🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº0555 ACTIVE

Morgawr

Morgawr is a cryptid — a creature whose existence is unconfirmed by science — with reported sightings near Falmouth Bay, Cornwall, GB. This file collects the accounts and folklore surrounding it.

Where and when was Morgawr sighted?

Location: Falmouth Bay, Cornwall, GB
Date sighted: Unknown
Coordinates: 50.135, -5.067
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

What is Morgawr?

Morgawr is the sea serpent said to haunt Falmouth Bay, and it is the rare cryptid whose whole history can be dated. There is no old Cornish tradition behind it. The name reached print for the first time on 5 March 1976 — St Piran's Day — in the Falmouth Packet, which ran a letter headed "Sir: kindly find one enclosed sea serpent", signed only 'Mary F', with two grainy photographs; the man who put the name into the paper was Noel Wain, a writer on its own staff. Two weeks earlier, Tony 'Doc' Shiels, a painter and stage magician living at Ponsanooth, had posted a taped letter to a friend describing exactly this plan, down to the recruited fisherman and the polystyrene model. Mark Chorvinsky published those tapes, with Shiels's permission, in Strange Magazine in 1991, and read the photographs as a plasticine model. Shiels denied faking anything to the end. In 2001 the Packet itself printed the confession. The name has outlived the hoax: it is still in Falmouth's tourist literature.

What is the history of Morgawr?

