I have not really blogged on this well known sighting from 1960 by Torquil MacLeod. I covered it in my land sightings book, but an email question from a longtime blog member and student of the LNM phenomenon led me to update the subject. The story is familiar to fans of the beast and was first published anonymously in Tim Dinsdale's book "Loch Ness Monster". Around 3:30pm on February 28th 1960, Torquil stopped his car south of Invermoriston to check out an object on the opposite shore on the Horseshoe Scree.
Upon turning my glasses on the moving object, I saw a large grey black mass (I am inclined to think the skin was wet and dry in patches) and at the front there was what looked like an outsize in elephant’s trunks. Paddles were visible on both sides, but only at what I presumed was the rear end, and it was this end (remote from the "trunk"), which tapered off into the water. The animal was on a steep slope, and taking its backbone as an approximate straight line, was inclined about 15-20 degrees out of my line of sight: the "trunk" being at the top and to the left, and the tail at the bottom, in the water, to the right....
For about 8 or 9 minutes the animal remained quite still, but for its "trunk" (I assume neck, although I could not recognize a head as such) which occasionally moved from side to side with a slight up and down motion—just like a snake about to strike; but quite slowly. It was, to my mind, obviously scanning the shores of the loch in each direction. In the end it made a sort of half jump - half lurch to the left, its "trunk" coming right round until it was facing me, then it flopped into the water and apparently went straight down; so it must be very deep close inshore at that point. As it turned I saw distinctly a large squarish ended flipper forward of the big rear paddles—or flippers: call them what you will, but not legs. I did not see the end of the tail at any time, but the animal looked something like this ...
One of the sketches which appeared in the same book is shown at the top of this article. It looks like a binocular's eye view with the lens graticulates visible as well. Now I agree with others who have pointed out that a creature of that size at that distance of one mile would not fill so much of the binocular field of view. However, I do not think this is something suspicious or incriminating for we see this same use of "artistic license" elsewhere in Dinsdale's book as seen in the "binocular" view of his own sighting which led to his famous film a few weeks later.
Dinsdale spotted his creature at a similar distance away as Torquil and it certainly would not have filled the view of his binoculars either. I also suspect the angle of incidence in this sketch is too large. My theory is that someone on the publisher's editorial team was taking liberties with how binocular sketches were framed. The error is repeated over ten years later when Nicholas Witchell's "The Loch Ness Story" has a similar illustration. Here the artist also decides to reduce the number of graticulates from five to three. Now I am no expert on how many graticulates the various makes and models of binoculars came with, but I am sure it didn't vary with the same item.
But moving on, my esteemed colleague had emailed asking me what part of the Horseshoe Scree the monster had been seen by Torquil. Not knowing the answer myself, I read the original account again and came to the conclusion that Torquil MacLeod's monster had not been on the Horseshoe Scree at all, but somewhere else. I quote further from Torquil MacLeod's account:
I was able to pinpoint both my own and the animal's position on the 1 inch ordnance map (1 inch to the mile), the distance being approximately 1,700 yards - to within 50 yards. The animal was near a burn marked on the map, and I was only yards away from a house which was also marked - hence the accurate pinpoint.
That struck me as a curious statement. Here below is a beautiful view of the scree (or craig) from the opposite shoreline that my fellow Nessie fan pointed me to. It is one of the most distinctive natural features around the loch - yet MacLeod uses an unnamed stream as his frame of reference to pinpoint the creature's location and not the clear and unmistakable contours of the horseshoe.
In fact, in his letter to Tim (reproduced in Dinsdale's book) and another letter he wrote to Constance Whyte quoted in Witchell's book, Torquil makes no reference to the Horseshoe Craig in either. So where exactly did MacLeod see this massive beast? Looking at my ordnance survey map of the southern part of the loch, no stream is marked on the Horseshoe, but somewhere is a stream that Torquil explicitly references.
Clearly, Nessie was not doing whatever Nessies do on the scree. I brought up Google Maps to show the streams nearest to the scree. The burn called "Stream 1" is about 340 metres from the southernmost part of the scree, while "Stream 2" is about 750 metres away. The "Stream 3" is the furthest at 1600 metres north of the scree. Since MacLeod states he was 2.5 miles out of Invermoriston when he saw his monster, I have also measured out that distance using Google's "Directions" feature.
