Underground Channels in Loch Ness

There is a story perhaps as old as the Loch Ness Monster itself and that is the legend of an underground channel leading out of Loch Ness to a distant coastline exit to the sea, either to the west or the north east and which it is said the creature travels along to enter or exit the loch. This story goes right back to the first important book on the monster by Rupert Gould in 1934 where he states:

Credulous persons in the neighbourhood, and elsewhere, occasionally avow a belief, or at least a suspicion, that a subterranean tunnel exists, connecting Loch Ness with the sea - its distal end being usually located in Loch Hourn.

The subject was further taken up by Constance Whyte twenty three years later in her own magnus opus but neither did she give it much credence. The argument against it was stated by Gould himself from his same work, "The Loch Ness Monster and Others":

Unfortunately, the facts of the case forbid such a supposition. If a tunnel existed, the surface of the Loch would be at sea-level, and not a permanent 50 feet, or so, higher - furthermore, the waters of the Loch would rise and fall with the tides, and would be at least brackish, if not definitely salt.

That argument has been pretty much repeated by others throughout the decades and Gould's experience as a maritime man was taken to lend credence to the argument. However, one man was not convinced that this was the end of the matter and his name was Herman Cockrell. In an article for his local "Dumfries and Galloway Standard" newspaper in April 1958, he stated that:

So far the arguments adduced by experts against the possibility of an underground connection between Loch Ness and the sea, have been summed up by the late Commander R. T. Gould, R.N., in his book of careful recordings, "The Loch Ness Monster," 1934, and amplified in "More Than A Legend," by Constance Whyte, M.B., B.S., 1957.

I consider both these books to be of the highest merit; they are painstaking and impartial and it is only on this point about an underground connection that so far I have found them blindly following the majority. Apparently they were unable to find any convincing argument in favour, in spite of a special search, though this appears incredible.

I'm afraid the Commander must be mostly to blame as he was an expert on the movements of water and a noted navigator and his word therefore carried a lot of weight. 

If Cockrell's name sounds familiar then it is because of his photograph (below) of the Loch Ness Monster taken later in 1958 when he mounted a one man kayak expedition and which I covered in a previous article here. 

Herman took the view that there was an underground river flowing from some point deep below the surface of Loch Ness on its north shore which came out at Loch Hourn which is a bit further north than Loch Morar on the western coastline of Scotland. The shortest straight line distance between these two lochs is just a little longer than the length of Loch Ness at 27 miles and shown on the map below.

Cockrell had written a series of articles for The Scotsman newspaper on his planned expedition to the loch and one had covered this topic. I made contact with Herman's son some years back who kindly sent me material related to his father's research on the monster and the proposed underground river. This included an article produced on a typewriter in which Herman puts forwards some of his arguments for such a waterway which I reproduce here:

Since this date I have steadily collected evidence, and it is this that I wish to tell you all about. Firstly, Loch Ness drains over 700 square miles. The River Ness is the only exit to the sea, apart from a little flooding at high spring tides, Inverness never seems to be in danger from heavy spates and as there seems very little data on the subject, I can only assume there never has.

I have had great difficulty in tracing any data on the inflow and outflow apart from The Garry and The Moriston, which are controlled now by the Hydro scheme. The average flow from these two rivers is about 1000 million gallons per day, to this we must add four other rivers and about 40 burns, for which so far I have no data.

The average flow out at Ness Castle Farm, for the periods I929-62 I have only just received, it is 2611 cusecs, 1350 million gallons per day, which leaves only 350 million gallons per day for all the rest of the drainage. I am still getting data in, but I think these figures make it pretty obvious that as I have always said far more water is going in than is coming out, even allowing for a lot of evaporation. The excess water must be going somewhere and I think it is over the sill of my underground river.

Secondly, there is the mystery of the Garry salmon, are they east or west coast fish? I think West, and I hope to do some work on salmon and sea-trout scales to prove this. But to keep out of trouble as a professional fish farmer, I will state the case by quoting indisputable authorities on Scottish Salmon rivers. Grimble in "The Salmon Rivers Of Scotland" 1902 in a graceful and dignified disagreement with The Badminton Library over The Garry waters, Page 254, he writes:

"The usually accurate Badminton Library falls in to a curious error with respect to this river, for in the volume of 'Salmon & Trout fishing' the reader is told the bulk of the fish come into Loch Oich via Loch Lochy and so in to The Garry, at Page 184 The Badminton volume reads as follows:

'Who can account for the fact, that when you cannot find or certainly see or raise a fish on the Lochy in early spring, you can take scores on The Garry, of beautifully large salmon in prime condition? The shortest journey to The Garry is through the River Lochy and Loch Lochy, and yet fishermen will tell you that the fish in the Garry come from the East and not from the West coast (which is close by) and come all the way up the River Ness and Loch Ness, double the distance the Garry and yet whilst they are caught there in numbers not a fish can be seen or got on The Ness. In July and Autumn when sport is fast and furious on The Lochy and Ness, not a fish is to be seen in the Garry'

A more erroneous statement is difficult to imagine for before the making of The Caledonian Canal, two miles of solid land divided Loch Lochy from Loch Oich, and at no previous time was there ever any connecting link. When however this waterway was constructed a narrow canal was cut between the two lochs and it is only by passing through this artificial stretch of nearly stagnant water, in which there are at least two ordinary canal lochs with gates and sluices, that a fish could get from Loch Lochy to Loch Oich. Of course fish could be transported from one loch to the other and I do not say that it is absolutely impossible for a fish to take such a journey on its own account, but it is in the highest degree improbable that any fish has ever done this, and it is absolutely certain that no great quantity do so. ------- "

I was only born in I902, so was not old enough to point out to these gentlemen my theory of a fine sparkling underground river with deep pools and waterfalls to the west, which I think starts under the hill a quarter of a mile a little to the east of north beyond Cherry Island on the West side of Loch Ness and runs north west and then south west to Loch Hourn. The tidal part of this river, I think, comes up under Loch Hourn, after the second or third bar. Apart from the excess of fresh water there I mention, many salmon are seen milling around this area, an area like the rest of Loch Hourn, in which there is no reason for salmon to be at all in any quantity, because there are no spawning rivers of any consequence in these parts.