Almost every cryptid in this catalogue has the same shape: an old tradition, a modern name, and an argument about whether the two belong to each other. Morgawr is the exact opposite, and that is why it is worth writing down carefully. There is no old tradition here at all. The whole case is modern, and every link in it can be dated — in one stretch, to the day. The man at the centre was Tony 'Doc' Shiels. Ronald M. James, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Shima in 2022, gives the outline: born in Salford, Greater Manchester, in 1938, art school in London, in Cornwall from 1959, where he made "a meagre living as an artist, writer, and street performer, specialising in magic and psychic tricks". He called himself The Wizard of the West. He lived at Ponsanooth, a few miles from Falmouth. Neil Nixon's obituary of him (Spooky Isles, 16 July 2024) lists the trades in one line: "Artist, musician, actor, magician, writer, playwright, showman, and wizard of the western world." He was born into an Irish family, which is why some writers call him Irish. What makes this case unusual in cryptozoology is that Shiels wrote the plan down before he executed it, and it survives. Between December 1975 and February 1976 he posted taped letters to an American friend and colleague, Michael McCormick. Mark Chorvinsky published excerpts from those tapes — with Shiels's own permission — as "The Shiels Tapes: Tony 'Doc' Shiels On His Monster Hoaxing". The December 1975 tape is about the Loch Ness photographs then filling the British press. By 14 January 1976 Shiels is writing: "We must try and do a little bit of hoaxing and things of that nature." On 30 January he is specific: "I think that I mentioned that I am hoping to hoax the people of Falmouth, and thereabouts, here in Cornwall, into thinking that there is a Cornish sea monster on the loose. It will take a bit of planning. I've started to drop a few hints here and there, and encourage a few friends to back me up on this." He sets out the division of labour — "I am going to have nothing to do with it as far as the press is concerned at the beginning" — and describes the psychic angle he will use to step in later. The last tape is dated 19 February 1976. In it he names a recruit: "A fisherman friend of mine by the name of Paul Francis, who is a mackerel fisherman — works mainly around the Falmouth Bay area… Paul has agreed to see something strange within the next few days when he is fishing." He discusses building a model of expanded polystyrene, weighted on a raft, for "middle-distance photographs where detail didn't count too much", explains why bad photographs are more convincing than good ones, and closes by mentioning "our dreadful faked monster photographs". He also states a method that reads like a summary of what followed: "I think the best thing is to go by word of mouth reports, and then, after a suitable period, for someone to come up with a photograph or two of the thing." Two weeks later that is exactly what happened. On 5 March 1976 the Falmouth Packet printed, on page one, a letter headed "Sir: kindly find one enclosed sea serpent", signed only 'Mary F', together with two grainy black-and-white photographs. James notes the date: 5 March is St Piran's Day, the feast of Cornwall's national saint. And it is in that issue, according to George Eberhart's Mysterious Creatures (2002), that Noel Wain (1934–2013), a writer on the Packet's own staff, first put the name Morgawr into print. The name did not arrive from a reader or from a fisherman. It arrived from the newspaper. The rest followed fast. An eighteen-page pamphlet, Morgawr: The Monster of Falmouth Bay, credited to 'Anthony Mawnan-Peller' — a pseudonym never resolved — circulated in Cornwall the same year; it is the earliest printed source in which the September 1975 sighting at Pendennis Point can be traced. Shiels himself reported the creature in July and November 1976, staged rituals to summon it, and in the spring of the same year was at the centre of the neighbouring Owlman reports at Mawnan. The confession came twenty-five years later and in the same newspaper. On 6 February 2001 the Falmouth Packet ran an unattributed anniversary piece, which James reports as being written by Wain, containing this: "As one who remembers that date 25 years ago and if memories serves [sic] me right, the monster in 1976 was none other than a huge model, made by the then students of Falmouth School of Art aided and abetted by a reporter from the Falmouth Packet and of course Doc himself. It was all good fun of course, but who was to know that during the following 25 years there would be numerous 'sightings' of the 'real thing.'" Now the name itself. Our own entry used to state, flatly, that Morgawr is "a Cornish name meaning sea giant". That is the claim worth testing, because it is the one thing in the story that would give the creature a past. Robert Williams's Lexicon Cornu-Britannicum (1865) is the standard historical dictionary of the language, and it can be read by walking its alphabet rather than searching it. Williams has CAUR, "a giant", and adds the detail that matters: "It is preserved in the composite caurmarch" — caurmarch being the Cornish for a camel, literally a giant-horse. He also has the mor- compounds in abundance: morcath, a sea-cat or ray; morgi, a sea dog or dog-fish; morhoch, a porpoise, literally a sea-hog; morvil, a whale; morvoren, a mermaid. The pattern is alive and productive. But read the run in order — MORETH, MORETHEC, MORGI, MORHOCH — and the MORG- slot holds exactly one word, and it is the dog-fish. There is no morgowr. James reaches the same place from the other direction, noting in a footnote that the beast "is generally referred to with a Welsh word, Morgawr", that the Cornish spelling Morgowr is a later preference of enthusiasts, and that the name "appears not to have had been documented in the Cornish language before this time". Where did our version come from? The oldest datable source for the exact phrase is not a Cornish scholar. It is the first revision of the English Wikipedia article, created at 15:31 UTC on 29 October 2006, whose opening words are "Morgawr ('sea giant' in Cornish)" — with no reference then and none added since. Falmouth Harbour's own visitor leaflet, Falmouth's Myths & Legends, repeats it in a stronger form: "In the ancient language of Cornwall, the name Morgawr, meaning 'Sea Giant', describes an enormous marine monster which lives in the waters of Falmouth Bay." That is a real, current, official publication, so the claim that the name survives in Falmouth's tourist literature stands. What it does not do is make the name old.

