How to Make a Mermaid

Adrian Woolfson

  • Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe by Simon Conway Morris
    Cambridge, 464 pp, £18.95, September 2003, ISBN 0 521 82704 3

In a letter in the Times on 8 September 1809, W.M. Munro, a schoolmaster, described seeing a mermaid off the coast of Caithness. Walking along the shore of Sandside Bay, his attention was ‘arrested by the appearance of a figure resembling an unclothed human female, sitting upon a rock extending into the sea, and apparently in the action of combing its hair, which flowed around its shoulders’, and was ‘of a light brown colour’. ‘The head was shaded on the crown, the forehead round, the face plump, the cheeks ruddy, the eyes blue, the mouth and lips of a natural form, resembling those of a man.’ ‘The breasts and abdomen, the arms and fingers were of the size of a full-grown body of the human species.’

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