Pausing here and using a bathymetric map of Loch Ness, Cockrell's location and suggested depth places his proposed around the area of the white circle.

With regards fish, there is another interesting fact I have been told about but have not read yet. Salmon marked with capsules released in Loch Ness, unlike fish marked in this manner in other parts, are found to have their capsules collapsed, it has been found that capsules only collapse at about 400ft depth. I think it is most unlikely that salmon would go so deep in Loch Ness without a reason, could it not be that the tunnels connecting my underground loch or cleft to Loch Ness are very deep, forcing the fish to take this dive.

Another method I used for finding my river while up at Loch Ness and Loch Hourn last week, was dowsing. It struck me that while all waters round Loch Ness would be running in, my river could be the only water running out, this rather simplified matters.

I do elementary worn on dowsing myself, so know that it works but I cannot define direction of flow, however I was lucky in getting a dowsing friend, who can do this, Colonel Millar of Annan, to come with me. I drove him to the spot that I thought my river started, and to three places on the line and then to Loch Hourn itself. He got indications in all these places, unfortunately Loch Hourn must have been in a jocular mood and it put on one of its really wet days, the corries and mountains smoked with water, giving my dowser a bad cold.

We also had difficulties with [the] largest Highland bull I've ever seen, bent on protecting cows with calves, which were well able to look after themselves anyway. The Colonel had a bright red Mini about the length of one of the bull's horn, so just in case we drove backwards over the shoulder of the mountains and with a sign of relief turned and made for safer country.

Herman's main argument lies in the matter of how much water flows into Loch Ness and how much flows out. His example of two rivers with a total inflow of 1 billion gallons per day while the River Ness outflows 1.35 billion leaves only 350 million gallons for all the other major inflow rivers such as the Oich, Foyers, Enrick and Coiltie plus dozens of other smaller streams. The argument being that the total inflows of all these rivers must exceed the outflow of 1.35 billion gallons, so where does the extra outflow go?

The second argument concerns the migration patterns of salmon which he argues points to the fish coming from the west rather than the east, but there is no obvious path of origin for such a fish.

The third argument is more indirect concerning Loch Ness as it focusses on the theory that Loch Hourn contains too much freshwater and salmon for its location irrespective of whether that water may have come from Loch Ness or some other source.

The final argument concerns the practise of dowsing which is more controversial and so I will put that aside for now. Going back to the previously quoted newspaper article, Cockrell counters the generally accepted explanation of Gould:

This statement has apparently been taken for granted, in spite of the fact that the River Ness and the canals are doing this so-called impossibility all the time. We only have to say underground river instead of surface river and the argument collapses. Clearly the experts have been thinking only in terms of a connection between the bottom of the loch direct to the sea.

He then expands on the dynamics of his proposed underground channel and if you are not familiar with how such aquatic systems may or may not work, this may require reading over several times. It is certainly the most complex treatise of this subject I have come across.

The actual "nuts and bolts" of the river system could be worked in many ways. I give one simple example: An underground parallel cleft to the north-west of the loch, big or small, with a deep underwater connection or connections to Loch Ness. The water level of this underground cleft would be the same as Loch Ness, but its overflow would run underground through a series of pools or clefts, in an easy gradient to the sea, 50 feet below, the last cleft being tidal, like the lower reaches of any river.

I think, together with those who conceived the so-called old tales, that the outlet is in Loch Hourn (where our beast has been seen), because this loch is very much the same formation that I have suggested for the remainder of the water course. There are at least three basins divided by bars, from the head to the sea, though I would favour a last deep underground cleft, which would connect with Loch Hourn in fairly deep water.

Accompanying this article and shown below was a sketch of the proposed underground waterway. The vertical is exaggerated to bring out the channel detail with the surface level of Loch Ness and the proposed underground loch on the same dotted line and below this another dotted line aligning with the exit at Loch Hourn.

As the waters of Loch Ness outflow north towards the Moray Firth via the River Ness, so the waters of this hypothetical loch flow out west towards Loch Hourn. Even underground rivers need gravity to flow and so the height difference of about 17 metres allows for this. Herman expands on the inflow argument made earlier:

A further argument for the underground passage that strikes me as very important is the enormous amount of water that must be going into Loch Ness from such a large catchment area. It is difficult to believe that this can all run safely through the River Ness. and, since 1824, the canal system. The rise in a spate is very large, two feet in an hour or so on occasions, and a total rise of 8ft to 10ft. Surely there must be some safety overflow which makes the River Ness a pleasant place to live by.

Herman's argument then turns as to why Loch Hourn is his prime candidate for the outlet of water at the other end:

Another of the chief reasons for my thinking that the outflow is in Loch Hourn is this: I find that the pilot book for the West of Scotland, Vol. I on page 270, says in effect there is far more fresh water in Loch Hourn than any other sea loch in the west, but attributes it to heavy rainfall caused by the height of the mountains. I quote: "... Loch Hourn has about the heaviest rainfall of all lochs in the Highlands, from the great height and close proximity of its surrounding mountains. It is a gloomy place when the clouds hang low on their sides." On page 272, referring to tidal streams, it says: "The flood stream is retarded after rain."

In other words, the fairly strong tide is held up by the amount of fresh water coming out of Loch Hourn. All these things I intend to check during my investigation. I mentioned air-locks and here give one example of the many ways this could work.