But how do we determine which of these three streams the creature was near? I noted that Tim Dinsdale in his book reproduced a survey map to accompany his week of watching around the loch between the 18th and 23rd of April 1960. His diary mentioned him hearing of a man who had seen the monster partly out of the water "
near a place called the 'horse shoe' ...". On his map Tim marks the location of some notable land sightings without naming them. There is one dot beside the annotation "
Horse Shoe" which could only be that of Torquil Macleod but since the map is about six miles to the inch, it lacks the required accuracy to pinpoint the location.
In fact, I am not sure Tim knew the exact location himself if he relied solely on Torquil's letter, who would become seriously ill with cancer and sadly died just before the book was published in May 1961. Thus more detailed information on the subject may have passed away with him. So we must return to MacLeod's direct testimony and some number crunching where he stated:
I was able to pinpoint both my own and the animal's position on the 1 inch ordnance map (1 inch to the mile), the distance being approximately 1,700 yards - to within 50 yards. The animal was near a burn marked on the map, and I was only yards away from a house which was also marked - hence the accurate pinpoint.
Torquil on his map had the house near him marked as well as the stream beside the creature. Given that, it is no surprise that he confidently states a distance with an accuracy of less than 3% and that should be our main guidance in this matter. A distance of 1700 +/- 50 yards equates to 1554 +/- 46 metres. If we take the end of the 2.5 miles distance as our location for Torquil, which of the three streams is the closest to his estimated distance?
So "Stream 3" is closest at 1620 metres followed by "Stream 1" at 1720 metres and "Stream 2" at 2120 metres. Of course, it partly depends on how accurate the 2.5 miles statement is. I double checked the numbers using a good old fashioned inches ruler on a 1.25 miles to the inch paper ordnance survey map. Curiously, that gave me 1600, 1770 and 2170 metres respectively, which I think I would trust more than Google.
The only way to make this work for the stream nearest to the Horseshoe (stream 1) is to draw out 1700 yards onto the nearest point on Torquil's road and measure that distance to Invermoriston. That comes to 2.8 miles instead of 2.5 miles. If MacLeod knew exactly where he was, I would think he figured out the miles from Invermoriston. Now the Google Street View places us about 180m south of the entrance to the Loch Ness Highland Cottages. The view of the loch is quite good here especially if one also expects less foliage in February 1960.
The other point to note is that the angle of viewing for our favoured stream is as good as the other streams. If viewing directly opposite is an angle of zero degrees and ninety degrees is basically looking down the same shoreline then our stream is just over 40 degrees as is stream 1 but stream 2 is 55 degrees, so it is at no disadvantage there. So what does the area around this stream look like? Over to Google's Loch Ness boat view.
The stream is just slightly left of centre here and with a steep slope and paucity of foliage, it fits with MacLeod's description of the creature lying on the slope. You could pick left or right of the stream, but the left of the stream looks a barer patch to me for a monster to lie on. Of course, who knows what it looked like in 1960. But does this conclusion change anything else about the story? Various people including myself have written previously on this and made our deductions and speculations.
For myself as I looked over the relevant chapter in my book "When Monsters come Ashore", I saw some minor errors but nothing substantial. Others such as Ronald Binns and Dick Raynor had expressed their opinions on what MacLeod saw. Binns' "man in a boat" theory did not seem affected but I was uncertain about Raynor's "herd of feral goats" theory.
He postulated that a group of such animals had congregated up the side of the slope to form a clump looking Nessie-like from a mile away. Aside from existing counter-arguments, it seemed to me that this new proposed location was set on a less steep slope than the Horseshoe. I reckoned the Horseshoe had a gradient of up to 60 degrees while the new location was more like 40 degrees. This would flatten the appearance of a clump of goats to an observer on the other side - assuming goats are ever seen there.
There are some unanswered questions such as what map Torquil used as I do not see the proposed stream on some contemporary OS maps. When I am next at the loch, I will conduct a further investigation at the location. To finish, I overlaid Torquil's monster onto the location with a guesstimate of relative size!
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