The Loch Ness Monster

The world’s most famous lake legend; searched hard, never proven

The Loch Ness Monster, Nessie, Niseag in Gaelic, is said to live in Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands, usually described as large and long-necked with one or more humps showing above the water. The oldest story near the loch is in Adomnán's Life of St. Columba, written in the 7th century about events a century earlier: Columba met Picts burying a man mauled by a water beast in the River Ness, sent a follower swimming across, and stopped the beast with the sign of the cross. Sceptics note that water beasts were common in saints' lives and that the tale is set in the river, not the loch, and the writer Ronald Binns finds no reliable sign of a monster tradition before 1933.

That year made it. On 2 May 1933 the Inverness Courier carried a piece by Alex Campbell, water bailiff for the loch and part-time journalist, about a whale-like creature that Aldie Mackay and her husband had seen rolling in the loch on 15 April from the A82, the new road along the northern shore that had just opened up clear views of the water. Sightings poured in. In December 1933 the Daily Mail sent the big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell, who found huge footprints on the shore; the Natural History Museum identified them as made with a dried hippo's foot of the kind used as an umbrella stand. In April 1934 came the Surgeon's Photograph, credited to the London gynaecologist Robert Kenneth Wilson, showing a slender neck rising from the water. In 1991 Wetherell's stepson Christian Spurling admitted it had been a toy submarine, made as revenge on the Mail. By 1938 Virginia Woolf was writing to her sister about a couple who had seen the monster, which had no head and swam at immense speed.

The search has been long and technical. Robert Rines's Academy of Applied Science swept the loch with sonar from 1972, and his famous gargoyle head photograph was later matched by a tree stump filmed during Operation Deepscan in 1987. In June 2018 researchers from Otago, Copenhagen, Hull and the Highlands and Islands sampled the loch for environmental DNA and found no trace of sharks, sturgeon, catfish, otters, seals or reptiles, but a great deal of eel. The study's leader, Neil Gemmell, would not rule out an eel of extreme size, though none has ever been caught.

The scientific view is that sightings are hoaxes, wishful thinking or misidentified animals, objects and natural effects. The loch is real, long, deep and dark, and the legend still draws people to its shores.