Herman then examines how the general flow of water can sometimes be reversed in a dramatic fashion:

If the underground water was confined by low roofs, a high spring tide, raising the seaward end, and a heavy spate from the loch would set up a tremendous air pressure in one or two of the higher clefts, and water would be forced back into Loch Ness with great power. The air would then probably escape into the possibly higher roof of the first underground cleft next to Loch Ness, releasing the pressure, and water would rush back through the connecting channels.

With possibly fatal consequences:

This is where the diving party might get into trouble, though any ordinary current, flowing out through an underground system, would be sufficient to cause an accident to an amateur diver, and could account for the known disappearance of some people in the loch. These air-locks and their action could be mistaken for the monster himself; in fact, underwater disturbances have been suggested as a solution to things seen in the loch.

I have only spoken of rents and clefts as opposed to other forms such as the terraces reaching down to the coast in the west, which lend themselves so well to surface drainage in easy falls, as I am not prepared so far to argue with geologists. I feel I am on fairly safe ground, however, when dealing with a fault in the earth's crust, like the Great Glen, a split 65 miles in width, which could be 6000ft. deep, surely a disturbance like this could create anything.

OBSERVATIONS

Herman Cockrell makes an interesting argument for the existence of an underground channel between Loch Ness and the sea to the west and I shall now make my own comments which begin with the tradition that there was a subterranean link between Loch Ness and Loch Hourn. Certainly, the idea is a repetition of what Gould wrote concerning his conversations with the locals in late 1933. So far, I have found no texts which corroborate this belief, though that does not disprove the existence of an oral tradition.

When I was researching my book "The Water Horses of Loch Ness" which focused on the folkloric aspects of the mystery, I read through a lot of folklore books on Scotland but found no references to this tradition, though there was one tale from Loch Ness which told how a spoon or similar item dropped into a fathomless pool at the summit of one of the local mountains would eventually be found floating in Loch Ness!

But proving that such a river exists is another matter and by its very nature, such a channel is well hidden and may only be inferred by its effect on that which is observable. The most compelling argument is whether there is indeed a shortfall between water flowing into Loch Ness and that which flows out.

Using the National River Flow Archive going back to 1972, outflow data from the recording station at the River Ness comes out at a daily average flow rate of 90 cubic metres per second. However, the spates and droughts that affect the loch at irregular times means that the flow can rocket to almost 1000 m3/s or drop to as low as 5 m3/s. 

In terms of rivers flowing into the loch, the data is quite sparse and does not seem to have improved since Herman Cockrell's days. The same NRFA dataset gives a mean flow rate for the River Moriston measured at Invermoriston of 20.7 m3/s. The only other rivers with daily flow data are the Tarff and Enrick with slower rates of and 3.2 and 3.5 m3/s. 

But that leaves out the other main rivers such as the Oich, Foyers, Farigaig, Coiltie and dozens of other smaller streams. Herman's compatriot, Colonel Millar, calculated the total to be about 158 m3/s. Another estimate I found for total inflows published in 1969 was much lower at 71 m3/s, though this publication also provided no information on how this number was calculated. However, a 2023 hydrology study of Loch Ness makes the following statement: 

Loch Ness is the largest freshwater lake or reservoir in Great Britain, both by area and volume. It drains a catchment area of about 1800km2. The large surface area (about 56km2) provides a substantial smoothing effect on flows - whilst a severe flood could see peak inflows in excess of 3000m3/s the peak outflow to the River Ness would not exceed 1000m3/s. In normal conditions the loch level varies within a range of about 1m, but in a severe flood event would go significantly higher.

Thus the answer as to whether inflows can exceed outflows is "yes" but it depends on the prevailing conditions. The volume of water entering and leaving the loch is in a constant flux as rain falls to soak the land or a heat wave arrives to dry it out. So, Herman Cockrell was right ... at least some of the time. How much of the time he was correct is not known, but the quote above brings in another factor.

When it is said that "the large surface area ... provides a substantial smoothing effect on flows" it means the water level of the loch rises to accommodate the increased inflows of water by up to a metre or more. For a rise of one metre over a surface area of 56km2 that equates to an inflow of 56 million cubic metres of water or an additional inflow rate of 650m3/s over 24 hours.

That suggests a situation such as where 3000m3/s flowing in over one day flows out at 1000m3/s over three days, a bit like a sink with two taps running but the open sinkhole won't drain as fast and so the sink fills up. Now Herman asked where the extra water went if the River Ness never runs above 1000m3/s while also acknowledging rising loch levels of "two feet in an hour or so on occasions, and a total rise of 8ft to 10ft".

So Herman wasn't buying that sink analogy and asked why the River Ness and its banks weren't simply inundated with this massive influx of water? In his analogy, we would add the sink's overflow hole siphoning off the excess water and that was his underground channel.

Now the existence of underground rivers is not disputed though they tend to be found within limestone cave systems or by drilling boreholes and other geological surveys. Cave systems are more likely to be discovered first and hence any rivers. The geological faults that surround the Great Glen may provide fissures for water to seep down into and form pools and areas of flow, but limestone formations are not as likely to provide the basis for such a channel as there are no known complex cave systems around Loch Ness.

A SUBTERRANEAN MONSTER

But as the old saying goes, you can lead a Nessie to water, but you can't make it drink. What would induce a monster to first find this subterranean hole and then go through it? On the face of it, a twenty seven mile journey through tight channels and perhaps lumbering along occasional stony shallows seems a waste of time and effort. Finding the entrance is likely the easiest part and traveling through darkness is no problem for a creature generally submerged in peaty darkness, but where is the motivation?

Cockrell likens it to the salmon he also thinks traverse this channel - it's all about reproductive instinct. They know where they came from and they come back there to breed. The seemingly wasteful effort of salmon leaping against the torrents before them to get to their breeding ground leads to their death but new life for their offspring. How this applies to a creature as vast as the Loch Ness Monster requires further thought and perhaps some imagination.

