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And another thing

Is the Loch Ness Monster heading for real celebrity?

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 25th July 2007

At this time of year my thoughts often dwell on the Loch Ness Monster. Let me recapitulate what we know about this beast.

The hotel also accommodates, from time to time, people of scientific or pseudo-scientific bent who come up to find or if possible capture the monster. They are rough diamonds rather than Einsteins; adventurers, rather like the men in that marvellous Edgar Wallace movie, King Kong, which dates from the same period (it might fairly be described as inter-war but pre-Hitler). Sometimes they have a young moll with them, like the delightful Fay Wray, to do a bit of screaming if the monster gets out and grabs her. ‘Nessie’-hunters sometimes bring elaborate equipment. In the 1980s they made a month-long sonar ‘scan’ of the Loch, which detected a moving object of large size. Experts on animals and reptiles were said to be ‘baffled’ and ‘amazed’. But nothing came of it. Another year the bird-man Peter Scott, having studied the dossier, baptised the monster Nessiteras rhombopteryx. Readers of popular newspapers were told this meant ‘The Ness creature with the fins in the shape of a diamond’. But it turned out to be an anagram of ‘Monster Hoax by Sir Peter S’. In yet another year, a group of rich Japanese monster-fans came along with a miniature submarine, holding two people and a mass of photographic and recording equipment. What came of that I don’t know — nothing, obviously.

I have visited Loch Ness many times. Indeed I once swam in it. This is not so common as you might suppose. The Loch is dauntingly wide, over a mile, and 700 feet deep. The surface always appears to be dark, even in bright sunshine. This is not an optical illusion. The fierce mountain streams on both sides bring down immense quantities of minute particles of peat. Most of it settles on the floor of the Loch in great depth but enough remains undissolved in the water to render it impenetrably opaque. If you dive as little as six feet below the surface, you can’t see a thing. So there was not much point in having a submersible craft anyway. The darkness and density of the waters suggests to me that they will never find the monster by going under them. And can a creature of any size live in such an inhospitable liquid? Not many fish do, obviously. And the monster has to live on something. It can’t just swallow liquid peat-fragments. Of course its diet would depend on what kind of a thing it is. My old walking-companion in those parts, Simon Fraser, the Master of Lovat, whose family estates, which were sold after his early death, once stretched from coast to coast, embracing nearly 200,000 acres, had certain rights in Loch Ness. He used to say to me, ‘If the monster is a mammal, it belongs to the Queen. But if it’s a fish, it belongs to me.’