A few times a year the moon comes up over the buildings looking like a prop somebody wheeled in. Too big, too orange, and altogether the wrong scale for the sky it's in, so that your first thought is "what is that," and "moon" only arrives second.
And every single time, without any input from me, my hand goes into my bag for the phone.
I know exactly what's about to happen. I have roughly a decade of documentation in my camera roll of what's about to happen. What's about to happen is a white grain of rice on a black rectangle.
Every time. Never once has it worked.
So I pinch to zoom, which makes the grain of rice bigger and also somehow soft, like it's been photographed through a sock. I hold my breath. I hold the phone up over my head for no reason at all, since the moon is not going to be less far away by fourteen inches, and a man walks past me on the sidewalk with a dog and gives me the look people give someone standing motionless with one arm in the air, and I lower it slightly but do not stop. Then I notice my thumb has been resting on the lens this whole time, so what I've got now is a soft grain of rice with a fingerprint on it, in a photograph that also contains, at the bottom, the top of a parking sign I did not want.
Fine, whatever. Deleting it.
Except I don't delete it. That's the part I want to flag.
I keep it, and then about a week later I'm scrolling for something else and I hit it, and this is the part nobody warns you about: the bad photograph moves in and evicts the memory. I saw a moon that stopped me on the street. What I have now, permanently, is a smudge. My brain, which is lazy and would always rather open a file than remember anything, went ahead and swapped the good one for the bad one without consulting me.
Anyway. Scotland.
Loch Ness runs about twenty-three miles down the Great Glen, southwest from Inverness. It goes down over seven hundred and fifty feet in places. It holds more fresh water than every lake in England and Wales put together, which is one of those facts that sounds made up and isn't.
The water is stained brown-black with peat washed in off the hills, so it doesn't clear up as you descend. It closes. Divers report visibility dropping to essentially nothing within a few dozen feet of the surface.
So we're dealing with a large, cold, opaque, permanently choppy body of water that nobody can see into, ringed by a road full of people holding cameras.
Gorgeous, by the way. Genuinely one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen photographed badly.
What Aldie Mackay saw in 1933, and what a local paper did with it
On 15 April 1933, Aldie Mackay was in a car on the road along the north shore with her husband John. She managed the Drumnadrochit Hotel. She said she saw something large moving in the water, rolling and plunging, and by the time anyone else looked it was gone.
Of course it was.
Her husband mentioned it to Alex Campbell, who was the water bailiff for the loch and also filed items for the local paper. Which is the sort of dual employment you get in a place with more water than people.
The piece ran in the Inverness Courier on 2 May 1933.
The word "monster" is generally credited to the paper's editor, Evan Barron, who is said to have decided that whatever this thing was, it plainly deserved better than "creature."
Good call, Evan.
I want to note, because it's the honest thing to note, that a fair amount of this is recollection rather than record. Campbell's own account shifted across later retellings. Nessie scholarship has been arguing about the details for decades and shows no sign of stopping. What isn't in doubt is the date the item ran and what happened next, which is that the national press picked it up, and then the international press picked that up, and a lake in the Highlands became a story on three continents inside a year.
There's a duller reason 1933 was the year, and I think it's the best fact on this page.
A new road, the A82, had just been pushed along the loch's northwestern shore. Building it meant felling trees and blasting rock. When they finished, there was suddenly a paved route with long, open, unobstructed views over the water, where before there had been trees and slopes and not much reason to be out there at all.
Locals said at the time that the dynamite had woken something up, and the likelier version is that the dynamite gave several thousand people a clear line of sight, which is less satisfying but does explain why the sightings begin the same season the tarmac does.
The Surgeon's Photograph, and the sixty years it took to fall apart
The Daily Mail, at this point, had stopped covering the story and started producing it.
In December 1933 the paper hired a man named Marmaduke Wetherell, a big-game hunter and film-maker, to go up to the loch and find the animal. Within days, Wetherell found footprints. Enormous ones, in the mud at the shore, and the Mail ran it big.
The Natural History Museum then examined casts of the prints and reported that they had been made with the foot of a hippopotamus. A dried one. Almost certainly the base of an umbrella stand, which is a thing that genuinely sat in British hallways at the time and which I would like you to sit with for a moment, because somewhere in England there was a house missing a leg off its umbrella stand and nobody in that house ever knew why.
An umbrella stand.
Wetherell was humiliated in public by the paper that hired him. Keep that in your pocket.
On 21 April 1934, the Daily Mail published a photograph of a small dark head and a curved neck rising out of rippled water. It was credited to Robert Kenneth Wilson, a London gynaecologist. A respectable man with no obvious reason to lie, who declined to attach his name to the creature and only ever said he'd photographed something moving in the loch.
That reticence is exactly what sold it.