But the presence of a twenty seven mile underground river does not require the presence of a twenty seven foot monster. It's either there or it isn't and whether any creatures of any size forage in and out of it is a secondary consideration. But how does one go about proving such a geological feature exists?

SOLUTIONS

The only way to resolve the question is, like Nessie, to go and look for it. Cockrell proposed that its entrance could lie deep below the surface of Loch Ness near Cherry Island. That may have been a choice based on the most efficient route to Loch Hourn but in deference to his research it should be checked. In fact, I have a sonar scan of that loch basin in that area provided by the Olex sonar mapping facility on the Loch Ness Cruises boat which I photographed back in 2014 and is shown below with the suspected area circled.

The vertical axis is exaggerated but the sweep of the transducer does not provide a high enough resolution to indisputably show the kind of feature we are looking for. But nevertheless, could modern sonar technology provide an answer? Certainly this technology has matured since Herman Cockrell's days to the point where anomalous water currents deep down could be located. I say that based on the observation that differences between the underwater thermocline and its surroundings make it visible to sonar. Water turbulence near the mouth of an underground channel ought to show up if this causes a change in water density based on temperature or pressure differences while the presence of disturbed silt at the entrance may also help.

That leads to questions such as would these deep sonar anomalies not already have been seen? Would they be distinguishable from other underwater currents? Would they be visible if a sonar operator was not explicitly looking for them or the equipment was not configured for such a targeted search? Those are questions for equipment owners prepared to focus on such a task. But where else would one look along the twenty six mile stretch of north Loch Ness?

But such an entrance could be somewhere else along the north side of the loch. I can think of one suggestion and it hearkens back to an incident from August 1969.  Dan Taylor had come over to Loch Ness from America with his mini submarine ready to seek out the Monster (pictured below). For his first dive, the vessel was towed out into Urquhart Bay where the depth was about 300 feet. This maiden voyage proved to be a potential disaster as the Viperfish dived into the loch only to hit the bottom and lodge its nose in the silt. Reversing the propellor did not help and Dan was forced to blow the ballast and the submarine burst to the surface on a rapid ascent.

However, lessons were learnt and the Viperfish conducted dozens of other searches without incident apart from one where Taylor reported that near the bottom, some force made the vessel move and yaw in the midst of a cloud of silt. Naturally, people speculated that he had encountered the monster but it was not a collision but rather a movement initiated by water displacement. If we speculate that he moved near the entrance to an underwater channel then the force of the inflow could pull the submarine towards it and initiate a spin.

Apparently, the submarine operated by Vickers at the same time also encountered some force which put them in a spin and it would be good to know at what location and depth these incidents occurred for further investigation. With all this in mind, Urquhart Bay may be an area for an underground channel entrance, though the use of an ROV rather than a submarine is much more likely!

CONCLUSION

I don't know if the discovery of such a feature would constitute an important discovery for Scottish geology. Curiously, it may constitute an important discovery for some Loch Ness Monster researchers as the two have been linked for decades. Of course, the presence of such a feature is not proof of what wildlife may or may not lurk in the loch but I could see it giving rise to a new legend. Namely, the equivalent of the fabled Elephant's Graveyard where a hoard of Nessie bones await the first intrepid explorer - just as Herman Cockrell predicted!

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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Gould's 1934 Book now in PDF

Rupert T. Gould wrote his seminal book "The Loch Ness Monster and Others" back in 1934 at the height of the speculation and reporting concerning this new creature that had been regularly reported in Loch Ness over the twelve previous months. Gould had made the trip to the loch in November 1933 to spend two weeks investigating the matter for himself as well as interviewing key witnesses up to that point in time.

After following up later on other accounts, the book was published in June 1934 and remains a classic title to this day. It was republished in paperback form in 1969 but copies to this day can be hard to find at an affordable price. Since Gould died in 1949, this meant that the book went out of copyright in 2019 and was ripe for republication.

As it turned out, this has come to pass when a group called "Horological History" produced a downloadable PDF version of the book in 2024 which can be found here. Their web page links to Amazon where a paperback version is advertised for purchase but is currently stated as unavailable. The horological subject relates to Gould's expertise with maritime clocks.

Enjoy your browsing of this important book on the phenomenon of the Loch Ness Monster!

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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Bigfoot and Nessie Hoaxing

There are rumblings in the Bigfoot community as an upcoming documentary claims to present evidence that the most famous piece of evidence for this creature may be a hoax. I am of course referring to the  Patterson–Gimlin of 1967 shot in Northern California. The documentary entitled "Capturing Bigfoot" purports to show a newly discovered "dress rehearsal" film prior to the final filming.

Only a few have seen this documentary but already claim and counter-claim has been made regarding its own authenticity and whether the expose is a hoax itself. Like most I will wait until the documentary is syndicated on Amazon Prime or some similar media outlet before forming an opinion - whenever that may be.  But Nessie fans may remember a similar scenario when the "Surgeon's Photograph" was exposed as a fake in 1994, sixty years after the photograph appeared in the Daily Mail.

The story is familiar enough when big game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell was hired in 1933 by the British Daily Mail, to hunt down this new phenomenon called "The Loch Ness Monster" and bring back evidence of it. He failed and the paper was embarrassed by tracks Wetherell found being identified as that of a hippopotamus. The paper dropped him as people supposed the tracks were laid by a local wag. It turned out decades later that Wetherell was the wag and out of some undefined malice he completed the deception with the Surgeon's Photograph being plotted by his own family and some associates, including the surgeon himself, Kenneth Wilson.

If this upcoming documentary has a convincing story to tell, this may be their "Surgeon's Photograph" moment. But then again, maybe not. Either way, the potential loss of something iconic to ones cryptid genre has ramifications. Most may accept it and move on, a sizeable minority will not and find inconsistencies and unanswered questions, as is the case with the "Surgeon's Photograph", even thirty odd years since its expose. There will be such questions and it all depends on the individual as to whether more questions have been answered than not answered.

