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Veästa - The Sea-Monster of Chesil Beach
       
Veästa is the Chesil Beach monster whose first reported sighting was as long ago as 1457 - and whose most recent reported sighting was on the day of the eclipse of the sun in August 1999.

Spooky or what? Eh!

Want to know more about this mythical beast? Then read on!

 Veästa is a rather nice name for a monster. The root of the word stems from old Dorsetshire dialect, meaning a feast - the olden-day beach gathering that was held on warm summer evenings on the neatly shelved banks of the Chesil Beach. This area once had well-established trade links with Spain. Depending upon the pronunciation, Veästa sometimes sounded like "vista" - that is the Spanish for "sighting". And so Veästa has been sighted, several times now, off of Chesil Beach on summer nights - sighted in all her splendour, bathing off the hidden shores of this mystical coastline. Veästa is the Chesil Beach monster and though little was heard for well over 500 years, she was sighted again in August 1995, fifty yards off of Chesil Beach at Portland - some 12 feet high, half fish, half giant seahorse. On that occasion it was Martin Ball of Wyke Regis who saw her. Before then he had never even heard of Veästa, but that experience led him into carrying out a great deal of research into the history of the mythical sea-monster. The latest sightings have been by a local diver in 1998 and by a pleasure craft on August 11th 1999 - the day of the eclipse of the sun!
Portland is a fitting place to be associated with a sea-monster. Its Jurassic landscape lives in a cycle of submergence and emergence, revealing its pre-historic existence. The Island traces the evolution of life as its quarried stone denudes petrified ammonites and trilobites locked in the fossiis of the moment. Mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers once roamed here, their kingdom now greatly reduced in scope by natural convulsion.
At the Portland Race, tides from the east and west converge, drawing upon the forces of the sun and moon to reflect raw energies to the ocean depths. Unimaginable power is unleashed as fathom upon fathom of dense, green sea collide unrelentlessly against unyielding tides. The Island has always fed the Chesil Bank as its seemingly inexhaustible waste debris falls carelessly into the seas and nourishes the beach by perpetual attrition. These are the seas that organise and rank those cohorts of brightly coloured calcareous, quartz and jasper pebbles on Portland's ancient beach, whose shields of armour dazzle in the sunlight. It is these shores, which have defended England's southerly coastline against the ravages of storm and tide, which hold the secret of Veästa.
The Age of Enlightenment may be considered to have begun in the year 1700. Veästa was sighted in June 1757 by no less than the Reverend John Hutchins, famous historian of Dorset.

Not only was the monster seen but the corpse was washed ashore at Burton Bradstock. What happened to it? In the mid-1740s, important figures in the town of Weymouth, including Sir George Bubb Dodington, `Portland-based' Edward Tucker Esq and the former Mayor of Bath, Ralph Allen, formed an alliance. They were aware of the potential to transform the town. They had all recognised that tastes and fashion were changing and leaning towards a return to Roman traditions for good health and long life, which advocated the consumption of sea-water (together with a portion of wine for good measure). There was more than one case of occasional visitors, "come to drink up the sea" finding their primeval instincts aroused by that curvaceous bay.
The 1757 sighting came as unwelcome news to the "dealers in salt-water" who had committed vast sums of their personal wealth to the success of the resort of Weymouth. They feared the genteel visitors' disgust and revulsion at the prospect of a monster creature sharing their bathing area and contaminating local supplies of sea-water by its very presence. Although there is clear evidence of the 1757 sighting, the fact that it is not documented in more detail suggests that a plan was hatched to destroy all documentation relating to the sighting of Veästa and to have all witnesses to the monster's corpse silenced.
It would seem that Veästa has visited the shores off Portland and Wyke Regis over a period spanning five centuries. She was first sighted in 1457, then in 1757, then in 1965, again in 1998 and most recently in August 1999...as far as is known. The earliest sighting of Veästa was misunderstood, because in the l5th century, imagery of the cockerel and the pheasant was used to describe the unknown in terms of the known to a rural audience. It is easy to ridicule this "hailucination" as pre-Age of Enlightenment delusion. Yet it is clear from Holinshed's Chronicles that l5th century man could distinguish between whales, dolphins and sea-cows. However, Holinshed also tells us that a creature was seen in 1457 "in the Ile of Portland" which could not be neatly classified, which defied explanation.
However, unknown to the Weymouth men at that time, a communication had reached the Dorset historian, John Hutchins, who had been afforded the time to research his work thoroughly and had been able to view and document the evidence.
This surviving report appeared in the first two editions of his great History and Antiquities of Dorset but was suppressed in the third. It was trivialised and lampooned by Sir Frederick Treves in his Highways & Byways in Dorset. It is by no means the only example of the history of Weymouth and Portland being re-written for the convenience of powerful vested interests.

At that time, then, Veästa was a monster that could be seen but not heard of! Nowadays at least some of the more recent sightings have been by reliable witnesses - not only in 1995 by Martin Ball but also in 1965 at Church Ope Cove on Portland - this sighting was mocked in cartoons which portrayed the creature as blonde, buxom and wedded to the tail-end of a fish. Are there other creatures of the same species as the one washed ashore in 1757, lurking off Portland's shores?
Perhaps we will never know - or perhaps you might be the lucky one to catch a glimpse of Veästa - the Chesil Beach sea monster!
If you would like to know more or would like to comment upon the existence of Veästa then please return to Wykenet and use the Wyke Regis Message Board. Alternatively, send an email to wykedh@globalnet.co.uk
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