OLL LEWIS: The Big Three

A FEW WEEKS AGO WE ASKED VARIOUS BLOGGO REGULARS TO TELL US WHAT WERE THEIR TOP THREE FAVOURITE MYSTERY ANIMALS... AND WHY.


Apart from the fact that his puns are terrible and he has an obsession with the more surreal side of Internet culture, Oll Lewis hasn't put a foot wrong since we started this bloggo-thing. Because of his interest in things aquatic he has been co-ordinating the lake and sea monster news for the CFZ for some years now, and as regular readers of this bloggo will already know he is letting this obsession spill over online..

When I was asked to compile a list of the three cryptids that interest me the most I had to think long and hard. There are, after all, a lot to choose from so cutting that down to a list of only three was tough. It means that I have to leave out several fascinating animals, including giant dragonflies. I actually saw a giant dragonfly nearly 10 years ago and reported my sighting to an entomology professor at the university I was studying at the time who was quite adamant that I must have been mistaken. But anyway, I digress, eventually after much thought I’ve settled on the following three cryptids:

Gwibers:
Out of the three cryptids I’ve picked gwibers the least likely to actually exist. All but a few witness statements have faded into folklore and the creature sounds quite unlike any known to science. Gwibers are snakes with wings most often found in Wales but occasionally popping up in other parts of Britain. Descriptions of the animals vary greatly from account to account: Some gwibers, particularly in North Wales are depicted as humungous scaly beasts with leathery wings that can swoop down from the skies and carry whole sheep, where-as in South East Wales they are more often described as small beautiful feather covered farm yard pests.

Could such an unusual animal exist? It’s quite unlikely that they’d exist exactly as they’ve been depicted if the did because the evolutionary history of snakes doesn’t include feathered or winged creatures (at least as far as we know) but sightings could have been based on things people mistook for snakes or garbled accounts in folklore. I know it seems like a bit of a cop out but if gwibers do exist rather than just assuming that they are snakes that have somehow sprouted wings it might be just as possible that they are something else, like the aforementioned giant dragonfly with a liberal dash of exaggeration thrown on top.

Afanc:
Afanc are crocodile like lake monsters that have been seen in bodies of water all over Wales since at least the end of the Roman Empire and were probably seen even longer ago than that. It’s not just Wales where they are seen either, a large number of escaped crocodile reports that make their way into British newspapers when there are not enough stories about former reality TV stars going for a drink (in an actual pub, where people drink (!)) to clog up the real news from getting through are probably not sightings of crocodiles but of Afanc.

Afanc have suffered from an identity crisis though: they are not some hitherto undiscovered indigenous British species of crocodile, surviving dinosaurs, aquatic dwarfs, beavers or whatever the hell that big brown thing was that they called an afanc recently in the otherwise brilliant BBC adventure drama Merlin. Afanc are giant pike, not just pike that have grown a bit bigger than normal, really huge pike.

One place I’ve studied is Langorse Lake near Brecon in Wales. Langorse has had legends told about the afanc there since the dark ages at least and the creatures were so well known in the lake it even had poems writain about it by Lewis Glyn Cothi in the 15th century. Tales of large pike have persisted in the area into the modern day from a close encounter with a massive fish by Mike Tunnicliffe in the 1980s to a water-skier being hospitalised after he was attacked by a giant pike in the 1990s. The heaviest pike ever caught on a rod and line in Britain was caught there by O. Owens in 1846, the pike weighed 68lbs, remarkable considering the upper size limit for pike in the UK is meant to be around 47lbs. An even bigger pike was found washed up dead along the shore of the lake a few years ago. Only the skull, or mask remained and that measured 18 inches in length, the estimated weight of the pike is roughly around 90lbs and it could have been anywhere between 6-10ft long. A real monster if ever there was one.

Nandi Bear:
I feel almost as if I’m cheating by picking Kenya’s Nandi bear for my list because it is almost certainly more than one cryptid. Most descriptions of the Nandi bear say that the animal is at least as big as a man, but with four limbs and a sloping back covered in fur, the creature is sometimes seen ‘standing up’ on its hind limbs but invariably seems to run on all four legs. Attacks attributed to Nandi bears are usually extremely violent in nature and the creature is said to have a taste for brains, often scalping its victims and cracking open skulls as if they were egg shells. Occasionally witnesses attribute feats of athleticism to the Nandi bear like being able to leap two meter high fences in a single bound and jump to the top of huts. It is also said to emit fearsome noises before or immediately after killing that can strike fear into all but the bravest of men.

However, when Bernard Heuvelmans started researching the cryptid for ‘On The Track Of Unknown Animals’ he soon came to the realisation that not every witness was describing the same animal. A number of sightings were likely misidentified ratels and aardvarks but amongst the sightings were what appeared to have been giant baboons and giant hyenas. One theory held by Heuvelmans was that the giant baboon sightings were caused by ancestors of the modern baboon thought to be extinct, another theory is that hybridisation between some species of baboon can result in much taller individuals than the 70cm norm. One such hybridised baboon population has been discovered in Ethiopia. Giant hyenas are spotted in Kenya every so often and a tea plantation owner in Nandi shot two giant hyenas in the 1950s that were reportedly twice the size of normal hyenas. The bones were donated to Nairobi Museum to be analysed where they presumably remain to this day. Frustratingly the museum could not, at the time, clarify the species of hyena, or indeed define whether it was a new species, and simply classed the bones a ‘forest hyena’.