Before the Surgeon's Photo expose, Loch Ness researchers saw things in the Surgeon's Photograph that they thought further vindicated its genuineness. Tim Dinsdale was sure nearby ripples indicated another creature was just below the surface, another researcher looked at the size of the waves and calculated the neck to be above three foot high, another though he saw a seagull in the photo thus scaling the neck to seven feet and yet another said computer enhancements had revealed "whiskers" on the creature. Yet none of them had any substance in the end because it is a fake.

Overriding all this amid the current controversy brewing in Bigfoot land is the confession of guilt. It is one thing to cite so-called scientific and logical reasons why a film or photograph must be genuine, but what happens when the very authors say it was a fake? Two people stated their involvement with the creation of the Surgeon's Photograph. The first was Ian Wetherell, son of Marmaduke who was quoted in a 1975 article from the Sunday Telegraph saying it was a fake.

We know this because follow up research by Alastair Boyd found another confessor in the form of his sibling, Christian Spurling. Wetherell's confession had been lost in the noise of the upcoming Rines underwater photographs and it seems Wetherell thought final proof was coming and so now was a good time to own up. That didn't quite work out but this "other" Patterson film may provoke a similar response.

When a lead participant confesses (and the Bigfoot community awaits a response from Bob Gimlin), it gets a bit difficult to continue pointing to those scientific experiments and observations as overriding proof. In fact, the only recourse is to find a reason why the person who once said "true" is now saying "false" despite you being convinced it is still "true". That normally distills down to a reason to do with financial gain which itself places the burden of proof upon the accusers.

Having said all that, the number of people confessing that a photograph or film of the Loch Ness Monster was hoaxed by them is next to zero. Only the Surgeon's Photograph seems to have found people willing to own up. Beyond that, everyone knows Frank Searle was a serial hoaxer, but he never owned up and none of the other so called hoaxers such as Lachlan Stuart, Peter MacNab or Peter O'Connor ever confessed. I have spoken to relatives of people connected with various photographs and no one is indicating any such issue.

So, no first hand or second hand confessions from family and friends - except the product of Marmaduke Wetherell and his gang. I am not sure what that tells me. Sceptics continually tell me these things were all a jolly jape with a nudge and wink to those who can transform a knowing smirk into irrefutable proof. If it was all considered that lightweight, then why not more confessions? Coincidentally, it is about sixty years since the Patterson-Gimlin film, as it was for the Surgeon's Photograph expose. That revelation in 1994 did not particularly phase me because there was another reason I suspected why it was always a hoax, but it was time to move onto other Nessie matters and that may be what Bigfoot researchers will have to do, but again I say this having not seen the documentary.

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Earthquakes, Monsters and Hugh Gray

Some years back I acquired a copy of Captain Alastair Mackintosh's autobiography entitled "No Alibi". It was F. W. Holiday's 1968 book, "The Great Orm of Loch Ness", which was published seven years later, that alerted me to this book.  That all revolved around a Loch Ness Monster story in the book, but a couple of other stories caught my eye. Alastair Mackintosh (above) was born in Inverness in 1889 and spent his early years around the region of Loch Ness before embarking on a military career. The first excerpt is that eyewitness account of the creature seen on land.

Loch Ness was so much a part of my boyhood and youth. Its beauty and splendour apart, there has always been - for me - a belief in the existence of its monster. Loch Ness remains one of the great geological mysteries. Since the waters receded from the earth it has put on minor atomic displays without any assistance from scientists.

The monster is usually observed in the summer. It was many years later that I missed seeing this monster - always supposing it to exist - by a matter of minutes. Oddly the occasion was linked with the British Aluminium Company since it was Alec Muir, the estate carpenter at the works, who had allowed his 'T' Ford to block the narrow road just beyond Dores. Bubbles were to be observed on the loch water. As I greeted Alec warmly, I thought he looked distinctly peculiar. The way a person is said to appear after seeing a ghost.

"What's the matter, Alec? What are you stopping for, eh?" 

He regarded me with his round, blue eyes and said portentously:

"I've just seen the Loch Ness monster, Mr Alastair. It crossed the road in front of me not a wee while back. It came as high as the top of the bonnet of the car and was so long it took ten minutes to pass."

I went round to the front of the Ford. Sure enough, there was the track of the monster where it had entered the loch. Alec alighted and we followed the marks on the other side of the road and into a wood of birch trees. It was spring. Our feet sank softly into a carpet of moss and primroses. We had gone hardly a hundred yards when we came upon a clearing in the trees. Showing in the moss was an immense depression, where the monster obviously had lain down to rest. 

This account was the reason for the reference in Holiday's book and I also covered it in my own book on land sightings where I wrote the following opinion:

Thus ends the account leaving perhaps more questions than answers. For a start, practically nothing is said about the appearance of the monster itself. It is said to have reached as high as the bonnet of a model T Ford which I estimate to be about four feet seven inches. It left a trail leading to the loch by which means broken and depressed flora. The immense depression suggests that the beast had some girth - I would assume it was at least as wide as it was tall - nearly five feet - but this "immense" depression suggests more. The bubbles on the loch surface are also interesting. Does this imply the monster is an air breather or that is discharges air for some reason after a land excursion (e.g. decreasing buoyancy)?

The most extraordinary feature is that the creature took ten minutes to cross the road! From this we infer that Alec Muir had one of the clearest views of the monster in the annals of Nessie sightings - yet we have practically no details. If we assume the road was seven feet wide (it was a narrow road) and the creature was just appearing onto the road as Muir saw it until its 30ft bulk was clean across, then it was travelling at an average speed of 0.04 mph. From this ridiculously slow speed we suspect that the creature had stopped in the middle of the road for some period of time.

