Morag Strikes McDonell and Simpson's Boat on Loch Morar

Loch Morar lies in the Rough Bounds of Lochaber, in the Scottish Highlands. It is 18.8 km long and 310 m deep at its deepest. No freshwater body in the British Isles goes deeper. For generations, local people told of the Mhorag, a creature whose appearance was said to foretell a death in certain clans. The first attested report of it dates to 1887.

In the summer of 1969 the loch was already stirring. On 8 July, Robert Duff, an Edinburgh joiner, looked down into Meoble Bay and saw what he called a "monster lizard" on the bottom. Five weeks later came the encounter that would define Morag.

16 August 1969. About nine in the evening. Still daylight. Duncan McDonell and William Simpson were motoring along the loch at 6 to 7 knots. McDonell was at the wheel. Simpson was in the cabin.

A splash sounded behind them. McDonell saw a creature in the water about 20 yards astern, moving directly toward the boat. Within seconds it had caught up. It struck the side of the boat with enough force to hurl a kettle of water off the gas stove and onto the floor.

McDonell feared it would capsize them. He tried to push the animal away with an oar. The oar was old. It snapped in half. Simpson picked up his rifle, ran out of the cabin and fired one shot. The creature slowly sank away from the boat. They did not see it again. They saw no blood either.

The part they could see was 25 to 30 feet long. Its skin was rough and dirty brown. Three humps rose about 18 inches above the water at the highest point. The head was brown and snake-like, about a foot across the top, raised 18 inches out of the water. McDonell believed the creature had hit them by accident. Simpson's conclusion was blunt: "There is no doubt in my mind that there is a large monster, maybe more than one, in Loch Morar."

About 21 hours later, a family was out in the middle of the loch. A 14-year-old girl, her three siblings and her father saw "two or three protrusions from the water, about two feet high." The father kept it quiet so they would not seem to "jump on" the fishermen's story. The account was only published in 2014.

The encounter led to the Loch Morar Survey, set up in 1970 by members of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau. Elizabeth Montgomery Campbell led it, with David Solomon. They collected 27 incidents describing an elongated, serpentine, dark animal. Ten more followed, including sightings by Campbell herself. Their findings appeared in The Search for Morag in 1972. From 1975, Adrian Shine led the Loch Morar Expedition, using hydrophones, sonar and a small underwater hide called "Machan." It found only small fish.

The retellings do not agree on every point. One calls the weapon a shotgun and says the animal rammed the boat "in a deliberate manner." Another claims the men told only close family, because of the "Mhorag curse." Nobody has ever alleged a hoax against McDonell or Simpson, and nobody has offered a specific mundane explanation for what struck their boat. The only sceptical detail is the missing blood. By the mid-1990s, no clear evidence of Mhorag had been produced. Still, two men, a broken oar and a single shot remain at the heart of the Morag legend.