Creature record / 1871
Kilkee, County Clare. 1871. A party of visitors walked the cliffs above the Atlantic at a place known as the Diamond Rocks. Several ladies. Some gentlemen. Among them, a well-known clergyman from the north of Ireland. Then something rose from the sea, about seventy yards out. An enormous head, shaped somewhat like a horse. A huge mane behind it. Large, glaring eyes. A vast body seemed to lie beneath the waves. One woman nearly fainted. The whole party was shaken. The Limerick Chronicle carried the story, London took notice, and an engraving of the monster resurfaced 144 years later.
By 1871 the British press had a name for it. Sea serpent season. The phrase, historian Karl Bell writes, "had preceded 'silly season' into journalistic parlance from the mid-1850s". Papers that needed to fill space gathered sea serpent stories from around the Atlantic. Kilkee, on the coast of County Clare, already had a story of its own. In 1850 the Irish Times had reported a creature "sunning itself near the Clare coast off Kilkee".