Why would the Loch Ness Monster simply stop on the road? If it did this today, we would have a carcass on our hands and the mystery would be solved. One can only guess that something had captured the beast's attention just over the loch side of the road. It also seems it nonchalantly continued on and stopped again near the shore leaving this "immense" depression before finally entering the loch. All in all, the monster seemed rather blasé about what was going on around it and saw no threat from Mr. Muir and his model T Ford. A curious case for which one wishes there was more detail!

Do I have anything to add since I wrote the above words in 2018? I had another look for this account in various online resources, but Mackintosh's book remains the sole source of the story and indeed I could not confirm the personal details about Alec Muir. That does not mean Muir did not exist or held down that job at the Aluminium Works, such mundane details do not always end up in newspaper print. You basically have to take it or leave it as a factual story. The next story from the book involves no monster but is nonetheless spectacular.

Around this period, when I was in fact twelve years of age and at home, I remember being awakened one night by the violent shaking of my bed. All the bells—the handpull type, electric ones were still unknown - rang madly. I was and still am faintly uneasy in the dark. What with the shaking bed and clanging bells, I was really frightened until Mother came in to reassure me.

"It's only an earthquake, dear," she said.

Next morning Father ordered our wagonette and drove me over to Urquhart Castle with him. This is situated upon the north bank of Loch Ness, where the loch reaches its greatest depth - over six hundred feet. To my amazement the loch seemed to be boiling. For over a quarter of a mile there were enormous bubbles, each the height of a man. It was like a vast cauldron of sizzling water or, to provide a more modern image, balloons of detergent waste.

"What is it?" I asked my father excitedly. "It looks like a giant's washing-day."

"Must have been an earthquake in Italy last night," was his laconic reply.

He told me that whenever Mount Etna erupted, it affected Loch Ness and Inverness. Though never proved, it was thought that there must be some subterranean connection with Sicily. 

The author's age of twelve places this around 1901 and indeed the newspapers of the time relate this event as occurring about 1:30 in the morning of Wednesday 18th September. A series of foreshocks and aftershocks accompanied this event, although it was not a major earthquake being more the type that shakes plates off cupboards and chimney pots off roofs. Some seismologists believe the epicentre was near Dochgarroch, just north of the top end of Loch Ness. It is a well known fact that Loch Ness lies along a major fault line comprising the Great Glen running South West to North East but there are other subsidiary fault lines which could have been the stress points for this event.

I did not find any newspaper report which corroborated the massive bubbling event at Loch Ness, but I have no reason to doubt it as it has been confirmed and studied elsewhere in the world (see link) and a lot of this phenomenon is attributed to the release of methane gas from deposits deep below. But what exactly Mackintosh witnessed is not so clear. We can be sure it had nothing to do with Mount Etna in Italy which was quiet at that time.

The event happened somewhere out in the loch near Urquhart Castle but was confined to an area of about 400 metres, perhaps an extended area as he describes it as being like a "cauldron of sizzling water". So did the quake cause a fissure to open up down below releasing a pocket of methane? This seems more likely than layers of silt further up having any pockets of gas being shaken out of them. The energetic nature of the bubbling and its limited location dictates against this theory.

The bubbles "each the height of a man" likely were not that size when they escaped from the bottom due to the higher pressures below and expanded as they rose to the surface. Interestingly, looking at a geological map of the loch, we see that this area is the confluence of three different bedrock formations colour coded in the map below as shades of purple, green and brown. These each denote in order old metamorphic, old sedimentary sandstone and newer sandstone structures, all meeting at a point halfway across the loch where the main fault line runs. Quite possibly, these boundaries provided zones for ruptures to open up.

The only other effect reported from the loch was from the Dundee Evening Post of the 21st September which recounted how the quake caused the Caledonian Canal and River Ness to combine into a tidal surge heading northwards towards Inverness. But an effect of a more curious nature were strange lights seen by some locals as recounted in the Northern Chronicle of the 25th September.

Lights around the loch area has been discussed on this blog before. This is a phenomenon poorly understood but believed to be associated with tectonic activity. It is not a fleet of UFOs but perhaps a form of ball lightning. It is speculated that a combination of certain geological features around a fault line such as the Great Glen Fault could produce these atmospheric effects.

But to end our look at the life of Captain Mackintosh, I read with interest his time as an apprentice at the Aluminium Works beside the village of Foyers on the banks of Loch Ness. The picture of him at the top of this article portrays him at the time he was working there. Amongst his recollections of excessive drinking and Gaelic speakers from the Western Isles whom he did not understand, he talks fondly of "Foreman Gray" or to be more precise a man by the name of Hugh Gray. 

When I read this, I initially assumed this was Hugh Gray, the man who took the first photograph of the Loch Ness Monster in November 1933 thus giving us an insight into the man himself. Actually, it turned out to be his father, also named Hugh. Mackintosh entered his apprenticeship in Edwardian times, too early for our Hugh Gray who was still a child then. The story is shown below and I would not recommend doing this today!

Ours was a happy factory where men worked industriously, untroubled by class-wars and restrictive practices. That was until we had our first socialist agitator. I can see him now standing by the gates as we were all going out to lunch, telling us in a very loud Glaswegian voice that we were fools not to strike for more pay and less work.

"Join the happy band of brothers under the leadership of Keir Hardie . . . wealth and prosperity to all of us . . . Except the capitalists. Hang 'em from the nearest lamp-post."

They had said the last bit during the French Revolution .. . Foreman Gray nudged my arm, jerked his head and took me aside.

"Alastair," he said, "we're going to teach this chap a lesson. We're going to tie the b------ to one of the trolleys. I want you to go down where the railway line turns off to the pier. When you hear him and the trolley - and he's bound to be hollering blue murder - nip out, jump on and stand on the brake. Stop him just short of the edge of the pier."

