Episode 34 - Loch Ness Monster

You liked it here best in the autumn. After most of the tourists had gone home. It wasn’t that you disliked them, or that you didn’t want people to come and see this beautiful place, it was just that it was so much louder when that many people were here. Most were here for the novelty of the thing, and most people were perfectly happy to give them that.

You were happy to go about your business and let them go about theirs.

But now, with summer fading and behind you, and autumn right around the corner, it was mostly quiet here. Certainly there were a few visitors, but the number was drastically reduced from even a few weeks ago.

With things quieting down, you always took the time to walk the shoreline. Paralleling the road that followed a short distance away. You would make your way through the small towns, stopping to chat with a few of the other locals, occasionally sharing a short conversation with one of the late-season tourists.

But while it was always nice to see the towns and the people, they were not the focus of your walks. No, you were here to watch autumn happen, to watch the highlands shift around you as the season changed.

This was your favorite time to walk the shores of Loch Ness.

The Loch Ness Monster, or Nessie, rose to incredible popularity during the 1930s among locals and spreading from there throughout the world. Nessie is one of the most famous cryptids in the world.

The Loch Ness Monster has inspired concentrated searches, biological studies, and massive tourism. Loch Ness has become a popular destination with boat tours, and a rich history.

Descriptions vary from a serpent-like thing with legs, a massive amphibian that has been known to wander the shores, to a large-bodied, long-necked creature with descriptions akin to a plesiosaur, an aquatic reptile from prehistory. What Nessie looks like, it seems, depends on who you ask.

There are thousands of lochs in Scotland. Tens of thousands really. It is estimated that more than 31,000 lochs are scattered across the rocks, and hills, and moors. The deepest is Loch Morar, at 310 meters at the deepest point. Loch Lomond has the largest surface area at 71 square kilometers. But neither of these lochs has achieved the far-spread reputation, nor the mystique of Loch Ness.

Loch Ness is the largest loch by volume, with nearly 7500 million cubic meters of water, more than all the lakes of England and Wales combined. But that is not why it is famous. Why its name is known around the world.

No, people know Loch Ness because of its most-famed inhabitant.

I am Andrew Eagle, and invite you to join me as I pass Through the Veil, and share a piece of the story of the Loch Ness Monster.

You walked down the lochside, having crossed a small bridge over one of the several streams that entered the loch. The day was relatively clear. Light fog earlier in the morning had given way to a sunny day broken by a scattering of clouds. The forecast had said there may be some rain later, but you would be done with your walk well before then.

As you passed a small trail that wound down to the actual shoreline, you decided to pause in your progress to make your way right down to the water’s edge. You couldn’t see much of the loch from the road. There were too many trees between you and it. On the other side of the treeline, the air was cooler, and the wind had more teeth. It cooled down as it rolled over the loch. You shivered and pulled your jacket tighter around yourself.

The waves were just shy of real white-caps in the wind, and the surface of the loch was a dark gray, broken by the scattering reflections of the mountains and hills across the loch.

You could see several of the large tour boats making their meandering way from the north end of the loch to the south. There would be fewer and fewer of them as the season passed into fall and eventually winter properly. You stood there for a minute. Peaceful. Breathing deeply, and simply staring out across the water.

Something catches your eye. Only for a moment, it snags. It’s not movement exactly, just the opposite in fact. It is a space where the constant movement of the water is interrupted. Just down the shoreline at a point, and then out into the loch itself. There is something floating in the water. You turn and squint at it, trying to make out more details, but by the time you do, whatever it was is gone.

Looking back at the trail for a moment, you decide you have time for an investigation. You head down the shoreline toward the point.

Loch Ness is a massive body of water. With a surface area of 56 square kilometers, and a deepest point of 230 meters or 755 feet, it is the largest loch by volume in the British Isles. It is situated as an important part of the Caledonian Canal which connects the North Sea at Inverness all the way to Corpach and Fort William.

The Loch itself is surrounded by a number of small settlements, many of which are populated by businesses operating tours of the loch by boat, or otherwise engaging in the local history and folklore. Its shores have two castles, two lighthouses, a lifeboat station, and a number of docks supporting the boat-tour companies.

Depending on season, you can see many people come down to the loch to swim, and play in the water.

The Loch used to have two islands, however Dog Island was submerged during construction of the Caledonian Canal. Cherry Island is now the only island in the loch. Interestingly, Cherry Island is a crannog, a kind of artificial island which was probably built during the Iron Age.

Even before it became home to a monster, Loch Ness had a powewrful draw all its own.

The walk took longer than you had thought it would looking at it. Several times, the shoreline was too steep to pass easily, so you had to trek through the thickets that grew along the shores or trudge into the water. Without wading boots, there was really only one option.

But eventually, although you had certainly earned a few new scratches and nicks from your journey, you arrived at the point closest to where you had seen that strange stationary point. You had already explained it away really. It was probably nothing, just a wave that had moved in a way you weren’t expecting.

