The Loch Ness Monster

The most famous lake legend on Earth. Reports of a creature in this long, deep, peat-dark Scottish loch go back to a tale of St. Columba in the 6th century, but the modern craze began in 1933 with a new lakeside road and a rush of sightings. The loch is real and genuinely vast, holding more fresh water than every lake in England and Wales combined, deep and cold and impossible to see into. Decades of sonar sweeps and a 2018 environmental-DNA survey found no monster (the DNA hinted at a lot of eels). Told as the grand folklore it is, in country worth the drive for its own sake.