Normally the trolleys were loaded with the aluminium bars, run down this way to the steamers to be taken off for rolling. Each truck weighed two tons. Considerable momentum would be gathered down the incline to the pier. Whilst I set off for the quay willing helpers were assisting Gray to hoist the protesting Glaswegian on to the makeshift tumbril. He was made fast and set moving.

Had I tripped running out of the birch-wood near the pier, or failed to jump on to the trolley as it passed, I shudder to think what might have happened. It might have plunged off the rails straight into Loch Ness, which was at least four hundred feet deep at that spot. As it was, I stopped him ten yards short of a very unpleasant end. Gray, accompanied by Mackenzie, the mechanics' foreman, untied the agitator, giving him a veritable king of kicks as they bade him walk those twenty-three miles back to Inverness and never return. 

Hugh Gray Senior died some years later in 1921, seemingly a well liked and upstanding member of the community there in Foyers, though it sounds like he did not suffer fools gladly! Meanwhile, Alastair Mackintosh, like many in those days, went to seek his fortune abroad in the British Empire, but eventually ended up living in London, having worked as a Royal Equerry as well as employment at Rolls Royce and United Artists. By the time he wrote his autobiography in 1961, a new wave of Nessie interest was rising on the back of Dinsdale's film and one suspects his inclusion of such stories was no coincidence!

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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Trail Camera Pictures of Nessie?

 

Back in May 2025, the "Quest" surface watch run by the Loch Ness Centre came to an end and as was my custom I left a trail camera pointing at the loch before I headed back down south. It stayed there snapping away images of whatever may have passed in front of it while I got on with the day job. It ran from the 25th May until the 7th July when the SD card finally filled up.

When I collected it after a gathering of the LNE at the end of August, I once again headed home and began to go through the 18,399 images on its MicroSD card. This would be a task that I would be dipping in and out of over the weeks ahead. I had placed my first trail camera at the loch over ten years before and based on subsequent experience I knew I would expect to see pictures of boats, kayakers, birds, mist and maybe jet fighters from Lossiemouth or perhaps a rainbow bending over the hills. 

Occasionally stranger images would leave me wondering what I was looking at. Maybe a strange wave effect or a trick of the sunlight? When I finally came to image number 13,810 shown above, I knew it was something no previous trail camera had snapped. It looked big enough to be of significance but also below the threshold of one hundred percent certainty that it was the famous Loch Ness Monster.

The camera was set up to snap three images in a row about a second apart when triggered and the three images of this curious object were taken at 6:18 on the morning of Thursday 26th June 2025. As you can see, the surface of the loch was about as calm as it can be, thus discarding any theories about the object being a wave effect. The object is also in motion as its position changes across the three images.

I spent some weeks musing about what to do with the pictures, but eventually submitted them to a press agency for publication. They were duly taken up by some media outlets, such as the Scottish Daily Record who published them on the 7th January 2026 and can be seen at this link. I must admit I was a bit disappointed it did not also appear in print for my clippings collection! So I let the media customers have their run and also read the comments by those interested in the subject on the various online forums. 

Now I add my own analysis to the three images shown below in chronological order. There is a mix of good and bad luck in these images. The good luck is that something of notable dimensions had actually passed in front of the camera. The bad luck was the mist over the loch reducing the light levels. Furthermore, the object is a bit further out than I would have liked and is on the terminating line between the reflection of the hills beyond and the reflection of the mist and sky. I would have preferred it to be more in the sky reflection area to provide a better contrast. But beggars can't be choosers in this game!

Behind the object to the left is a sort of wake and before it to the right as it moves from left to right is something creating further disturbance in the water. The distance between the front part of the main object and the source of the disturbance ahead is constant, suggesting they are likely connected under the surface. The source of this disturbance is as far from the main object as the main object is long, thus doubling the potential length of the whole object - and this does not take into account anything that is more than likely to be under the water. 

The two images below are the last one taken before this sequence and the first one after them. I am not sure what the pronounced white line just before the opposite shore is on each image. It is visible on other sequences on the SD card, though I thought it could not be anything to do with boats as they should be absent at this time of day. Perhaps it was the phenomenon known as Langmuir Circulation which produces lines of bubbles caused by the wind, but there was little wind and it looked more pronounced than that. Either way, it looks unrelated to the primary object of interest.

It was while going through the analysis that I realised the camera was in a configuration I had not anticipated. Instead of triggering the triple snap on a motion detection event, it was actually in time lapse mode with a setting of seven minutes! So I was getting here were groups of three snaps at 06:11, 06:18, 06:25 and so on. Getting the right configuration has historically been an issue due to the waves of the loch continually triggering motion detection events which can quickly deplete battery time and memory storage over typical in situ time of months.

This has led to some constraints such as not recording video clips. A 10 second AVI clip is about eight times bigger than a single JPEG compression image. One other constraint was the time limiter which turned off camera activity between 22:00 and 05:00 as I found that infra-red images taken in the dead of night lacked any real clarity and distance. But would these three images had been recorded if the camera was in the intended setup? I presume so, but I will never know for sure but perhaps time lapse mode now has a part to play in this ongoing project.

The three images were combined to produce a GIF animation sequence to show the object is in motion. It does not appear to be swift, but there is motion there. How fast will be determined with the size of the object though the stillness of the loch suggests there is little wind to drive any inanimate object forward.

But how large is the object visible in this sequence? After all, when it comes to controversy over Loch Ness images, size matters. When various photos claiming to be the Monster are produced, there is often no way to determine the size of the object with any precision, but that is not an issue with these images due to what is on the other 18,396 images on the SD card. By that I mean the various pictures of boats and kayakers passing the camera during the 43 days of operation. The main one for consideration is image number 9157 taken 11 days before and shown below.

