In the last podcast, we talked about the Loch Ness monster, and we met Steve Feltham, who has spent the last 17 years living beside Loch Ness, looking for the monster.
On the website today, you will find a YouTube video. In the video, Steve Feltham tells us about what he does. I will not give you a transcript of what he says, but here are some of the main things, to help you understand.
He introduces himself and tells us where he lives, how long he has lived there and what he does. He mentions a place called Dores where he now lives permanently.
He tells us about “the best thing he has seen” (ie the best sighting of something that might be the Loch Ness monster). It was near Fort Augustus, is at the southern end of Loch Ness.
He has also been out on Loch Ness in boats with sonar equipment. The sonar shows “little blobs”(ie little shapes) and sometimes some “big blobs”. Steve tells us what these “blobs” might be.
He tells us about the different theories that people have about the monster.
He tells us what he does when the water is flat and calm;and what he does when it is choppy.
He gets to hear about sightings which other people have made, and people often show him their photos and videos.
There are fewer good sightings of the monster today than there used to be. Steve puts forward a theory on why this might be.
There is a quiz on the website, so you can test how well you understood Steve’s video.
Loch Ness is in Scotland, and it is long and narrow and very deep. Loch Ness is special. What is it?
Well, “loch” is a Scottish Gaellic word that means a lake or an inlet of the sea. There are thousands of place names in Scotland containing the word “loch”. So Loch Ness is a lake. It is in fact the largest freshwater lake in Britain. But that is not the reason why Loch Ness is special.
No, Loch Ness is special because it has its very own monster. People say that deep in the lake there lives a large creature. Occasionally – very occasionally – you can see the creature swimming on the surface of Loch Ness, or even moving on the land close to the shores of the lake. No-one is certain what sort of creature it is, so it has no proper scientific name. But everyone calls the Loch Ness monster “Nessie”.
The oldest stories about the monster date from the 6th century. St Columba, who first brought Christianity to Scotland, is said to have saved the life of a man who had been attacked by a huge creature near Loch Ness. The modern stories about the monster started in 1933, when there were three sightings of a large, strange creature, about 1 metre high and 8 metres long, with a long neck. There have been similar reports in most years since then, sometimes of a creature on land, though more normally of a creature in the water. There have been some photographs of Nessie as well, but most of them are of poor quality, and some may be fakes. Several studies of Loch Ness using sonar equipment have found traces of a large object or objects deep in the water.
So what is Nessie? Some people think that she (or he?) may be a type of dinosaur, which had managed to survive when all the other dinosaurs on earth died out. But most scientists think that this is extremely implausible. So is Nessie some other sort of animal, such as an eel or a seal? Or perhaps Nessie does not exist at all. Perhaps the people who say that they have seen a creature in Loch Ness actually saw other things – a small boat, perhaps, or a group of birds, or a pattern of waves and shadows on the water.
Steve Feltham is one of the people who believes that Nessie exists. In 1991, he gave up his home, his job and his girlfriend to become a full-time Nessie hunter. For the last seventeen years, he has lived beside Loch Ness looking for the monster. His home is an old van that used to be a mobile library. It is parked in the car park of a pub, close to the shore of the Loch. Steve makes little clay models of Nessie to sell to tourists. He has only once, in 17 years, seen something which might have been Nessie, but that is not important for him. He loves his life as a Nessie hunter. We shall have more about him in the next podcast.
We stay in Scotland for today’s podcast. We are going to meet a man called William Topaz McGonagall. Most people agree that he was the worst poet ever in the English language.
He was born in 1825. His father was a cotton weaver, who had to move from town to town in Scotland to find work. Young William spent only 18 months at school before he too had to go and work in the mills and factories. He became a jute weaver in Dundee, a town on the east coast of Scotland. (Jute is a fibre which is used to make sacks. In the 19th century, Dundee was the centre of the jute industry in Britain). It was in 1877, when William was 52 years old, that he suddenly discovered that he was a poet. Not just a poet – a great poet – possibly the finest poet since Shakespeare.
Over the next 25 years, Willam McGonagall wrote a large number of poems. He wrote about the great public events of the day, like the attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria, and the funeral of the Emperor of Germany. He was particularly fond of disasters, like shipwrecks and railway accidents. He wrote about famous battles, and about people and places that he knew.
And his poetry was bad. It was so bad that it almost became good, if you see what I mean. It was like someone playing a musical instrument, loudly and confidently, but completely out of tune and without any sense of rhythm. It was like a newspaper report turned into poetry. Here are some examples.
In 1878, a railway bridge was built over the river Tay near Dundee. At the time, it was the longest bridge in the world. It was a triumph of British engineering, and the nation felt proud. Naturally, William McGonagall wrote a poem about it. It began:
Beautiful railway bridge over the silvery Tay! With your numerous arches and pillars in so grand array, And your central girders, which seem to the eye To be almost towering to the sky.
Less than two years later, the Tay bridge collapsed in a storm while a train was passing over it. Many people were killed. McGonagall wrote:
Beautiful railway bridge over the silvery Tay! Alas! I am very sorry to say That ninety lives have been taken away On the last Sabbath day of 1879 Which will be remembered for a very long time.
A new Tay Bridge was completed in 1887, and of course William wrote a poem for the occasion. I think you can guess how it began.
Beautiful new railway bridge over the silvery Tay! With your strong brick piers and buttresses in so grand array, And your thirteen central girders, which seem to my eye, Strong enough all windy storms to defy.
William McGonagall organised public events where he would read his poetry. They were very popular. People came to laugh at his poems, and throw rotten fruit and vegetables at him. (Obviously, in those days, there was not much to do in Dundee in the evenings). But McGonagall continued to believe that he had a special gift as a poet. His fame as a bad poet spread throughout Scotland, and then in the rest of Britain and in the British empire. But his poetry did not make him rich, and he died penniless in Edinburgh in 1902. He has never been forgotten however. His books of poetry have been reprinted regularly. Last week, a manuscript of some of his poems was sold at auction for thousands of pounds. People still read his poems today and smile.
