For me the fascination with the weird and the uncanny was there from the start: on a family holiday to Wales, aged four, asking the tour guide in Caernarfon Castle whether we might see the place’s spectral lady; a few years later, obsessing over Borley Rectory – the ‘most haunted house in the world’ – or, at the Halloween party I begged my mother to let me have (long before such events were a commonplace British occurrence), my friends and I dressed as Dracula, the Wolf Man and various grinning ghouls. My favourites back then, which called out to me from my spine-creased Usborne Guide to the Supernatural World, were vampires and lycanthropes; the popular late 1970s children’s book even showed a “typical magical werewolf ritual” which involved rubbing a transformative ointment of wolfsbane, opium, bat blood and the blood of a murdered child into your chest at, of course, midnight.
I was hooked; I was definitely for the dark.
My Halloween party, c. 1981. I’m Dracula… (Copyright: Edward Parnell)
As I grew older that lurid childhood book was superseded by the black-and-white filmic horror of Lon Chaney Jr. in the purportedly Welsh-set The Wolf Man (sneakily recorded off late-night telly), before aged around ten I managed to persuade my older cousin to hire me a copy of An American Werewolf in London from the local video shop; I doubt I appreciated its inherent humour, but was hypnotised and terrified in equal measure by its Nazi zombies and jaw-stretching transformations from man to beast. A few years later, now a teenager, for a while I decided I’d outgrown such imaginary scares – perhaps there was enough real horror in my mum’s repeated trips to the hospital for chemo and radiotherapy? The countryside and its wildlife, particularly birds, offered a new obsession to pursue, though what M. R. James might refer to as those “pleasing terrors” never went too far away.
I grew to love moors and mountains, a landscape so different to my own south Lincolnshire flatlands, and loved the stories and folklore that seemed to cling like mist to the hills we visited on childhood holidays to Dartmoor and the Lake District. An early holiday to Wales had taken in the haunting Gelert’s Grave, traumatising me with its folk tale of a wrongfully killed, faithful wolf-slaying hound. Later, I fixated on stories of Britain’s actual lupine past, but it wasn’t until I was eighteen that I first came to the Scottish Highlands, their reputed last redoubt. That strange imaginative hold of the wolf over our collective consciousness has been an enduring one, reflected in the wealth of falsehoods that persisted long after the species had been hunted and hounded to the dark edges of the British map.
A wolf on the prowl. Etching after P. Potter, 1659. Credit: Wellcome Collection
There seems little certainty about when wolves became extinct on our island, though Anglo-Saxon place names that refer to them are relatively commonplace, indicating the species was widespread (or at least recently had been) during that period; this is backed up by the considerable numbers of successfully hunted animals recorded as late as the second-half of the tenth century. The increasing penchant of the monarch and the ruling class for the pursuit of deer – and the creation of royal forests and enclosed parks – led to an escalation of anti-wolf efforts after the arrival of the Normans. In 1281 Edward I commissioned Peter Corbet, a Shropshire knight, to bring out about their final extermination from England – a feat he is said to achieved nine years later; by this point wolves had likely long-vanished from Wales. Canis lupus lingered on north of Hadrian’s Wall, with a 1427 law passed during the reign of James I of Scotland making wolf-killing a compulsory activity. This did not lead to a nine-year removal like the purported extirpation south of the border, as Mary, Queen of Scots was still enjoying the hunting of wolves in the Forest of Atholl during 1563. However, the intensive woodland exploitation of the period would have meant that any remnant populations clinging to Caledonian survival must surely have been approaching their end by the time of Mary’s own execution in 1587.
Like the story of the legendary Gelert, a number of tales of dubious provenance were gathered during the nineteenth century surrounding the fate of the supposed sole remaining Scottish wolf, all of which possess an unreliable pedigree (the nature writer Jim Crumley catalogues these stories in The Last Wolf). Just off the A9 in Perthshire, outside the town of Pitlochry, is the Pass of Killiecrankie, a narrow gorge enfolded in mixed woodland where, in 1689, a decisive battle occurred during the Jacobite Rebellion; nine years before, in 1680, Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel (who would go on to be a commander on the battle’s winning Jacobite side) was said to have shot what, at the time, was considered the last wolf to be killed in Scotland. On the early Spring day on which I stopped off at the Pass while researching Ghostland it was hard to imagine any such creature lingering for long among the steep-sided slopes: the airy green woods were far removed from the bleak wilderness vistas in which my imagination had come to place the species.
One-hundred-and-fifty miles to the north along the same meandering A9 – at Helmsdale, halfway between Inverness and John O’Groats – stands a carved stone that marks the spot near which “the last wolf in Sutherland was killed by the hunter Polson, in or about the year 1700”. In fact, William Scrope’s Art of Deerstalking gives us the rather-less romantic account of the “feeble howling of the whelps” and subsequent killing of five or six wolf cubs, before the desperate, but ultimately futile intervention of their fearsome, full-grown mother.
No such monument exists near Strath Glass, northeast of Loch Ness, where in 1720 a woman supposedly defeated a wolf with an iron griddle pan, nor is there any commemorative marker along the lonely middle stretch of the River Findhorn, thirteen miles east of Inverness. Here, in 1743, a six-foot seven-inch giant of a man named MacQueen – who in my imagination appears like Christopher Lambert’s Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod from the film Highlander – slayed, according to Victorian accounts composed a century later, a huge black beast: absolutely the last of its kind left in the land.