Timeline: the documented record of Morgawr

1865 Robert Williams publishes the Lexicon Cornu-Britannicum, the standard historical dictionary of Cornish. It records CAUR, "a giant", noting that "it is preserved in the composite caurmarch" — the word for a camel. It also records the sea compounds morcath, morgi, morhoch, morvil and morvoren. Read in alphabetical order, the MORG- slot between MORETHEC and MORHOCH contains only MORGI, the dog-fish. There is no morgowr.
September 1975 A Mrs Scott and a Mr Riley are said to have watched, from Pendennis Point, a hump-backed creature with stumpy horns and bristles down a long neck, which dived and surfaced with a conger eel in its jaws. The episode is told identically in every later source, but no press report of it from 1975 has been located; the earliest printed source in which it can be traced is the 1976 pamphlet, published after the photographs. Ronald James, citing a 1996 television programme and a 2020 news feature, writes that it is "not easily sorted out" whether such earlier sightings were part of the deception or the thing that inspired it.
December 1975 First of the taped letters from Tony 'Doc' Shiels to Michael McCormick later published by Mark Chorvinsky. It is about the Loch Ness photographs then filling the British press: "The reason I mention Nessie is that I think it would be quite nice to incorporate some kind of monster, preferably a dragon, in our show."
14 January 1976 Shiels on tape: "We must try and do a little bit of hoaxing and things of that nature… Although I believe in the real thing implicitly, as you know, I've also got a great interest in the business of hoaxing people, mainly newspapermen and television people, with fake monsters."
30 January 1976 The plan is stated outright: "I think that I mentioned that I am hoping to hoax the people of Falmouth, and thereabouts, here in Cornwall, into thinking that there is a Cornish sea monster on the loose. It will take a bit of planning. I've started to drop a few hints here and there, and encourage a few friends to back me up on this." On the same tape: "I'm a born hoaxer."
19 February 1976 Last of the tapes, and the one that predates the photographs by a fortnight. Shiels names a recruited witness — "a fisherman friend of mine by the name of Paul Francis… Paul has agreed to see something strange within the next few days when he is fishing" — describes building a monster from expanded polystyrene on a submerged raft, explains that detail in a photograph "would be dangerous, or a bit of a giveaway", sets out the method ("go by word of mouth reports, and then, after a suitable period, for someone to come up with a photograph or two of the thing") and refers to "our dreadful faked monster photographs".
29 February 1976 Date on the letter signed 'Mary F', which states that the two photographs were taken some three weeks earlier. Where they were taken is disputed to this day: Rosemullion Head according to Darren Naish and Ronald James, Trefusis Point near Flushing according to Falmouth Harbour's own leaflet.
5 March 1976 The Falmouth Packet prints the letter on page one, headed "Sir: kindly find one enclosed sea serpent", with the two photographs. Ronald James notes that the date is St Piran's Day, the feast of Cornwall's national saint. According to George Eberhart's Mysterious Creatures (2002), it is here that Noel Wain (1934–2013), a writer on the paper's own staff, first puts the name Morgawr into print. This is the document zero of the name.
1976 An eighteen-page pamphlet, Morgawr: The Monster of Falmouth Bay, credited to 'Anthony Mawnan-Peller' — a pseudonym that has never been resolved — circulates in Cornwall. It is the source Darren Naish cites for the eyewitness accounts, and the earliest printed source in which the September 1975 sighting can be traced.
1981 Janet and Colin Bord publish Alien Animals, which reproduces the Mary F letter and reports that, having examined first-generation copy prints, they "feel that these photographs could well be genuine". It is the strongest statement anyone sympathetic to the case has made, and it was made on copies, without negatives. Bord and Bord are also the intermediate link through which the letter's wording reaches almost everyone who quotes it.
Autumn 1991 Strange Magazine 8 devotes much of a 64-page issue to the case: Mark Chorvinsky's "The 'Mary F.' Morgawr Photographs Investigation", "The Shiels Tapes" and "Shiels on Surrealism & Magic". Chorvinsky concludes that the photographs show a plasticine model, and publishes the taped correspondence with Shiels's own permission.
28 December 1998 On the Fox-TV programme "World's Greatest Hoaxes", Shiels says: "I don't lie. I never did… I wouldn't dream of faking something like [the Loch Ness monster photo]. It's not in my nature." Chorvinsky quotes the line at the head of the tape transcripts precisely because the tapes contradict it.
6 February 2001 Twenty-five years on, the Falmouth Packet runs an unattributed anniversary piece, which Ronald James reports as written by Noel Wain: "the monster in 1976 was none other than a huge model, made by the then students of Falmouth School of Art aided and abetted by a reporter from the Falmouth Packet and of course Doc himself." The newspaper that launched the creature is also the one that takes it apart.
29 October 2006 At 15:31 UTC the English Wikipedia article is created. Its first words are "Morgawr ('sea giant' in Cornish)", with no source. This is the oldest datable appearance of the etymological claim our own entry used to repeat, and no reference has been attached to it since.
2 February 2021 The zoologist Darren Naish reviews the case and the physical evidence, concluding that the Mary F images "are not genuine pictures of an animal but instead seem to show a plasticine model", and that the skull long kept as Morgawr's, recovered from a carcass at Durgan Beach, is that of a pilot whale.
28 January 2022 The folklorist Ronald M. James publishes "Morgawr and the Folkloresque" in Shima, the first peer-reviewed treatment of the case. He identifies Noel Wain as Shiels's collaborator, dates the debut of the name to the 1976 newspaper page, and notes in a footnote that the name is a Welsh word and "appears not to have had been documented in the Cornish language before this time". His verdict is not that the creature is fraudulent and therefore worthless, but that a faux tradition "seems to have inspired genuine belief".
11 July 2024 Tony 'Doc' Shiels dies in Ireland, aged 86. Neil Nixon's obituary lists him as "Artist, musician, actor, magician, writer, playwright, showman, and wizard of the western world", and records that he claimed to have "conjured up" Morgawr in the mid-1970s. He never accepted the charge of faking the photographs.

