Glen is one of the newer additions to the bloggo family. He wrote to me out of the blue last year to ask wherther we wanted a Western Isles volume in our Mystery Animals of Britain series. We argeed that we did indeed want one, and commissioned him. What we were not expecting was such a bloody good writer and all round nice guy, who - by the way - is writing several other volumes for us... The still waters of Rostherne Mere can be found lying between the stately homes of Dunham Massey and Tatton Park at the northern end of the county of Cheshire on the outskirts of Greater Manchester. The waters of this mere were recorded in 1905 as reaching down to a maximum depth of 103.5 feet with its widest part coming in at 3,750 feet; being fully land locked and on the small side you would not really expect that it would harbour much in the way of mystery animals, but sometimes things are not always what they seem.
The most well known tales attached to this lake are those concerning the appearance of a mermaid that frequents the Mere each Easter Sunday when she sets about ringing a church bell that unfortunately found its way into the mere. The story goes that in the dim and distant past there happened to be a travelling bell maker who for reasons known only to himself cursed the new bell the he was taking to Rostherne church, as happened in those quondam days divine retribution wasn’t far behind and the bell maker’s cursing saw both him and his new bell falling into the depths of the mere in some not easily explained accident.
The reports of the mermaid in themselves ask a number of questions, with the mere being inland and many miles from the sea it is hard to place the creature sighted as an out of place mystery seal, but not impossible I might add. After all it was only around a hundred years ago that a seal made it to nearby Warrington by swimming up the River Mersey. Which of course leads us nicely to an old local tradition that states that Rostherne Mere is connected to either the Irish Sea or the River Mersey by means of a subterranean passage, perhaps it is this mystery link that has aided the travel arrangements of this mystery finned campanologist.
While talk of an underground link to the sea may at first sound nothing more than fanciful mediaeval superstition there is possibly some truth to it because there used to be reports of another animal in the waters of the mere that strongly hint to there once being a connection to the Mersey. For until the 1920s Rostherne Mere played host to a population of fresh water smelt.
Traditionally the smelt is an estuarine fish spending August to May in fresh water but returning to the sea after spawning at the beginning of April. Due to possessing a tolerance for low salinities the smelt has been able to adapt itself to live continually in fresh water when a population has found itself cut off from the routes back to the sea, such is the case with those smelt found in the lakes in Scandinavia. It was claimed Rostherne Mere was unique in the United Kingdom in playing host to this species of fresh water smelt, sadly however this claim can no long be supported as the last specimen was caught in 1922 and with it the smelt of Rostherne Mere disappeared into the history books.
Of course there is one last big question that has to be asked, just how the mermaid manages to work out when the moveable feast of Easter is due each year.
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