I retraced the mythic-seeming MacQueen’s steps on my trip north, putting up with the driving rain that soaked through my inadequate trousers for a glimpse of the landscape in which the fabled carnivore lived out its final days. The Findhorn curved below me like a scythe, the winter-bleached grass on the hillsides punctuated by ribbons of brown heather and the occasional leafless birch. A blackened, freshly charred area of burnt-off moor filled the air with a distinctive aroma not dissimilar to that of cooking sugar beet – a smell familiar from my Fenland youth and the four giant silos of the steam-emitting factory that rose over my hometown until their demolition in 1996. Though big-skied and vast, the lonely country all about me was managed and tamed, I realised, with the distant house perched on the bluff above the bend in the river, close to where the infamous deed was said to have been done, now a base from where less-mythic modern-day MacQueens head out with their shotguns to pursue tame, farm-reared pheasants and red-legged partridges, or flick their expensive fly rods to and fro for salmon.
The bend in the River Findhorn close to where the last wolf in Britain is said to have been slain. Copyright: Edward Parnell
As I descended to my car, tentatively crossing a shallow tributary by stepping on its slippery stones – for a second once again the excited little boy of those earlier upland holidays – three songbirds flew in front of me and perched low, half-obscured, in a birch: two taupe-coloured females and a coral-red male bullfinch that sat in silence while I watched them, before taking off in a flash of white and whispered whistles. Despite its long absence from the landscape the wolf will, I think, continue to persist as a powerful icon of our folk tales and supernatural fables, because it reminds us of the ultimate dominion of nature and time, of our fragility away from the safety of our ring-fenced human enclaves: we each know too well that there will be no hiding in our houses of straw – or even in slate-roofed, stone-walled cottages – once the Grim Reaper’s dry breath begins to blow our way.
(This is an adaptation of an article I wrote for a feature that appeared in The Scotsman on 31 October 2019.)
From way back in the dunes I can make out the pale mound of its outline behind a huddled melee of figures. At this distance it seems much less massive than the leviathan I was expecting: a fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus), the second-largest species known to have ever lived on the planet, smaller only than the blue whale.
Excluding skeletons in museums, I have never seen a dead whale before. Earlier in the year several sperm whales were beached a little further west of here, around the coastline of The Wash. I contemplated going to look at them, to appreciate fully the size and grandeur of these animals I had previously observed tail-fluking and spouting off New Zealand, but decided I did not want to risk having those memories replaced with something tawdry. Today though I have given in to my morbid curiosity and am now close enough to touch a species I have witnessed with awe in the Bay of Biscay and, most memorably, beneath a sunlit midnight sky off the coast of arctic Spitsbergen.
Here though it is very different, and those underwater mysteries may be about to find resolution in the flesh. Above, her skin is pencil-grey with a hint of storm-cloud blue. Her belly is pale and etched with dark longitudinal lines. This is her ventral groove blubber, highly elastic tissue that can be expanded accordion-like during a fin whale’s gape-jawed lunge feeding, which draws in up to 70,000 litres of fish- and plankton-filled water in a single mouthful that is then filtered away through the tightly shut baleen plates, leaving behind perhaps as much as 10 kilograms of krill to digest. Up close these pleated throat grooves are beautiful, curving and sweeping along her underbelly like the caressing waves themselves.
The baleen is attached only to the upper jaw. Its ends are feathery and brush-like – it’s hard to imagine that it is made from keratin, the same material that forms human hair and nails, or that it once was prized as ‘whalebone’ to make corsets and the ribs of parasols. The rear two-thirds of this baleen are black, with the front portion coloured cream. Fin whales are unusual among whales (and vertebrates generally) in having consistent asymmetrical colouration: the right side of the immense head before me has an off-white jaw and lower lip, while the hidden left side will match the dark shading of the rest of her back; the baleen shares this odd, two-tone pattern. Scientists are not sure why this lopsided colour scheme exists. Earlier speculation that is was some sort of adaptation to the species’ lunge-feeding technique appears not to be supported by more-recent scientific research, though interestingly, like humans, the large rorqual whales are mainly ‘right-handed’, preferring to lunge with the right sides of their bodies facing downwards. Perhaps then, the fin whale’s asymmetric patterning just is.
Occasional scattered gouges expose the harsh white of deeper blubber. The blowhole is not a single opening but two thin slits that form an incomplete triangle, sited just behind a ridge that runs forwards down the centre of the head. Most strikingly, about halfway along the back there is a distinct bend, an ugly unnatural angle from which point the whale’s stern, her tail stock, is noticeably wasted. The dorsal fin, often the most-telling tool when trying to identify whales at sea, is just visible through a puddle of seawater, its tip buried beneath the beach. I estimate its height to be only around a foot or so; it seems remarkably small compared to how I remember those of living, swimming animals.
At the strandline along the base of the dunes I spot a starling-sized black-and-white bundle of feathers at my feet: it is a little auk (Alle alle), a rare storm-blown seabird from the High Arctic, another species I watched, years ago, in a northern, Spitsbergen reverie. And I am in that moment once more, with the inverted sun glinting off the blue as the midnight whale’s swept-back dorsal fin slices the water ahead of our ship. In Moby-Dick Herman Melville describes the Fin-Back as “gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from man”. Here, scuttled on the wind-whipped sands, she has not been so fortunate. I will prefer not to think of her this way, but streamlined and magnificent as she cuts and lunges through the food-laden waters of the Greenland Sea, vast flocks of auks whirring above her wake.
During a three-week trip around Greenland in July of 2017 I spent a lot of time thinking back to the previous October and the Holkham fin whale. Fin whales were the most numerous large whale that I encountered, with numbers in double figures on a couple of days. Memorably, on Disko Island, halfway up Greenland’s west coast, we were treated to a prolonged encounter with what was presumably a family group of fin whales, which fed around the ship and in front of the nearby numerous icebergs; at one point on the other side of the ship a group of humpbacks put on a similar show.
Edward Parnell | Award-winning author of 'Ghostland' 