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Just six miles west of Culloden in the Great Glen
of Glen More lies Loch Ness, Britain's biggest
lake, a colossal 36 miles in length. Of all the mysteries
that remain unsolved in the world today, a favourite of people
around the world is that of the Loch Ness Monster.
Although plying on the American tourist market, Nessie has
become something of an icon to represent the enigma that is
Scotland.
One man believes in the existence of Nessie so much that
in 1991 he left his home country of England and moved to Loch
Ness to prove that she exists. Steve Feltham finances
his self-daubed "Nessie-serry Independent Research"
by selling miniature models of Nessie to tourists. He lives
in a battered van on the side of the Loch and a visit to Loch
Ness is sure to entail a meeting with Steve himself. He cites
the lack of photo-evidence of Nessie due to the local temperament,
local people don't carry around cameras and are fairly blasé
about the monster lurking in their loch.
Mysteries of the Loch
An exhibition about Loch Ness held in 2000 at the official
exhibition centre at Drumnadrochit revealed that Nessie
isn't the only mystery to the massive 10,000 year old lake.
The lake is immersed in centuries of Scottish folklore, nuclear
radiation, and even the remains of a Viking Longboat has been
found in its murky waters.
Loch Ness seems to draw so many different types of people
to it, united by the desire to solve the mystery of the Loch
Ness Monster. Some people are looking for giant sturgeon,
or giant catfish, or even hunting for a time gate back into
the past. When it comes to Nessie, everyone has a theory.
The most viable scientific theory is that Nessie is a modern
day plesiosaur dinosaur. If scientists can prove the
existence of Nessie's clan who have outlived their contemporaries
by some 350 million years, the discovery could be as important
to science as Darwinism. It is thought the Dinosaur may have
moved to Scotland when its egg were frozen under the earth's
crust (a principle similar to Cryogenics), where they were
able to survive millions of years, and were moved to Scotland
by the shifting tetonic plates that make up the surface of
the earth.
How to spot Nessie
The first sighting of old Nessie occurred around the 6th century
AD, when St Columba reported an encounter witth a sea serpent,
but it wasn't until 1933, when they built a road around the
outside of the Loch, that the mystery really began to deepen.
The story goest that a great monster crawled on land from
the waters, and killed 3 onlookers. The story remains unconfirmed!
One of the reasons it's so hard to get an underwater monster
sighting is that the visibility in the peat filled loch only
extends a few feet down. Operation Deepscan in 1987,
a TV filmed crew still failed to find the elusive Nessie despite
millions of pounds worth of high tech gear.
Hot, still days are said to be the best time to spot Nessie,
a rare phenomena itself in Scotland!
Even if you don't manage to spot the infamous monster, the
Loch still provides stunning lake side walks rich in colour,
especially around dawn and sunset.
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