Legends of the Deep: Loch Ness
In January 1934, a motorcyclist traveling around the north-eastern end of Loch Ness reported nearly hitting a large creature as it crossed the road in front of him. The witness, a veterinary student, said it looked like a cross between a seal and a plesiosaur. It was in the years of 1933 and 1934 that “Nessie” was becoming a worldwide sensation, and reports brought tourists flocking to the area to see if they could catch a glimpse of the monster. Although the Loch’s story gained traction in the media in the 1930s, people had been encountering what they thought was a monster of the deep since 565 A.D.
Scotland’s Loch Ness
Loch Ness, named for the River Ness flowing from its northern end, lies in the “Great Glen,” a valley rife with lochs and rivers extending about 80 miles. The glen follows a geological fault that bisects Scotland from the northeast to southwest. It was erosion along this strike-slip fault line during a glaciation that formed the basins for these bodies of water, including Loch Ness.
Loch Ness is a freshwater inland lake about 24 miles long and an average of about a mile wide. Its official maximum depth is 754 feet, though researchers have detected trenches that may be up to 889 feet deep. With a surface area of 22 square miles and its overall great depth, Loch Ness contains more water than all lakes in Wales and England combined. Much of the water that sits in the Great Glen holds high levels of peat, which is decaying organic material. Because ness of and this, surrounding the waters of lakes loch and rivers have murky waters with low visibility. A long, fect deep, place dark for lake an seems undiscovered the per“beast” to make a home.
St. Columba Confronts a Beast
The very first written record
of a monster in Loch Ness came from Irish missionary and scholar St. Columba. Thanks to his 7th century biographer St. Adamnan’s book about him, we can read about St. Columba’s reported encounter with a beast in Loch Ness. It happened in 565 A.D.
St. Columba was standing on the bank of the River Ness, which flows out from the Loch Ness in northern Scotland. He was contemplating the best way to cross the river when he came upon a group of men who were burying a friend, alleging to St. Columba that he had been attacked and killed by the monster while swimming. St. Columba laid his staff across the man’s chest and the man rose. The missionary then asked one of his fellow monks to swim across the river to retrieve a small boat that was tied up on the other side. As the monk did so, the onlookers saw a huge form rise to the surface and begin to race toward the man in the water as it roared, its mouth wide open. Those on shore screamed at the man in the water, warning him of the creature. St. Columba remained calm, and after stepping forward to the edge of the loch, he made the sign of a cross, saying to the monster: “You will go no further! Do not touch the man! Leave at once!”
The beast stopped and fled, quickly disappearing into the depths of Loch Ness. The group of men converted to Christianity on the spot, giving glory to the God who had, through St. Columba, saved their friend and commanded the obedience of a monster.
St. Adamnan’s account of St. Columba’s dance with Nessie is the first written account of such a monster in Loch Ness. So what monster could be still making appearances in the loch almost 1,500 years later?
Though the first modern newspaper report of a monster in Loch Ness appeared in 1930, the story didn’t rise into a modern legend until 1933, when a new road was finished along the lake. From that road, motorists and their passengers had an unobstructed view of the expansive loch, and some of them reported seeing something rather unnatural churning the waters of the deep. Newspapers in the United Kingdom carried various reports of strange sights in Loch Ness, but it was the May 1933 account published in the Inverness Courier that launched the monster into modern infamy.
The article laid out the details of Mr. and Mrs. MaCkay’s sighting of a sudden “tremendous upheaval on the loch, which, previously, had been as calm as the proverbial mill-pond.” He was a well-known businessman from Inverness, and his wife was a University Graduate. They were driving along the north shore of the loch when they spotted a creature “rolling and plunging…its body resembling that of a whale, and the water cascading and churning like a simmering cauldron.” The article continued to say that the couple knew this was no ordinary inhabitant