Connemara Horse-Eels

 

Connemara has become famous in cryptozoological circles for being home to so called horse-eels. These mysterious amphibious beasts appear to have been viewed locally and historically as very large eels differing from the common variety by virtue of having a horse-like head with a mane on their neck.

The term horse-eel became universally popular in the 1960s and 1970s following several investigations and expeditions by leading cryptozoologists and Fortean researchers of the day into the exact nature of the phenomena. Expeditions by The Loch Ness Investigation Bureau including researcher F.W. Holiday, cryptozoologist Roy Mackal and Irish naturalist and adventurer Captain Lionel Leslie are well documented. It is difficult to ascertain exactly when the term horse-eel became used colloquially to refer to such beasts but when Holiday interviewed some of the most prominent witnesses in Connemara it appeared to be a well-known description. However as Gary Cunningham has documented in Mystery Animals of Ireland, in fishing speak, the prefix horse can also be used to describe an unusual or abnormal catch simply denoting something out of the ordinary. In fact the term horse-eel itself appears to be a modern one found only in Connemara. There are reports from historical literature describing eels with manes like horses, but despite an extensive background search into Irish literature, folklore and non-fiction works there is little if no evidence to suppose that it was one that has been used to describe a common phenomenon known in Connemara life for hundreds of years. 

The only reference to such an animal documented prior to the 1960s, can be found in Gaelic names of beasts (Mammalia), birds, fishes, insects, reptiles, etc. in two parts, by Robert Forbes (1905), and refers to a horse-eel or eel-horse which only appears to have inhabited Loch Awe in Scotland, and which had twelve legs and eyes and was a type of lamprey.

The horse-eel again is said to be found only in Loch Awe, and to have twelve legs! The appearance of this fish is so fierce-looking as to give it the name "Ulla or uile-bheisd," or monster; another name given it is “Biasd-an- da-shuil-deug," the beast of the twelve eyes; it is also said to have a hole right through its head. The "niney" is vulgarly supposed to be the one originating from a horse-hair.

The only reason it seems this entity was termed a horse-eel, was simply the fact that it was an eel as big as a horse.

To possibly confuse matters even more, fisherman in the north of Ireland (and presumably the south), had different names for different species of eel. Writing in the Natural History of Ireland vol. 4, 1849, William Thompson relates the following names which were applied by fisherman at Lough Neagh, one of the principle eel fisheries, in Belfast.³

The fishermen distinguish three species; this they call the Weed-eel ; the A. acutirostris they call Eel, Skull-eel, or Bann-eel, par excellence ; the A. latirostris they distinguish by the name of Gorb-eel, and Collach or Hunter-eel, on account of its comparative voracity.

In addition other names for eels in the British Isles are given as frog-mouthed eel and bulldog- headed eel (The Freshwater Fish of the British Isles, Tate, 1878). All these names appear to be applied to eels at various stages in their life cycle however, rather than completely separate species.⁴

When investigator Ted Holiday interviewed local witness Tom Joyce, a local farmer, about the phenomena, Joyce described to him possibly the first instance of the term horse-eel being used by a local woman, a Mrs Whalen, who encountered the unusual creature in Lough Auna where Joyce lived.⁵

There is a well-known story known by the older people, imagine seventy years ago because the woman died a couple of years back. She was attending her turf as it grew sort of late in the evening and her bog, you must remember ran down to the lake shore and she happened to be working the end near the lake. Suddenly there was a commotion in the water and this thing which she told everyone was a Horse eel came out of the lake and right up on the turf bank beside her. And she got so scared she ran for her life. It had come up to within a few yards of where she was working. She described it its front appearance was something similar to a horse and it tailed off something like an eel. She called it a Horse eel. She was very scared. Although the animal was not on the attack she didn’t stay any longer.

But these large eels, (perhaps the size of a horse, giving them their name), all seem to have legs and therefore cannot really be eels at all. As the authors have also suggested in their previous work, The Seal Serpent, the grey seal, indigenous to Ireland is also known as the horse-headed seal due to its sometimes equine looking head. Although this term is of Canadian origin it is interesting to note that if you remove the word head you end up with horse-seal, so perhaps the real identity of these creatures (which subsequently spawned the name) has become confused by dialect. In fact writing in an issue of Ireland of the Welcomes, July/August 1970, Ted Holiday wrote a short article about his expeditions to Connemara which included a picture of a 400 year old wooden carving, part of a decorative chair, which reputedly showed a horse-eel (below). However this isn’t an eel as it appears to depict a bulky, squat bodied animal with an extended fore-limb, an impression on the head of what might be ears and a whale-like tail.