Is there a rational explanation for Morgawr?

This is one of the few cases in the catalogue where the sceptical section can name the author of the deception, quote him in his own words, and date the quotation before the evidence it explains. That is unusual and it should be said plainly rather than hedged. The chronology is the argument. Shiels's last taped letter is dated 19 February 1976. The Mary F letter is dated 29 February 1976 and appeared on 5 March. Chorvinsky's point, and it is a strong one, is that the tapes describe the operation — the rumour campaign, the recruited fisherman, the model, the deliberately poor photographs, the plan to wait and then produce "a photograph or two of the thing" — before the photographs existed. Chorvinsky's investigation of the images themselves, "The 'Mary F.' Morgawr Photographs Investigation", ran in Strange Magazine 8 (Fall 1991), whose printed contents also list "The Shiels Tapes" and "Shiels on Surrealism & Magic" in the same 64-page issue; his conclusion was that the photographs show a plasticine model. Darren Naish, reviewing the case in 2021, reaches the same reading: "They are not genuine pictures of an animal but instead seem to show a plasticine model." Shiels did not accept it. On the Fox-TV programme "World's Greatest Hoaxes", broadcast on 28 December 1998, he said: "I don't lie. I never did." Chorvinsky, who published the tapes, prefaces them with the observation that "Doc has given us permission to publish this highly controversial material", and that "like Barnum, Doc does not care what people are saying as long as they are talking about him". Both things are true at once, and neither can be quietly dropped. Some specific claims break in specific ways. Where the photographs were taken is not agreed. Naish and James place them at Rosemullion Head; Falmouth Harbour's leaflet, and the account followed by several Cornish writers, place them off Trefusis Point near Flushing. These are on opposite sides of the estuary. A photograph whose location cannot be settled is not evidence of anything. The negatives were never produced. Janet and Colin Bord, who took the case seriously in Alien Animals (1981), examined first-generation copy prints and wrote that they "feel that these photographs could well be genuine" — a judgement made on copies, without negatives, and it is the strongest thing anyone sympathetic has been able to say. James notes that the original images apparently no longer exist and that Mary F "is likely a fabrication". The letter itself needs a caution. The passage everybody quotes — "it looked like an elephant waving its trunk, but the trunk was a long neck with a small head at the end, like a snake's head. It had humps on its back which moved in a funny way… the animal frightened me. I would not like to see it any closer. I do not like the way it moved when swimming" — reaches us through Bord and Bord, and it circulates with an ellipsis in the middle. I have not been able to consult the Falmouth Packet page of 5 March 1976 itself, and I say so rather than pass the quotation off as read from the primary. The September 1975 sighting has to be dated as a story, not only as an event. Mrs Scott and Mr Riley, the stumpy horns, the bristles and the conger eel are told the same way in every source, but I have not located any newspaper report of it from September or October 1975. The earliest printed source I can fix for it is the 1976 pamphlet — that is, after the photographs, and in a publication produced to promote the creature. James, writing as a folklorist, cites for it a 1996 television programme and a 2020 news feature, and remarks that it is "not easily sorted out" whether the earlier sightings were part of the deception or the thing that inspired it. That absence is a negative claim and I have not exhausted the British newspaper archives, so it is offered as what I could not find, not as proof that nothing was printed. The physical evidence has all been identified. The skull retrieved from a carcass at Durgan Beach and long kept as Morgawr's is, Naish states after comparison, the skull of a pilot whale. The video John Holmes claimed to have shot in 1999 was assessed by marine biologists as a sunfish, which Holmes disputed. The carcass that washed up at Charlestown on 20 February 2017 and was reported as a Morgawr proved on analysis to be whale remains. And the name will not carry the weight our old text put on it. As set out above, the standard historical dictionary of Cornish has the giant (caur) and has the sea compounds (morgi, morcath, morhoch, morvil, morvoren) but not the compound of the two, and the alphabetical slot where it would sit is occupied only by the dog-fish. A methodological note, because it nearly caught me: the other pre-1975 dictionary I consulted, Frederick Jago's English–Cornish glossary of 1887, returned zero hits for "giant" in the digitised text — which looks like proof and is not. Reading the file by its structure shows that the scan jumps straight from the F entries to GRIMACES: the GA-to-GR pages are simply missing. A zero from a search box and a zero from a complete alphabet are not the same thing, and only the second one is evidence. None of this makes the tradition false, because there is no tradition to be false. What there is instead is better documented than most cryptids ever get: a plan, a date, a newspaper, a name, and a confession printed by the same paper twenty-five years later.