But there was no harm in the extra walk today. Although the sky was getting darker already, as the scattered clumps of clouds began to draw toward one another and form the matte gray of a rain-storm that has not yet begun.

You gave yourself a few minutes there on that point. Partly breathing in the brisk wind that was now beginning to grow stronger, and partly to take a short break before a trek through the trees again and back to the road. Of course you didn’t see anything, there was nothing to see besides the waves and the water, and the rocks of the shore.

You turned to go, and made your way back into the trees toward the road.

To speak only of contemporary reports of the Loch Ness Monster is to do it an injustice. Although reports of the creature did not garner any popularity until the early 1900s, with one of the first published stories being told in the 1870s, the first report came much, much earlier.

In the Life of St. Columba, written sometime in the sixth century by Adomnan, Loch Ness is known to be home to a great beast. Saint Columba was an Irish monk who was traveling and staying in the lands of the Picts with a group of companions in an effort to bring Christianity to Scotland.

The story goes that Saint Columba and his companions came upon a group of Picts holding a funeral and burying a man by the River Ness. The locals explained that the man had been swimming in the river when a terrible beast rose from the waters and attacked. The creature killed the man and had disappeared back into the waters before the others could reach him in a boat to save him.

Columba, hearing this, saw an opportunity.

He sent one of his companions into the river to swim and draw the creature out. Sure enough, the beast appeared and charged through the water at the man. But Saint Columba held a cross and shouted “Go no further. Do not touch the man. Go back at once.” The creature stopped and retreated back into the waters, being repelled so far as the Loch in some versions of the stories. This is recorded as one of the first miracles Saint Columba performed in front of the Picts.

As intriguing and bold as the story of Saint Columba is, the Loch Ness Monster did not rise to popularity until 1933 when George Spicer and his wife claimed to see a creature cross a road in front of them near the loch. They described it as four feet high and twenty-five feet long, with a long neck, but no discernible limbs. They said it crossed the road and disappeared into the water.

After the Spicers published their story, more reports came rolling in with people claiming they too saw such a creature over the years. And so the legend was reborn.

This particular stand of trees was thicker than you anticipated. It was not a short jaunt through the thicket back to the road, you ended up turned around and in some clearing somewhere between where you had been and where you wanted to be.

Then you heard the crashing. Something moving through the trees. Something large.

Which was ridiculous. There was nothing in this part of the world that would make that kind of noise. You saw movement.

When it broke into the clearing, you could do nothing but stand in shock. The creature was massive. A huge, slithering thing, with a long neck and sharp teeth carrying a deer.

It disappeared through the trees back toward the loch, leaving a trail of snapped twigs and debris. You chased after it for a short time, breaking back onto the shore line as the rain began to fall. But whatever the thing had been, it was long gone.

There have been so many reports over the years. And several surveys and studies focused on trying to conclusively prove whether or not Loch Ness has itself a monster.

There were a surge of sightings during the 1930s after the first publications, things died down for a while until the 50s and 60s, and then again until 2007. There have been a rash of recent sightings with six between 2007 and 2015.

In and around the sightings, there have been a series of studies trying to find the monster. Starting just after the first sighting, we have the Edward Mountain expedition in 1934. The Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau performed a search from 1962-1972.

More have been done, with studies throughout the 60s and 70s. And then more in the early 2000s. The most recent occurring in 2018 and taking a unique form.

An international team of scientists performed a DNA survey of the lake. They published the results in 2019, showing that the water of the lake contains no DNA from large fish. This concludes that the loch is not home to sharks, sturgeons, or catfish. In addition, no DNA was found from otters or seals. The only anomaly on the record was a large amount of eel DNA.

While no eels of any extraordinary size have ever been found in the lake, the team specifically said they cannot rule out that as one possibility with the other being a large number of smaller eels.

No reptilian sequences were found, so they did conclude that if Nessie is still swimming the waters of Loch Ness, she’s probably a giant eel.

Nessie is an international symbol of the strange and cryptic. She may be a plesiosaur, or a giant eel, or simply a story. But regardless, she has influenced the history and people of an entire region of the Scottish highlands and beyond. She is one of the first lake monsters to gain popularity, although a great many such monsters are now claimed across the world.

 Loch Ness is a stark and strange place. With so much dark water, it can be easy to let the imagination run wild. It would be easy, we can think to ourselves, to hide in such a place for a creature. So while science, and the surveys of DNA, can tell us more about the facts, about the world and the Loch; Nessie will always live in the stories and the communities that have grown along the loch’s shoreline.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Through the Veil. I hope you enjoyed. I encourage you to subscribe to receive new episodes weekly wherever you listen as we continue our exploration of folklore, myth, and magic.

If you are enjoying the show, and have subjects you would like to hear covered, please email me at throughtheveilpodcast@gmail.com or reach out on Twitter, you can find me @ThroughVeil.

As always, thank you, for listening.