It became the Surgeon's Photograph, and for sixty years it was the picture. It's on the tea towels. It's the silhouette in your head right now, and it's been in your head since childhood, and you did not choose to put it there.
In 1994, a man named Christian Spurling was reported to have confessed, shortly before his death at ninety, that he'd built the thing. Spurling was Marmaduke Wetherell's stepson.
The account, given to the researchers Alastair Boyd and David Martin, is that Wetherell wanted his own back on the paper, so Spurling made a head and neck out of plastic wood and fixed it to a toy submarine bought at Woolworths, and they floated it in the shallows and photographed it, and got Wilson to front it because a gynaecologist is more believable than a taxidermist.
A toy submarine. From Woolworths.
The confession is secondhand and arrived after the confessor died, and there are researchers who'll tell you parts of it don't hold together, and they're not being unreasonable. Nobody defends the photograph anymore, though. That question is shut.
What I keep coming back to is that the most famous picture ever taken at Loch Ness is also the only crisp one, and it's crisp because the subject was about fourteen inches from the lens and holding still.
Saint Columba and the beast in 565, which is not the story you've been told
The oldest thing anyone cites is a story about Saint Columba, and it's real in the sense that the text exists and says what people say it says. It's in the Life of Columba, written by Adomnán, the ninth abbot of Iona, roughly a century after the events it describes.
Columba comes across some Picts burying a man who was seized and killed in the water. Columba then sends one of his own men, Lugne Mocumin, to swim across and fetch a boat.
Which is not what I would have done. Lugne went.
The beast comes up. Columba makes the sign of the cross and tells it to go no further and not to touch the man, and it goes.
Two things about this get left out roughly always.
The whole thing takes place in the River Ness, which runs out of the north end of the loch and is a shallow, ordinary river you can stand in.
And a saint's life is not a police report. Adomnán was writing a work of devotion, in a genre whose whole job was to demonstrate holy authority over the natural and the demonic, and beasts subdued by a word turn up in that literature constantly, because that's what the literature was for. Reading it as a monster sighting is a bit like reading a company's annual report as a diary.
Still.
Somebody in seventh-century Iona chose a water beast for that scene rather than a wolf or a storm, and chose to put it in the Ness.
The films, the flippers, and the pictures that aren't hoaxes and still don't help
After 1934, everybody had a camera, and the results are instructive.
In April 1960 an aeronautical engineer named Tim Dinsdale filmed about fifty feet of 16mm footage from Foyers, showing a dark hump moving across the water and leaving a wake. In 1965 the film was analysed by the Royal Air Force's Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre, who concluded the object was probably not a boat or a submarine and was therefore probably animate, which is the single strongest piece of institutional support Nessie has ever received, and it launched a decade of organised searching. The Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau ran volunteer watches on the shore every summer until 1972.
Later image work, including analysis by Adrian Shine, appears to show a man at the tiller.
So.
Then there's the 1972 flipper photograph, produced by Robert Rines's team using strobe cameras underwater, which shows a diamond-shaped fin. In 1975 Sir Peter Scott, a naturalist of enormous standing, co-published a scientific name for the animal in Nature: Nessiteras rhombopteryx. Within days, a Scottish MP named Nicholas Fairbairn noticed the letters could be rearranged into "Monster hoax by Sir Peter S."
Nicholas Fairbairn. National treasure.
Scott was not hoaxing anybody. He had a genuine and rather touching motive, which was that British wildlife law protects named species and he wanted the thing protected before somebody harpooned it for television. The anagram was an accident. It is also the funniest accident in the history of taxonomy, and it ended the discussion instantly, because that's what a good joke does to a serious claim.
The flipper images, meanwhile, turned out to have been retouched, with outlines sharpened and shapes brought out by hand before publication. The originals are much less flipper-shaped, and honestly a bit hard to describe at all.
Operation Deepscan, and what twenty-four boats found in 1987
In October 1987, Adrian Shine's Loch Ness Project ran the biggest sonar effort the loch had seen. Twenty-four boats spread across the width in a line, sweeping the full length, with the sonar beams overlapping so that in principle nothing large could slip between them. Something like two dozen television crews came to watch.
They got three contacts in deep water that they couldn't identify.
Three. Out of a loch that size, over two days, with the beams overlapping.
None of them could be relocated. The team's own assessment afterward was cautious and has stayed cautious: the returns were unexplained, they were unlikely to be fish, and they were probably debris or thermal layering, with a seal not ruled out. Nothing that anybody could honestly call a large animal has come back on any sweep since, and there have been many.
Which is more or less the technological history of this whole business. Every improvement in the equipment has produced a decrease in monster, and the drop is steep enough that you could plot it if you were the plotting type.
