (St Tegla’s Well) at Llandegla in Denbighshire had been little more than a damp hole in the ground for more than a century but in its day (up to the early 19th century) had been an important pilgrim site and a bit of a cash cow for the parish church, since it was believed to cure epilepsy (providing you took part in an elaborate ritual involving the transference of the disease to a chicken and, of course, coughed up a coin or two). The well has recently been cleared and restored, so it’s now a basin in the ground rather than a damp patch and since there’s not very much to do up here, this seemed like an exciting enough attraction for me to bother driving the all-of 8 miles to visit the site again.

The experience was not exciting enough to keep my interest for more than about 46 seconds, however, so I then went for a stroll through the fields which skirt the River Alun into which Ffynnon Degla drains. It’s fairly nondescript county just here: open grass fields, some with cows or sheep, a few patches of woodland and scrappy plantations, also a few farms and cottages dotted about in between. Llandegla is on limestone and about 250m above sea level, although higher ground and moorland (standing on gritstone and shale) is to be found east and west a few miles away.

Strolling along in rather muted light, I spotted a critter some way ahead of me on the path. Now unfortunately, I’m useless at judging distances (my old driving instructor was driven mad by this trait, I seem to recall); suffice it to say it was close enough for me to easily spot and follow it but sufficiently far away for me to at first mistake it for a bird before realizing it was actually a mammal. When I first saw it, I thought it was a grouse or maybe some exotic pheasant that had lost its tail. That gives you an idea of the size, and also the shape: dumpy, low to the ground.

But the reason I assumed at first it was a bird was the colour. It was red. I mean: RED. Not chestnut or foxy reddish but Red Panda red, Bandicoot red. It trotted ahead of me on the path, with a kind of lolloping gait. I couldn’t see its legs. And for some reason I can’t for not recall the length or shape of its tail. All I can give is useful negatives: it didn’t have a brush and it didn’t have the white flash of a rabbit’s tail.

I was effectively driving the critter. It was aware I was there and if I stopped it would trot more slowly, but since it still kept moving, I considered it advisable to try and keep up with it just in case it turned its head. And the bastard didn’t, so I never saw it in profile. All I saw was its back and bum.

Well, there you are, a furry red thing with a dumpy shape which trotted and/or lollopped. Ultimately, I lost sight of it, ran on and realised it must have at last found a hole in the fence and had escaped into a scrubby bit of land which provided it with plenty of cover. I stood there for ages hoping I’d get another glimpse but I didn’t. I suppose I could have camped out there with big binocs but Richard Freeman I ain’t: I’m more of a spend-time-in-a-library-with-loads-of-dusty-folklore-books-and-a-cup-of-tea kinda guy.

Finally, in the hope that you haven’t already dozed off or clicked away from my one feeble foray into cryptozoology in the (rather damp) field, I need to ask a question: are there such things as brindle foxes? Twice now I’ve caught a fox in my headlights here in my home village of Gwernaffield in Flintshire and am convinced it’s brindle, or dare I say it, tabby. But much darker than most foxes or indeed tabby cats. So, is it just a trick of my headlights, or have we a rather unusual fox padding about our village?