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!

Comments can be made at the Loch Ness Mystery Blog Facebook group.

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Nessie Review of 2025

 

As I was thinking about this year end review, a link to the Daily Mail coincidentally came in telling me that Nessie had been spotted five times in 2025. Not surprisingly, the word "spotted" was framed within single quotes indicating the article author was advising some caution. The information was taken from "The Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register" which went into further details at this link.

Now this is an improvement on the meagre total of three sightings in 2024, though my corresponding review article last year did argue that numbers can fluctuate significantly over the decades. In fact, that review article only had one "at the loch" sighting, but evidently two more turned up later to bring it up to three. So, I expect this five to increase and I am already aware of some accounts that will indeed increase that number by a few more.

The first register account is from the 22nd March at about 7pm and is of interest and I quote the testimony of one of the eyewitnesses visiting from London:

We were right at the point where the River Tarff connects to Loch Ness, on the north bank. At first I noticed a very quiet splash sound as if something was cutting stealthily into the water and this drew my attention to the south side of the water. There I saw something moving through the water. Between 130 and 160 feet away from us. It was paler than the jet-black water around it, but in the gloom it was impossible to determine a hue.

It was large and alive and swimming in the water - it was what I can only describe as a "hump" (as people often say) kind of like if a large seal or walrus was swimming in the water but for some reason it's head was hidden, like just it's back was exposed. Kind of graceful but very slow moving like 2 to 3 meters per second. It was too dark to pick out detail on it, but it wasn't uniform, there was texture there but hard to pinpoint what exactly.

And as we watched I realised that there was a second mass in its wake, perhaps it was hidden by the wake at first, or it had risen up as it moved - it was roughly the same size and shape as the leading mass but perhaps lower in the water. There was maybe 1.5 to 2 meters gap between the humps from my line of sight. I think until I saw the second hump I was thinking it was a seal that was behaving strangely.

It went in a roughly 20⁰ (east-southeast-ish) direction, towards the deeper water of the Loch and slowly submerged as it went and disappeared. It moved very gracefully and silently. Later when we talked about it, my partner told me that from her vantage point it was clear that the two humps were on one creature, that it was one long creature.

Sunset on that day was at 6:35pm, so the eyewitness' description of "gloom" would be correct but this is countered by the estimated distance of 40 to 50 metres which affords a distance that few eyewitnesses have the privilege of seeing the creature at. Nevertheless, clear camera images with such light levels is unlikely without more specialized cameras. But the account lacks some details such as the size of the humps and the duration of the sighting.

I would think this was a prolonged duration without any head being seen, which is unusual for a seal. The appearance of the second hump removes any seal theory because if one seal in Loch Ness is uncommon, how much more then is two. Since the witness says the back was larger than a seal and more the size of a walrus, that suggests the total hump to hump length was more than four metres and that is just the parts visible above the surface!

So we are off to a good start as we move onto the register's next account from the 23rd May at about 3:40pm during the "Quest" surface watches. One of the participants took a video clip of an object in Urquhart Bay from which this still is taken. Something "long and thin" appeared intermittently in the wake of a boat entering the bay before eventually submerging after three to five minutes.

I made an educated guess as to where the person was at the time, perhaps just before the entrance to the Castle car park which places the object and boat to the right of the tip of the headland visible at the opposite side of the bay. That would place the distance to the object at about a mile away with the distance decreasing over a number of minutes. I could not find the original video sequence and so not much more can be done with this. For example, the boat mentioned in the account is not visible in the zoomed image.

The 29th August and 15th October brought us two further accounts accompanied by video clips. The first was a two minute video taken by a long term local of something just under the water at Lochend causing what was described as an "unusual disturbance pattern". Naturally, we would prefer to see something physical above the surface of the water and so such items by definition can only ever be indirect evidence of a biological entity. Moreover, I again only had access to a still image and not the original video and so an assessment is more limited.

The second appears to be one or more photographs taken by a Peter Hoyle from Moray at 1:30pm who over an interval about 30 seconds observed "a dark shape sticking out of the water, moving from right side of loch to left from the middle". One of the images is shown below and it is evident it is a zoomed image indicating the object was a long way off and so little can be deduced from it.

The final item from the Register was from the 28th October when Mishawn Kiekle from Texas observed something from Urquhart Castle:

I first saw it and was like wow, that looks just like images I saw from the sightings website. It didn't look like a wave, it actually looked like the head of something popping up. it made a distinct pattern in the water I couldn't see anywhere else, kind of like its own wake. And than it was gone. From that distance I'd say the water pattern was at least 3 m long.