This was chosen from the list of candidate boat shots due to it being almost exactly the same distance away as the object. In the shot we have objects of known dimensions - people. I picked the person on the far left and assuming they were in the normal range of human height from the waist up concluded that the length of the object was about one metre or three feet. Since the object ahead of the main hump was a hump length away, that gave a surface length of about two metres or six feet.

Though corroboration of this number is not really required, a mathematical analysis of the original SD card image also yielded a comparable length. This length can be computed if one knows certain other figures such as the pixel size of the image, the height of the camera, the focal length and the dimensions of the image sensor. This gave a hump length of 0.92 metres for the camera height of 2 metres. But at least this confirmed the maths for future use in other images. Applying the same type of maths, we can add an estimated distance to the object of about 44 metres.

The total length of the object is more a matter of conjecture but I usually apply the rule of thumb that a third of a marine animal's body length is usually above water when in motion. Applying that solely to the main object or hump gives a tentative total length approaching ten feet long. That is not exactly the thirty foot monsters oft reported in classic eyewitness reports, but it is potentially significant nonetheless as we look at a zoom in of the object.

The main object, which is presumed to be its back, has an elongated and flattish appearance which rounds off at each end, though there is some curvature to it in general. It is grey in colour but with little detail beyond that for reasons given earlier. It has been suggested that this may be a head rather than a back, which would make the animal a lot bigger, but I think that does not explain the smaller object creating the disturbance ahead - unless one wants to go down the path of the larger object chasing a smaller object like a fish.

How fast is the object moving across the three images? Since the length of the hump can be confidently estimated, the distance it moves across the images is estimated to be about half the length of the hump. The camera timestamp is only accurate to the second and states that one second has passed between all three images. That would give a maximum speed just below one mile per hour, but it could be slower.

That sounds a very slow speed but another part of the image suggests that is possible. I am referring to the wake behind the animal which is a curious shape. One may normally expect some kind of V-shaped bow wave at the front of the animal as it progresses across the waters but this formation is more concentric and if you look at the animated gif above, it spread out in a circular fashion as it the animal had just surfaced in a sedate manner. It all adds up to a rather laid back creature taking its time over things.

Which brings us to the matter of candidates for identification. What "scientifically approved" animal known to inhabit the area around Loch Ness could show three foot of back? The short answer is none of them and that is without asking about the three foot of wash ahead of it. Pike, salmon, otters and birds cannot attain such a length but the closest ones would be the harbour seal or grey seal. The grey seal is the larger species growing up to 2 metres as an adult while the harbour seal can reach 1.5 metres. It is a known fact that grey seals do swim into the loch looking for food and can stay for long periods of time.

I have never seen one personally and no seal has ever been snapped by any trail camera I set up in the last ten years. That is mainly down to the fact that they are generally not there to be photographed, but they do turn up and stay for a few days or even a few months. Normally, when a seal is suggested as an explanation for a sighting, I may say that we do not even know if a seal was in the loch at that time, but we can be fairly certain one was swimming around during that Summer.

On the 31st July, 35 days after the trail camera pictures, a Duncan Horlor took a video clip of a seal eating a fish near the Boat House Restaurant by Fort Augustus, you can view the entire clip here and note the smaller more rounded appearance of this harbour seal as it moves about. Looking around, people stated that a seal had been seen nearby in Inchnacardoch Bay and a gamekeeper told a fellow LNE member that two seals were currently living near the mouth of the River Moriston.

These were all topped by footage of a harbour seal taken by Alan Mckenna and other LNE members near Cherry Island only a few days ago lying on the nearby shallows. It even hung around to pose for his drone flying over which you can view on the LNE Facebook group here! You wouldn't get the Loch Ness Monster to be so compliant ... and yes, they figured out it was a seal and not said monster. 

As said above, the harbour seal is at best 1.5 metres long, though this one is likely smaller. Is this seal the same one recorded in July 2025 or the ones claimed further up at Invermoriston? We are told that these saltwater creatures cannot tolerate freshwater for long. However, the harbour seal, as hinted by its name, is more tolerant of freshwater than the grey seal. One is beginning to wonder if these seals are beginning to adapt to the fresh water in the loch due to their more frequent visits? We know that there are seals indigenous to freshwater lakes elsewhere which made the transition.

I would say that more seals entering Loch Ness for longer periods is not going to help assessing eyewitness accounts in the future! One also wonders what happens when they encounter the "big guy"  who rules the loch? One of the LNE team thought the seal above was looking a bit wary!

Looking at the profiles below of these two species of seal, the Harbour Seal is too small and this looks like the seal that was in the loch in recent months. But it is hard to see how the back of the Grey Seal could fit the high back profile of the animal in the trail camera pictures, let alone explain the leading area of disturbed water one metre ahead. Looking at videos of seals in action, one tends to only see the back on its own momentarily when they are diving and it is more concave, though seals can float on the back or front. The speed of the unidentified animal also is rather contrary to the more energetic movements we observe of seals in the region. This of course does not mean all potential species of pinnipeds are excluded.

Credit: New Bedford Whaling Museum

That is only my opinion and others may observe features I have missed, but my view is that it is not a seal, fish or otter leaving few other options to pick from. Of course, someone may propose it is a hoaxer swimming past the camera underneath a fiberglass hump. You get all kind of strange propositions in this game and you may even be told that is more probable than a ten foot animal of unknown species. Or maybe I have finally snapped one of the rotting vegetable mats once championed by Maurice Burton and being propelled by the expulsion of its decaying gases?

As for myself, it gives me some renewed vigour in managing the next set of trail camera placements. Maybe I will switch to more time lapse photography rather than motion detection. That at least gets rid of those annoying succession of waves but then again it would sit there silently as a potential ten foot hump and six foot neck monster swims by, but the next time lapse snaps are still minutes away! I just hope I do not wait another ten years for similar images, but not too soon either or people will think I am the next Frank Searle!

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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com