OLL LEWIS: Penllyn Is In My Ears And In My Eyes

A few of you will probably be aware that one of my internet nom de guerres is ‘gwiber’ and I’ve actually been asked a few times what it means.

A gwiber (pronounced ‘why-bur’) is a type of wing-ed serpent said to be found almost exclusively in Wales. In folklore they range in size from fairly small beautiful creatures to great big monsters that are often said to protect a hoard of treasure and sometimes, if a would-be slayer is lucky, a particularly attractive maiden. They are the original form of the Welsh dragon, the four legged red ‘Ishtar gate’ style dragon that features on today’s Welsh flag is a modern creation that came into being sometime after the crusades. The use of the red dragon as a symbolic representation of Wales according to folklore came from Merlin’s prophesy relating to a red gwiber and a white gwiber he saw fighting. After the victory of the red gwiber Merlin proclaimed that the original people of Britain would eventually defeat the invading Saxons while fighting under a red dragon, this came to pass with the ascension to the throne of Henry Tudor (Henry VII), a direct descendant of Welsh royalty after his victory over the English king Richard III. However, the gwiber was a symbol of the British people long before this legend was supposed to have taken place but, you’ll have to come to watch my talk at this year’s Weird Weekend in August (tickets are available now by the way) to learn more about that…

There hundreds of gwibers mentioned in Welsh folklore, from all over the principality, differing in size and ferocity. Often, due to the nature of folklore it is impossible to offer all but the vaguest date ranges to when the animals were meant to have been seen, let alone verify if the sighting even happened in the first place or what animals might have been seen. There have however been gwibers seen in fairly modern times and one witness was interviewed by Marie Trevelyan some years before she published her 1909 book ‘Folklore and Folkstories of Wales’:

“The woods around Penllyne Castle, Glamorgan, had the reputation of being frequented by winged serpents, and these were the terror of old and young alike. An aged inhabitant of Penllyne, who died a few years ago, said that in his boyhood the winged serpents were described as very beautiful. They were coiled when in repose, and "looked as though they were covered with jewels of all sorts. Some of them had crests sparkling with all the colours of the rainbow." When disturbed, they glided swiftly, "sparkling all over," to their hiding places. When angry, they "flew over people's heads, with outspread wings bright and sometimes with eyes, too, like the feathers in a peacock's tail." He said it was "no old story," invented to "frighten children," but a real fact. His father and uncles had killed some of them, for they were "as bad as foxes for poultry." This old man attributed the extinction of winged serpents to the fact that they were "terrors in the farmyards and coverts.”

Parts of the description make the animals sound very unlikely to say the least but never the less, last year I went to the woods around Penllyn, to see if I could find any trace of these creatures or, more likely, existing animals in the woods that these tales could have been based upon. Upon my arrival to Penllyn the first thing I noticed was just how quiet the village was. I live in a slightly larger village and no matter where you walk, or what time of the day, you always see someone out and about, weather they are walking a dog, off to the shop or pub or just posting a letter. Penllyn was different. During my wanderings around the village itself all I saw was the occasional car passing though and the gravestones of the local church, the only sign of current habitation was the village noticeboard and the well kept and tidy nature of the place. Perhaps I was unlucky and went on a day when all the residents were busy, but this meant that there was nobody in the village itself I could ask about local fauna or if they had heard about their village’s cryptozoological claim to fame.

So I headed off to the woods. In the woodland I was surprised to encounter the same quietness I had in the village, there was almost no bird song. I wandered through the woods, lifting up stones and logs and investigating the leaf litter but the only animals to be found were woodlice worms and other invertebrates and certainly nothing that could have been mistaken for a brightly coloured snake, let alone a winged one. I did find some eerie looking ruins, but if there was anything of cryptozoological note in the woods I didn’t find it that day. Before I left Penllyn I had one last avenue to pursue; Penllyn castle. Unfortunately the family living in the castle did not want to be interviewed by me, as they ‘don’t want publicity’ and neither did they want me taking any photographs while on site. This was strange considering they had had scenes from the Doctor Who episode ‘Tooth and Claw’ filmed there recently, but you have to respect people’s wishes. I explained that I was there for scientific reasons and wasn’t from ‘Heat magazine’ or something and left my business card with them but I never did hear back from them.

So did gwibers even exist in Penllyn? Or were they just folktales? Well there is certainly no evidence for them that has been unearthed yet other than stories and fantastical claims, so if I had to bet either way I’d say they probably did not, or at least not in the way they were described. Feathers on a snake would be odd indeed because there is no president for this and snakes are very far removed from dinosaurs and birds in evolutionary terms, but if an account was just talking about ‘wings’ on a snake and made no mention of feathers then it could be argued that it might be referring to something like a cobra. Real or not gwibers and other Welsh dragon legends are a huge part of Welsh folklore and very compelling creatures.