The picture displayed is again verging on pixelation and of little use. One wonders if it is the infamous pipe that resides just under the water to the south of the tower and appears depending on loch water levels and weather conditions? In this case, I would say not given the wake seen. That is the five accounts on the Registry site, but these days we now have the website of the Loch Ness Centre receiving potential reports from visitors and during the Quest weekend.

At their page another six accounts are listed which are different to the five on the register website. The first by "Annette" is likely that pipe by the Castle which one day will be removed! The next by "Diana" were some photos without any account and which the Loch Ness Centre tentatively identifies as a waterbird. The next is more interesting being a film of a wake taken by "Bob" on the 12th April.

Apparently, nothing broke the surface, although the Loch Ness Centre does not link to the video to verify that. I am beginning to think an archive of all these videos needs to be stored and made available online rather than fleeting appearance on forums which are designed to roll continuously like teleprompters. I do attempt to save images from Loch Ness, but some are missed, if they ever are fully published.

One final image from the Loch Ness Centre was taken by Graham from Abriachan on the 27th June. The website states that:

While walking his dog on a peaceful morning, Graham noticed a dark brown shape appear suddenly in the loch, around 150 metres from shore. It wasn’t drifting — it seemed to move. He managed a single photo before it vanished. From the image, it looks like it could be a shoreline rock, and some details are a little unclear — but the moment certainly left an impression.

The image itself looks like a zoom-in and is bereft of any frame of reference. I may be wrong but the rocks I have seen around the loch look more grey than brown and so I have asked if I could see the original. Context is everything and it may turn out to be something else mundane, but an uncropped image is always the first thing to ask for.

There is another sequence of photographs which have not been mentioned. They were taken by myself, or rather by one of my trail cameras one early morning back in June, collected at the end of August and finally discovered in October after trawling through tens of thousands of SD card images. I haven't decided what to do with them yet, don't bother asking to see them, they'll turn up soon enough!

To this array of claims of Nessie sightings, I now turn to the members of Loch Ness Exploration. I must give credit to founder Alan McKenna for his part in bringing the group to where it is now. I thought monster hunters were more like tigers than lions - they hunt alone, but I was proven wrong having met the people who I believe have been rewarded for their joint efforts with some singular experiences.

We start back in May with the third annual Quest event run by the Loch Ness Centre. I recounted my perspective on that weekend in a trip reported linked here. The third Quest weekend is a part of an annual review in and of itself but attached to that event came individuals seeking their own glimpse of the creature. So on the night of Friday 23rd May slipping into Saturday, Alan and Dave had gone over to a small inlet near the Castle to explore the waters there and had thrown some rocks into the deeper parts to see if something would stir. In Dave's own words:

As we started to walk away, we heard an almighty kind of splash right behind us! Obviously, it wasn't a rock because we weren't throwing anything in. We both turned around at exactly the same time to see. For me there was a split second of almost, like a slimy black hump that went very very quickly straight down into the water.

It was like it had come up and it had gone straight down with such a force that it created such a massive splash, almost like a torpedo. We both said at the time like a torpedo effect. Up and straight down and there was a massive wash, a massive splash that came after it and we could see that quite clearly because we had our torches on it as well and both at exactly the same time.

I can vouch for their excitement when they shortly came back to us and related what had just happened. It was late, dark and raining and only infra-red equipment would have any chance of resolving anything with the desired clarity for quality images. Nevertheless, I think that experience must have stuck like glue to Alan and Dave, it's the kind of fuel that powers future trips and indeed we were all back at the loch at the end of August to continue the underwater video and hydrophone experiments. An account was written up here and one stand out event was the experience of the lads from Glasgow who were camped out near Invermoriston:

However, the news from the campsite was that the Glasgow boys had had an unusual experience after we had all left for bed the night before. About 2AM, they were chatting away with a drink or two in hand when a huge splashing noise startled them from the shoreline down below. Not surprisingly, they were not too keen to go down and investigate the matter. Before anyone begins to think about the hallucinatory properties of alcohol, one of the chaps is teetotal.

This required some investigation and later we were back at the shoreline. There was nothing around that could be connected with the noise but if it had occurred further out in the loch, nothing probably should have been expected. Either way, we had our alcohol-averse colleague sit where they had been at night while we tossed various rocks into the water down below. We would then get his response from above as to how that sounded compared to the "big splash".

