LOCH NESS MONSTER

Evening Star, Issue 22366, 16 June 1936, Page 7

LOCH NESS MONSTER

TALE FROM THE HIGHLANDS “As a news story, the Lodi Ness monster has been done to death!” declared a hard-boiled sub-editor as he waved me away towards the Highlands (writes John Homes AFCtillach, in the ‘ Scottish Daily Express’). It may ho so. Still, I got all tangled up with the monster before I’d driven five miles along Loeh Ness. It may be a myth, or a joke that became serious. It may be, as one man suggested to me darkly, a submarine craft being tested secretly on the loch. It may be dead. But one thing is sure —it is still a lively topic of conversation around Inverness, and all sorts of people are eager to talk about it, and ready to swear that they have seen it, and will see it again. Mind you, Loch Ness itself is a very curious—almost a sinister—stretch of water. Its history begins with a legend, and the Ceilidh kept that legend alive. The loch was a deep well, the mouth of which was closed by a stone, and the story goes that if it ever came to pass that a careless housewife forgot to put the stone back after filling her pails, the water would rise and cover the valley. A careless housewife did neglect to replace the stone, and Loch Ness arose. Comparatively few people realise that it is 17 miles * long, _ and still fewer realise how deep it is. I was told that it was bottomless, that it was a mile deep, and that it was deeper than the North Sea, which gives you quite a range of depths. Actually, it is much more than 1,200 ft deep opposite the ruins of Urquhart Castle. Hour hundred yards! A quarter of a mile, roughly. That is a terrific depth, especially for such a narrow loch. A friend of mine, fishing in another part of the loch, dropped an anchor to hold his boat. He told mo that the stern of the boat was nearly under the water when the rope went suddenly taut. The anchor hadn’t touched bottom. NEVER FROZEN. Last winter was one of the most severe that the Highlands have ever experienced ; yet Loch Ness wasn’t frozen. It has never been frozen over within the memory of man. The water is too deep, I suppose, to be frozen on the surface. . . A sinister feature of the loch is its refusal to give up its dead. I met this claim with the assertion that a man’s body was found in the loch last year; but it was immediately pointed out to me that the body was found at the mouth of a burn—not actually in the loch itself. The bodies of people drowned in Loch Ness are never found. One more 'envious feature of this famous Highland loch—and then I will get back to the monster. There is only one island in it, near the monastery at Fort, Augustus. It is a circular one, no( much bigger than the top of a table as viewed from the road ; and it was put there by human hands. When I am at home I can sit at the window and watch the changing waters of the Solway Firth. Time and again, I have seen the water moving in such a way, as a result of vagrant winds, that it took on the appearance of some marine monster. Some of these peculiar upheavals of the water are so like sea-serpents or the Loch Ness monster that I have thought of photographing them. I have never done so, for the simple reason that I know that a monster would be as flat as a flounder to bask in tho shallow waters in front of my windows —and monsters of that kind would be a bit too flat. True, there is no shallow water in Loch Ness, but considering tho length and narrowness of this loch, and tho height of the hills that rise from it, its water's must be subjected to peculiar local wind movements, especially in the hot (lays of summer. There must be times, between June and September, when the warm surface water is piled up in peculiar ways by vagrant breezes. If .the results are only half as like moving monsters as some of the upheavals I have seen in the Solway Firth from my window I can quite understand why' so many summer tourists have glimpsed what they believed to be the Loch Ness monster. MONSTER WATCHED. I talked to one man, in Inverness, who said he had watched the monster for 20 minutes one day during the summer before last. He described it vaguely as being long, with humps on its back, and as having a small head like that of a horse. Now, in 20 minutes, on the Loch Ness road during summer, scores — probably’ hundreds—of motor cars would pass the spot where the man 1 mention was watching the monster. The following questions,_ which courtesy’ forbade me putting into words, formed in my l cymical mind. Why didn t he photograph the monster? If he hadn’t a camera- —or couldn’t get one —why didn't he appeal to passing motorists to photograph the phenomenon? He would have caused a traffic jam a mile long, and would have made a hundred cameras click by sharing his spectacle. Nothing like that happened, however, and because it didn’t happen, ray friend’s story left me sceptical. Something odd —and perhaps a monstrous living thing—has undoubtedly been seen in tho loch from time to time over a long period of years. But legends are legends along Loch Ness, and a lot of them have to do with the monstrous and repulsive _ water-kelpies, which had a nasty habit of enticing people into the loch and finishing them off there at their leisure. I cannot quite rid myself of the feeling that these ancient legends have a good deal to do with the Loch Ness monster of to-day’. And yet—one cair’t ho too cynical about this deep and sinister loch. “ I haven’t seen the monster, but a lot of people bare,” said the Press plioto"rapher who drove me out along the focli. “ And they can’t all be liars!” he added. Let’s hope not. After all. Loch Ness would lose a great deal if its monster wore to die dismally-—through lack of food—nr lack of public curiosity in its movements 1