Can you visit Morgawr?

There is nothing to visit that belongs to Morgawr, because Morgawr has no site, no museum and no relic on public display. What there is, and it is genuinely worth the walk, is the stretch of coast the story was written onto. Falmouth is on the main line via Truro, with the branch line running down to Falmouth Docks, Falmouth Town and Penmere. Pendennis Point, where Mrs Scott and Mr Riley are said to have watched the creature take a conger eel in September 1975, is the headland at the end of the town, walkable from the centre in about half an hour; Pendennis Castle sits on top of it, is run by English Heritage and is ticketed, but the point itself and the road around it are open and free, and the view over the Carrick Roads and Falmouth Bay costs nothing. Check the castle's own site for current opening and prices rather than trusting a figure printed anywhere else. Rosemullion Head, the location Darren Naish and Ronald James give for the Mary F photographs, is about five kilometres south of Falmouth on the South West Coast Path, reached on foot from Maenporth or from Mawnan Smith. It is an exposed National Trust headland with no facilities. Trefusis Point, the rival location given by Falmouth Harbour's own leaflet, is on the opposite shore, above Flushing; the small passenger ferry between Falmouth's Prince of Wales Pier and Flushing runs across the harbour and is the pleasant way to see both sides of the disagreement in one afternoon. Durgan Beach, where the carcass and the skull came ashore, is a small shingle beach on the Helford River below Glendurgan Garden, National Trust property with its own opening season and admission; the beach and the hamlet are reached by a steep lane and parking is very limited. In Falmouth itself, the National Maritime Museum Cornwall on Discovery Quay is the serious indoor stop, and it is where Naish's Monsters of the Deep exhibition ran from 2020 into 2022 — that particular exhibition has closed, so do not travel for it. The name is still in local use rather than in a display case: a pub in the town carries it, and Falmouth Harbour's free leaflet Falmouth's Myths & Legends, downloadable from falmouthharbour.co.uk, prints the Morgawr story in full. Two further traces are matters of record rather than places to go. A rollercoaster named Morgawr opened in 2010 at Cornwall's Crealy Great Adventure Park near Wadebridge; the park has since changed hands and name, so its current state should be checked before making a journey. And a public bench with metal backs shaped into the creature's silhouette was unveiled in Falmouth in December 2011, reported at the time by the Falmouth Packet — I have this through James's citation of that report and have not been able to confirm the bench's present location myself. One practical warning about the coast rather than the monster. This is a working estuary and an exposed south-facing shore: the cliff path between Maenporth and Rosemullion is unfenced in places and slippery in wet weather, and the beaches below Rosemullion and at Durgan cover at high water. Tide tables matter here more than sea serpents do.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-14 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas

Morgawr

Where and when was Morgawr sighted?

What is Morgawr?

What is the history of Morgawr?

Timeline: the documented record of Morgawr

Is there a rational explanation for Morgawr?

Can you visit Morgawr?

Sources consulted

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Morgawr

Where and when was Morgawr sighted?

What is Morgawr?

What is the history of Morgawr?

Timeline: the documented record of Morgawr

Is there a rational explanation for Morgawr?

Can you visit Morgawr?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

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