Mark Mason

Looking for Nessie

In A Monstrous Commotion, Gareth Williams describes the weird fraternity for whom finding the Loch Ness monster has become the ultimate grail

It wasn’t until I drove past Loch Ness a couple of years ago that I realised just how enormous it is. Over 20 miles long and deep enough to hide Blackpool Tower, it could hold the water from all the lakes in England and Wales combined. But it’s still not as big, I found myself thinking, as the human imagination.

Gareth Williams’s excellent book isn’t about the Loch Ness monster; it’s about the people who have looked for it. There is Alexander Keiller, rich from marmalade and ‘fond of sex, sometimes on a near-industrial scale’. There’s wing commander Basil Cary and his wife Winifred, known as Freddie, who can work out which pub her husband is in by dangling a pendulum over a map (she then rings up and shouts: ‘Send him home!’). There’s even the Daily Mail, who in 1933 tried tempting Nessie with a leg of mutton. Unimpressed, a Mr R.M. Green suggests six bullocks ‘impaled on appropriately sized hooks’. Needless to say the searchers frequently fall out. There are fisticuffs by the loch, and one believer ventures the opinion that another is ‘not quite 16 annas to the rupee’.

Some sightings, you’ll be amazed to learn, turn out to be hoaxes. A carcass discovered in 1868 is that of a whale, stripped of its skin and blubber then dumped in the loch by the ‘waggish crew’ of a sea-going boat. Some 1930s footprints are analysed: not only are they found to be those of a hippopotamus, but they’re all the same foot (back right): someone has been at work with an umbrella stand. But even though the monster might have been made up, you certainly couldn’t have invented some of those pursuing it. One expedition, in need of marker floats, cleans the Inverness branch of Woolworths out of orange and white footballs.

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