The south-east corner of Jersey is a strange coast. At low tide in St Clement the sea goes out a very long way and leaves behind a maze of reefs, gullies and pools, one of the largest intertidal areas in the British Isles. It is a place where noises carry and it is easy to get lost.
According to the legend on Visit Jersey, fishermen working this shore were terrified by something they could hear but not see: a deep, roaring bellow, like an enormous bull, that came from among the rocks when the tide was low. Nobody wanted to go and look. The noise became the Bull of St Clement, a monster of the shore.
Eventually someone did look, and found that the bull was a rock. Erosion had hollowed out a pipe through a formation on the shore, and as the ebbing tide drained through it, the water was sucked out with a roar. The fishermen filled the pipe with stones, and the bull fell silent for good.
Blowholes and 'bellowing' rocks exist on many coasts, and this kind of story, the monster that turns out to be the landscape, is usually told as a joke on the credulous. It is included here for completeness and because it shows that Jersey people told debunking stories as well as ghost stories. Our source does not name the rock, so the map pin is only approximate.
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