The first moderately sized rock we tossed in, he did not hear it from the tents. A larger one of about 10kg he did hear but it was a lot quieter than the 2AM noise. We stopped there realizing we needed Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime to throw something larger a sufficient distance into the loch to take this experiment further.

One can speculate about unscrupulous people fly tipping large items of garbage into the loch, but from what I have seen, anything rolled down from above is more likely to have its progress stopped by trees or just hit the beach below with little splashing going on. But, of course, nothing was seen and so all one can do is prepare for such a future happening by setting up infra-red cameras to record long segments timestamped which can be correlated to audible events.

But things took another turn on a return trip on October 31st when another midnight hunt by the Castle took place. Alan's video account is on YouTube at this link. Now I was not there, but four eyewitnesses were there as the baited underwater rig with the GoPro camera was lowered into the loch and the waters were scanned awaiting something to come along. Loud splashing noises had been heard to their left early on, but as the night progressed, the source of the splashing would soon be resolved. As one eyewitness, Chris, related:

As we stood (or sat) waiting patiently over the next 20 minutes or so, we heard what I can only describe as a childlike wail or a high-pitched woman’s scream coming from our left-hand side where all the splashing activity had been situated. It was very unnerving, and it sent chills down my back and made the hairs on my arm stand up.

I was standing next to Alan at the time of this chilling sound, just slightly back from the edge of the pier and we both looked at one another and asked each other what was that we just heard. I shone my torch onto the area where we heard the chilling sound, however, I could not see anything at all. I moved closer to the front of the pier after a minute or so and shone my torch out on the Loch.

Within the next few minutes, this “animal” appeared out of nowhere silently approximately 20 to 25 feet away from the piers edge in front of me. I was stunned! My torch was primarily focused on the front of this “animal” which was facing forwards towards the castle and suddenly it turned its head and looked directly at me. Its eyes lit up immediately with white eye shine, and I thought I could see what can only be described as a nose situated between its eyes.

I would reckon the head was the size of a football or basketball even and in my own opinion it was dog like. I did not see the body turn to face me; it was only the head of the animal that turned. I moved my torch light to the left-hand side of this “animal,” and I could see a slightly humped body shape. I would reckon the humped body shape was approximately six feet in length.

I cannot say with absolute certainty but I thought I saw gray colouring on the body with black speckled dots, however, I could be mistaken about this as it was dark, the “animal” was close to the water and only my torch shined any light onto it.

It submerged within seconds with a later splash to announce its final departure. Further baiting on the waters couldn't make it resurface. Meantime the GoPro video camera underwater recorded sounds which sounded like a guttural growl and which I believe are still being analyzed. Unfortunately, it did not capture any video of the animal. Chris sketched what he recalled of the animal.

The four eyewitnesses agreed it was not a huge animal akin to the thirty footers of the literature, but still big enough with the back estimated at up to six feet long. Was it the juvenile of a larger adult or was it a big seal, bigger than the grey or harbour seals of the surrounding seas? The sketch does not look like a seal to me with that raised back and spherical looking head. Neither is the long neck of tradition visible which leaves one pondering what was seen that night? The strange cries heard above and the guttural noises recorded below also require an explanation as opinions are sought of others who may know these subjects better. 

Another LNE trip was undertaken before Christmas but without any glimpse of anything unusual, but the hunt will continue into 2026 with expectations high for further adventures.

I wish readers a Happy and Prosperous 2026.

Comments can be made at the Loch Ness Mystery Blog Facebook group.

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Locating Margaret Munro's Monster

 

I blogged a piece a few years back about the area around Borlum Bay and the famous land sighting reported by Margaret Munro on June 3rd 1934. At that time a new tourist path had been opened going further into the bay which I had explored. However, I don't think my attempt back then to locate where her beast lay turning in the sun was accurate enough.

So it was time for another attempt as I came to the end of my recent trip to the loch in August. The original account states that Munro "watched the Loch Ness Monster for twenty five minutes on Sunday Morning as it enjoyed a sun bath on the shore, some yards west of Atlan Deor burn". The stream called "Atlan Deor" is a garbling of the Gaelic name as it was presumably transmitted vocally over the phone to the Inverness Courier offices. Its' actual name is "Allt an Dubhair" which I would say means "the dark stream".