The 2018 DNA survey, and the eel nobody was hoping for
In 2018 a team led by Neil Gemmell, a geneticist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, took around 250 water samples from across the loch at different depths and sequenced everything living in them.
This is environmental DNA. It works because everything in the water is constantly shedding itself into the water. Skin, scales, waste, the lot. You filter it, you sequence it, and you get an inventory of who's been swimming there.
Which is a fairly incredible thing to be able to do, and I don't think it got the applause it deserved, because it arrived attached to a monster story.
They got through more than 500 million sequences. Results came out in September 2019.
No reptile DNA. None at any size, from anything, anywhere in the loch. That takes the plesiosaur off the table, which it already was for a dozen other reasons, but now it's off the table with paperwork.
Greenland shark, sturgeon and giant catfish all came back empty too.
What there was, in remarkable quantity, was eel. European eel DNA turned up at practically every sampling point, in volumes that surprised them.
Eels.
Gemmell has been careful about this in every interview since, and I'd like to be equally careful, because the headline everybody ran was "Nessie is a giant eel" and the data doesn't say that. The data says there are a great many eels in Loch Ness. It cannot tell you how big any individual one is.
What Gemmell has said is that the giant-eel idea is the one hypothesis his results don't rule out. That is a considerably smaller claim, and an honest one. It got flattened into a monster headline within about six hours, because of course it did.
Eels are also, for what it's worth, extremely good at looking like a neck, which is not evidence of anything and I mention it only because it's true.
Is the Loch Ness Monster real, in the end
No. Not in the way the word "monster" is doing there.
Over a thousand sightings sit on the Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register, which Gary Campbell has kept for decades on his own time and without charging anybody for it. That's a real record of a real thing. The real thing is that a great many people have looked at that water and seen something they could not account for.
Boat wakes hold their shape on that loch for a long time and cross each other into humps. Deer swim it. There are otters, with their tails coming up out of the water behind them in a way that has fooled a lot of people. The wind comes down the Great Glen in a straight line for twenty miles and does things to the surface, and on top of all that the loch produces standing waves, which are moving humps with no animal underneath them.
And after ninety years of sonar, submersibles, satellites, strobe cameras, dedicated bureaus, hydrophones, and a full genetic census of the water, what exists is testimony and blurry photographs. In 2023 the Loch Ness Centre ran the biggest coordinated search in fifty years, with about two hundred volunteers, drones with thermal cameras, and a hydrophone in the water. They picked up four unusual noises, and that was the haul for the weekend.
The testimony deserves respect as testimony. It just isn't a specimen, and no amount of respect converts the one into the other, which is a boring thing to have to say and I'd rather not be the one saying it.
What Nessie means, if you'd like it to mean something
Water monsters in Scotland long predate 1933, and the older tradition isn't cuddly. The kelpie is a shape-shifting water horse that turns up saddled and gentle at the edge of a loch, stands there being lovely and patient and available in a way that no actual horse has ever been, lets a child climb on, and then walks into the water and keeps walking. Read as folklore, it's a warning about deep cold water dressed up as a story, and it worked, because "don't go near the loch" is forgettable and "there's a horse in there that wants you" is not.
Nessie is that same animal after the tourism board got hold of her. The loch didn't change and neither did the depth or the dark, but somewhere along the way she stopped drowning children and started appearing on a mug.
If you want the symbolic reading, she's whatever your own mind supplies when it's handed a surface it can't see through, and what it supplies is never nothing.
Standing at the loch with your phone out
What actually happens when you go is the same for everybody, so I'll just tell you.
You stand at Urquhart Castle with a few hundred other people and you look at the water, which is enormous and dark and unhelpful, and you think about how far down it goes. Then something moves out there. Could be a gust, could be a cormorant, could be the wake of a tour boat that went past four minutes ago and is only now arriving back at you off the far shore, at an angle that makes no sense to anybody standing where you're standing.
And your hand goes to your phone.
You take the picture. You know while you're taking it that the picture is not going to work, and you take it anyway, and when you look at it later on the bus it's a grey rectangle with a slightly different grey rectangle sitting in the middle of it, and you will spend a genuinely embarrassing amount of that bus ride zooming in on the second grey rectangle with two fingers, tilting the screen toward the window for better light, then away from the window because of the glare, then holding it at arm's length as though distance were the missing ingredient. You'll show it to one person, who'll be nice about it. You won't delete it.
Ninety years of those. Drawers and hard drives and shoeboxes full of grey on grey, from Aldie Mackay's rolling something in 1933 to a hydrophone burp in 2023, and one single sharp beautiful unambiguous image at the center of the whole thing, which a man with a grudge built out of plastic wood and a toy submarine and floated fourteen inches from a lens.
So put the phone down at Loch Ness, or don't, but understand what a blurry picture actually is, which is the only kind you ever get of something you weren't ready for.
