Myths Of Great Britain.

[BIAD]

I was perusing through my old books and some websites on the many legends of Great Britain, when I
recalled that most of the tales that have survived tend to have a moral lesson embedded in them.

Last night, my wife was watching a programme on Greek mythology and again, a common-sense caution
lay in the centuries-old narrative. Icarus and his father Daedalus, Prometheus and his zest to promote the
human-intelligence and Jason's Argonauts, all stories that showed the struggles that mankind endures to
be better than itself.

So I kept looking at the British tales -only because it's where I'm from, and after stripping out the 'scare-
the-children' stuff, very little seemed to give them any credibility. But some of these old chronicles don't
carry any warnings in a manner that a child would understand -except the exemplar 'Stay On The Path'!

If we assume that a child perceives the world as literal and any words of caution from elders hold their
exact meaning only, most of the myths I looked at made me wonder what might lay off this 'safe' path for
youngsters that could be dangerous?

Wolves certainly thrived in Britain  until they were supposedly exterminated within the fifteenth century.
Bears were gone around the same time in what we call the latter-end of the Medieval period.

Wild boar hung in there until the seventeenth century, but since these hairy swine were favoured for hunting
by the wealthy of the time, the continuation may have involved some form of human-management.

So did the residents of villages and hamlets around England have enough concerns about these dwindling species
 that it warranted tales of dread, it's not said. But still, I can appreciate a parents unease of having their children
close to forests and having such beasts as wolves, bears and boars roaming in the shadows.

Job done... but is it?
If such dangerous animals did sanction embroidered stories of beware, why invent other -more oddly
described animals to frighten children in the woods? Here's a fairly modern-day one that I find fascinating.

We're talking about the 1950's, a time when the polio vaccine became common and Elvis Presley starts
grinding his hips. Castro was blazing up his cigar and hurricanes were running rampant in the US.

In Britain, those terrible beasties were long gone and in the quiet coastal marshlands of East Anglia,
a Policeman on his beat would hardly be watching the woodland for such monsters.

The Shug Monkey.

'The Shug Monkey was first mentioned in print by local writer and broadcaster James Wentworth Day in
his 1954 book, Here Are Ghosts and Witches.

A local Police Constable A. Taylor, who had heard the stories of the creature in his youth, described it to
Wentworth Day as: “a cross between a big rough-coated dog and a monkey with big shining eyes.
Sometimes it would shuffle along on its hind legs and at other times it would whiz past on all fours.”

The man also stated that after dark local children were warned to avoid the Shug Monkey’s favourite haunts,
close to dark, dark forests...'

Wikipedia:

Shug is old-English slang from the word 'scucca', a demon of sorts. A nice local tale that would make parents
smirk and the children look warily at the country lanes. Suffolk is on the East coast of England (the bump that sticks
out into the North Sea above the London area) and oddly enough, this weird creature -that some may believe came
from a Policeman's vivid imagination, seems to have had not enough of being witnessed.

This particular account  was still in Suffolk a county of East Anglia, but in the now-famous area of Rendlesham Forest.

'In 1956, Sam Holland was taking a bracing January walk in the Suffolk countryside with his spaniel dog Harry
when he spotted something unusual in the trees around 40ft in front of him.

There, in a thicket of trees, was a beast that Holland had never seen before, a kind of bizarre British bigfoot,
a vast creature walking on four muscular legs (“like a lion’s”) covered in thick, glossy black fur.
Easily 10ft in length, Holland struggled to place what the beast could be.

Panicking, his brain raced through the options, wondering whether he had stumbled across an escapee from the
zoo or a private estate with its own menagerie: and then the creature turned towards his direction and stared
directly at him.

As ice-cold terror crept over Holland, he was powerless but to stare back at the creature in horror: as it watched
him and his whimpering dog, he saw that it had a dreadful, frowning face, similar to a silver-back gorilla.
It possessed a thick neck, intelligent-looking, piercing eyes, wide and flared nostrils and terrifyingly huge jaws.

Man and beast stared at each other, one in abject terror, the other in what soon appeared to be utter nonchalance:
after what seemed an eternity, the creature simply turned away and crept back into the dark forest.

When pushed, Holland said the beast had looked like a combination of an ape, a dog, a bear, a lion and a rhinoceros
–he maintained his sighting had been genuine when questioned decades later, saying he believed the creature had
been paranormal, rather than a natural wonder.

Seven years after Holland’s sighting, in the very same stretch of forest, a woman called Peggy Cushing saw an almost
-identical sounding beast with one (fairly large) difference: as she stared at the beast in horror, it shimmered and then
shifted its shape to become a winged gargoyle, taking flight into the darkness...'

Source:

An escaped malformed Baboon...? A zoo-free Mandrill? With the regular accounts of Werewolves and shambling
'Man-Apes' now becoming prominent in this small island, was the Shug Monkey just another example of what the
Germans used to insult the British with? 'Inselaffen'... it means island ape!



I'll look for more and thanks to other members for their earlier input.