South
Wales Sea Monster?
This is a photograph
I took in the Bristol Channel, close to Cardiff, during a boat trip
on 10th September 2003. At first it surfaced
just close enough to
the boat for the wash it caused to rock us. This was pretty
scary, but it dived almost immediately. I grabbed my camera
just in case in surfaced again, which it did, a bit further away. My camera is very
ordinary so the thing -whatever it is- looks even further away in the
picture than it did to me. You get a better idea when the picture is
blown up:
This, I believe,
is a picture of the Anghenfil, a
creature traditionally thought to frequent the Bristol Channel.
"Anghenfil" means "monster" in the Welsh language. Sometimes the name
is anglicised and written as "Angenvil". Stories have been
told of the creature for centuries, though when I looked into it
I found that sightings of the
Anghenfil in recent times seem to have started only since the 1990s.
In the 19th century villagers on the South Wales shore (and along the
lower reaches of the Wye) thought that to hear the cry of the
"angenvil" heralded a death in the family.
In August 1992,
two people reported seeing a massive creature with a large
partially-submerged body and a long flexible neck off the Gower
Peninsula.
The Anghenfil
has since been sighted periodically since. There were
a rash of reports in 2004.
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