So the above map marks the location of the stream whose source lies high amongst the hills south-east of Fort Augustus and it lies beyond the aforementioned tourist path, so it was time for a bit more clambering along the loch shore. While we are on the map, note the Glendoe Holiday Cottages in the bottom left of the Google Maps shot. This is the location of the original house where Margaret Munro was inside watching the beast through a pair of binoculars.

Wading through the loch water, it was not long before I came upon the Dark Stream trickling into the loch. Since the account states the creature was "some yards west" of this stream, the monster's location would be somewhere not far to the right of the picture below as "west" refers to the north-east to south-west alignment of that shoreline.

Swinging round in that direction toward Borlum Bay and another camera snap shows the location of the holiday cottages left of top centre from where Munro watched the Loch Ness Monster. Obviously, if I could see the house, then an occupant would see the beach. The distance from the house to the stream area is just over 650 metres. Since Munro was watching through 8x binoculars, this reduced the effective viewing distance to about 80 metres. So it would be reasonable to place the creature somewhere along the strip of gravel beach going off to the left in the picture.

We are told that Munro's employers, the Pimleys, walked this stretch after her account and found a stick depressed into the beach. Certainly, the granularity of this shoreline looked fine enough to accommodate such a scenario. The narrow width of the strip also backs up the statement that the creature was partially in the water - suggestive of a creature longer that the beach was wide.

I would also say that the strip of shoreline provides a convenient frame of reference to gauge the size of a large creature resting upon it. Based on my observations at this location, the proposed sceptical solution of a grey or harbor seal doesn't make sense as a typical member of either species would easily fit onto the whole shore unlike the beast said to be partially in the water.

From there, I looked back to the forest behind me, in the direction the creature was facing those 91 years before. Before me was a small half-stone and half-grass path leading into the woods. I walked along it to come into a circular area almost bereft of vegetation compared to the lush trees and undergrowth surrounding it. 

It was unusual in that I do not recall in my travels around the loch such a bare area compared to the growth around it. I jokingly thought to myself, this must be a curl up and snooze area for Nessie and she had just woken up and was heading back to the loch when Margaret Munro spotted her. The bare ground was, of course, due to the slime from her skin killing off the grass below.

Well, anyway, I mused whether this was a natural or man-made area. There was traces of human activity on the shore in the form of the usual little fires wild campers set up. I don't think this had anything to do with that. There was logging operations going on further up the hill towards the main south road and so perhaps it was connected to that. It could also be some natural form of dieback due to environmental factors such as disease, but the answer was not immediately apparent.

A visit back to this spot in 2026 to see how the area has changed may answer some of these questions. But for now Winter approaches with its cold winds, snow, hail and rain. I know some fellow Nessie hunters who aim to be back up at the loch before year end, so I hope the weather fares well for them and the beast puts in an appearance (thinking everyone has disappeared for Christmas!).

Comments can be made at the Loch Ness Mystery Blog Facebook group.

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Thoughts on the Torquil MacLeod Land Sighting

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.

Credit: geograph.org.uk

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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Marmaduke Wetherell's Monster Tracks

 

It was before Christmas 1933, that big game hunter, Marmaduke Wetherell, announced through his sponsors, the Daily Mail, that he had found tracks of a large animal on the shores of Loch Ness. By the first week of January 1934, the Natural History Museum declared them to belong to a hippopotamus and the whole expedition suffered some reputational damage, shall we say.

Years later, Alastair Boyd tracked the origins of the tracks to a hippo foot ashtray now in the possession of Wetherell's grandson. The only question remaining of real interest was where this hoax had been perpetrated? The answer would seem to be anywhere on the south side of the loch, but there are some indicators which can help locate the spot.

Various newspaper reports of the time talk about a spot "between Dores and Foyers" (Highland News, 23rd December 1933) but others are more specific in placing it in the "vicinity of Foyers" (Scotsman, same date). While one outlier states it was found on a "beach near Glen Doe" (Northern Chronicle, 8th August 1934). Prior to "finding" the tracks, Wetherell had spent three days on the road by car and then patrolling the shores by boat in pursuit of monster evidence. The Aberdeen Press and Journal for 26th December 1933 clipping below summarized events leading up to the tracks.

Now having considered the various contemporary accounts, I would conclude the term "between Dores and Foyers" refers to the main search area and references to Foyers are the location of the spoors. But that is not enough to identify the precise location. For that we need photographs and we start with the one published at the time and show at the top of this article. Here we see Wetherell right of centre examining one of the spoors. 

