Beasts of Britain

By: Andy McGrath

Narrated by: Johnathan Rufus Welsh

Beasts of Britain is an audiobook by Andy McGrath, a cryptozoology "enthusiast" who has spent more than 25 years of researching and obsessing about the unknown creatures living right under our noses here on this tiny island in the North Atlantic.

From a wildlife point of view, the accepted fauna of the British Isles were discovered and catalogued in their finite and immovable state in the 19th century. Nothing has really been added to this list or considered worthy since, and the continual reports of water monsters, bigfoot, mystery big cats and UFCs (unidentified flying cryptids) are largely ignored or used as newspaper fillers to entertain us. Andy's focus is on current research and sightings, pictures, videos, and eyewitness accounts of the many cryptids of the British Isles.

Although vast advancements in science and technology have brought great discoveries in other lesser known parts of the world, our island lies largely underexplored and overlooked. At night, outside of the busy cities and next to the unlit lakes and lonely mountains it is an island in darkness, where nobody ventures into the woods anymore and the pervading paradigm scare all but the most foolhardy scientists away from any serious investigation of the many yet to be discovered.

©2021 Hangar 1 Publishing (P)2021 Hangar 1 Publishing

don't bother

Trendy and credulous, this book should not be recommended to any but the most diehard enthusiasts, as nearly any other audiobook would prove more engaging.

About a third of the book is dedicated to Nessie, although this section is interrupted by a long speech about jellyfish whose introduction I must have missed as its relevance to the topic was not clear. The writer argues that the creature of numerous reports (from Loch Ness and anywhere south of Inverness, all round the Caledonian canal) could be a sort of throwback or living fossil similar to the horseshoe crab—and people including me baulk at this suggestion because of the great difference in size (not to mention additional requirements for vertebrates). I know very little about the matter and I’m not a palaeontologist, yet the author’s treatment of this most obvious objection was disappointing—clearly he regards the size argument with disdain, but fails to explain why this criticism should be dismissed out of hand. After the section on Nessie, there’s a rather long section on the wodewose or wild man/hominid, the best of the three parts. A bit of doorstepping allowed for an interesting bit of insight into human nature, to wit, the prospect of other hominids so alarms British mountaineers that many become permanent city-dwellers whose accounts are coloured by emotion (the result being that Bigfoot has acquired a sort of permanent blurriness in record as well as memory). There follows a short bit on the faerie and Black Shuck (a sort of spectral dog whose legend has amplified the eeriness in other stories, e.g., /The Hound of the Baskervilles/). One might have expected more on these, though McGrath’s argument that 'rights for creatures not yet proven to exist' might encourage tourism—lol, one glimpses his peculiar ambition in here somewhere. To read about artefacts of British legend, these pages on Wikipedia are much longer, more informative, and less biased. The final third of the book is dedicated to non-native or invasive species which indisputably exist—beavers and the like, ants and budgies you know—bit of an anticlimax after the cryptid sections.

After every section one hears a discussion of 'beastly theories' preceded by precisely the same two-minute introduction, which sounds a lot less clever the fifth time over.

Some items were clearly omitted from the audio version, although the reasons are sort of understandable, particularly as this book is mostly personal anecdote and spectacular drivelling on