THE LOCH NESS MONSTER

loch Ness is 24 miles long, up to li miles wide, over 700 feet deep for most of its length, and almost completely surrounded by forests. It is longer than the width of the English Channel at Dover and is four times as deep as the Channel at its deepest, and has never been known to freeze. It is situated in the Great Glen of Scotland, an enormous rift valley formed when the entire northern part of Scotland was wrenched sixty miles to the west following a gigantic upheaval in bygone ages. The loch was undoubtedly connected at one time to the sea, probably at both extremities, and although it is now considered a fresh-water lake, there is every possibility that at some distance below the surface there is still salt-water, a reminder of its ancient connection with the sea. (A 1,100 feet deep Canadian lake has recently been found to have a mixture of sea-water probably thousands of years old below 400 feet. Unfortunately, no such investigation has yet been carried out at Loch Ness.) Visibility in the loch is practically nil, due to the amount of peat content washed into it by the many streams and rivers entering from the surrounding countryside. The sides of the loch are extremely steep; at Cormorant Rock it plunges sharply to a depth of 236 feet just fifty feet from the bank ! The loch is not, therefore, a very prepossessing sight and is a natural focus of local superstition. One can imagine local mothers chastising their children with the threat of bogey-men and monsters rising out of this sombre expanse of and carrying off all those children who were naughty. The phenomenon of Loch Ness might well have remained as mere local superstition if it had not been for the overwhelming number of actual sightings of the so-called monster by reputable witnesses. The Loch Ness phenomenon is by no means a recent acquisition to the fauna of Scotland. According to legend it has always harboured a beastie or water kelpie ; and the first written account of the creature dates way back to the middle of the sixth century a.D. when St. Columba was visiting Brude, King of the Northern Picts, at Inverness. According to Adamnan, St. Columba's biographer, writing a century after the event, the holy man reached the banks of the loch as the local inhabitants were burying one of their number who had been bitten to death by the monster. Despite this, he instructed one of his followers to swim to the other side of the loch and return with a boat that had been moored there. The man had not been in the long before the monster arrived on the scene, making a bee-line for the now panicstricken swimmer. But St. Columba muttered a few prayers and ordered the monster to leave the man alone. Needless to say, the monster, on hearing the voice of the blessed man, turned tail and fled. Regular sightings of the creature have been made from that day to this. The frequency of the sightings of the animal increased tremendously in 1933, and this was solely due to the widening of a road (the A. 82) along the northern side of the loch. The blasting necessary for the road's construction sent shock-waves the length and breadth of the loch and agitated the animal into an unusual outburst of activity. A Ness Fisheries Board representative estimates that every year since 1933 there have been 20 to 30 sightings reported that he would regard as genuine. The number of reports accepted as genuine and inexplicable by the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau since 1963 has been: 1963 40, 1964-18, 1965 9, 1966 29. The modernization of the A.82 mainroad has enabled more people to have long uninterrupted looks at the loch than at any other time in history, and consequently the number of sightings has increased considerably. Witnesses to the existence of the animal come from all walks of life: churchmen, policemen, gamekeepers, mayors, labourers, monks, Members of Parliament, and even Forestry Commission workers !

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