 

Text adapted from: Irish Aquatic Monsters a Survey and Definitive Guide.

 

Parsons Long Necked Seal

 

In 1750 Dr James Parsons, member of the Royal Society wrote A Dissertation upon the Class of the Phocae Marinae In it he references Musaeum Regalis Societatis; or a Catalogue & Description of the Natural and Artificial Rarities belonging to the Royal Society and preserved at Gresham College This early was a description of natural artefacts which the Royal Society in England had been collecting from the mid-1660s onwards and was catalogued in 1681 by one Dr Nehemiah Grew a botanist and one time secretary to the society. In part one of the resulting tome on page 95, in a chapter called of Fifthes [sic] he includes the following intriguing description:

 

The Long Necked seal I find him nowhere distinctly mentioned [M]uch slenderer than either of the former; but that, wherein he principally differs, is the length of his neck; for from his nose-end to his fore-feet, and from thence to his tail, are the same measure; as also in that, instead of his fore-feet, he hath rather fins; not having any claws thereon, as have the other kind.

 

 

Scott Mardis subsequently brought this image to the world’s attention where the possibility that it could be proof of the existence of some undescribed species of long-necked seal, a theory pioneered by Bernard Heuvelmans, was debated.

The animal itself is clearly some form of fur seal or sea lion; it has webbed fore-flippers without claws, albeit one with what appears to have an overly long neck. However this feature was often emphasised by illustrators of natural history of the time. According to Parsons its origin was obscure and the Rarities collection later fell into disrepair with part of it being transferred to the British Museum and possibly the Natural History Museum in London where the skin of this unusual specimen appears to have been lost.

At the time Parsons wrote his dissertation, knowledge of otariids (fur seals and sea lions) was minimal with most still awaiting proper scientific description and the great naturalist Otto Fabricius had referred to the animal, believing it to be a genuine species, in his seminal work the Seals of Greenland (1790). However the most logical and obvious solution is that it was simply a species of eared seal (otariid), probably a fur seal, that had been imported into Europe during the seventeenth century. European sailors would have observed such animals which were termed sea dogs, sea bears etc. prior to scientific classification. The Cape Fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus) also known as the South African fur seal and Australian fur seal for instance, had become a staple diet of sailors as they travelled around the Cape of Good Hope in the late 1500s. So it is very likely that Parson`s seal was simply an early specimen of otariid that found its way to England and ended up in the Rarities Collection.

Seal at Hout Bay, South Africa (Mike Peel) CCASA 4.0 International

 

Indeed this supposition was subsequently made by the naturalist William Jardine and William Hamilton in The Natural History of the Amphibious Carnivora, Including the Walrus and Seals, Also of the Herbivorous Cetacea, &c. Illustrated by Thirty-three [i.e. 32] Plates, with Memoir and Portrait of Peron – Robert Hamilton (M.D.) (page 271, circa 1839) and J.E.Grey in  Observations on the fur-seals of the Antarctic seas and the Cape of Good Hope, with the description of a new species 

 

Dr. Shaw, in his Zoology, translated the name into Phoca longicollis and copied Parsons' figure. The name and the form of the front feet are enough to show that it is an Eared Seal; for the neck of these animals is always long compared with the neck of the Earless Seals or Phocidae. Though the habitat is not given, there can be no doubt, when we consider the geographical distribution of the Eared Seal, that it must have been received either from the southern part of South America or from the Cape of Good Hope, as the animals of the Northern Pacific and of Australia were not known or brought to England in 1686. As no account of the colour of the fur is given, it is impossible to determine to which of the species inhabiting these countries it should be referred. It is most probably the Sea-Lion (Otaria leonina), as that is the animal which is most generally distributed and commonly brought to England. The sailor’s some-times call it the Long-necked Seal.

 

An interesting footnote is the fascinating notion those entrepreneurial sailors may have brought living specimens of fur seal or sea lion back to Europe well before they were imported for entertainment in the mid-1860s. But there would have been some problems on their return; firstly sea lions need a lot of food to sustain them and secondly at a time when there were no purpose built aquarium’s to accommodate them, they would have to have some access to the sea or other bodies of water presumably making them difficult to manage without the possibility of potential escape or deliberate release…..possibly becoming early pseudo lake-monsters………

 

Adapted from The Seal Serpent