The scene actually looks reminiscent of the rocky and sloped surface of the Horseshoe Scree, which is only accessible by boat and would be consistent with the one newspaper which mentioned Glendoe as the location. However, the beach below him looks too wide to me for that location. But if we consider the area below Foyers, one would conclude that Wetherell wanted a location away from human activity which would preclude the area near the now former Aluminium Works adjacent to the current modern hydro-electric power station.

However, the aforementioned Aberdeen Press and Journal furnishes further evidence by printing a photo of the shoreline where the tracks occurred. It carries the title "The beach of Loch Ness near Foyers where the spoor of the 'monster' is alleged to have been found". 

Now is this enough to locate the beach today? I would say "probably" and would start by saying that some of the largest boulders in this picture likely haven't moved an inch in the last ninety-two years. The lone, bare Winter tree is likely a massive item now and the contours of the shore line may have altered, but not significantly, though the rising and falling of the loch levels throughout the year needs to be taken into account.

Potential candidates, based on my own walks around that area could be the shoreline immediately below the Loch Ness Shores campsite, although the slope from there down to the beach is less pronounced than that seen in the picture at the top. The better candidate may be the beach further south, on the other side of the cemetery backing the camp site. It has a high gradient slope to it and has a big rocky beach. 

It would also not be accessible from the road, hence being consistent with being found on the latter day from a boat. I would add that I have held the opinion for some time now that Wetherell took the Surgeon's Photograph near that spot. That article can be found here. So, does the criminal return to the scene of the crime? In this case, it would seem so!

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The Diver and the Unseen Eyes

It was a story that had always stuck in my mind back in the 1970s when I read it as a kid in Nicholas Witchell's "The Loch Ness Story". At the end of chapter five, it is briefly stated that:

Beppo, a famous circus clown went for a dive in the loch and was dragged out delirious, mumbling about "unseen eyes" looking at him from slimy black depths ...

Without further information, I jokingly assumed that this person had jumped into the loch for some clownish publicity, getting some good propulsion from those long clown shoes only to see something which was far from humorous looking straight back at him before he scrambled back to the surface. It turned out to be more complex than that as I attempt to do it more justice today.

Witchell had been summing up the hunt for the Monster up to the end of the 1950s, when this incident occurred. It was an in-between decade as wartime austerity drew to a close by 1954 and prosperity and hence tourism grew into 1959. The first book for twenty three years on the subject was published in 1957 by Constance Whyte which stoked new interest in the creature. The following year, the BBC came to the loch to produce the first serious documentary on the subject and a Herman Cockrell took some pictures of the beast during a kayak expedition. This prompted a Peter MacNab to come forward with his own mysterious photo from 1955.

Participation was on the rise again which leads us to August 1959 when the famous Bertram Mills circus came to Inverness. After a week of performances there, it was decided to mount a diving operation to look for the monster. The Inverness Courier from the 18th August 1959 sets the scene for the events of Friday the 14th:

John Newbold, a 31-year-old circus clown from Staffordshire, had a narrow escape from death when wearing a frogman's suit and aqua-lungs, he dived into Loch Ness on Friday morning to see if he could find some evidence of the existence of the famous Monster. Newbold, known professionally as Beppo, had been appearing at the Bertram Mills Circus at Inverness last week, and on Friday he went with Mr Bernard Mills on the latter's 35-ton motor yacht Centaurus, to Dores Bay. An experienced high-diver and swimmer, he had made several practice dives in the previous few days before Friday's attempt. As a precaution, the skipper of the yacht, Mr John Bruce (48), of Campbeltown. took up position in a motor boat, not far from the place where Newbold made his dive, and a member of the crew, Mr George Nicholson (34), of Southampton. was nearby in a rowing boat.

The picture at the top shows Newbold in his frogman equipment prior to the dive. This was printed in the Aberdeen Press and Journal on the 15th August, which relates what happened next:

Johnnie ... had plunged into the eerie, dark waters of the "hoodoo" loch in his frogman's outfit. When he surfaced, he collapsed unconscious. He is detained in the Royal Northern Infirmary, Inverness, for observation after having received a sedative. His condition last night was "satisfactory". It was a chance in a thousand that saved Johnnie's life. As he went unconscious after making a desperate attempt to grab the side of a small rescue boat, he was caught by the little finger as his limp body was slipping back into the water.

The Press and Journal photographer who accompanied the dive took this picture as Newbold attempted to get out of the water. The Courier article added its own words as shown below.

Newbold, whose breathing apparatus permitted a 13 minute dive, was submerged for about ten minutes, and when he surfaced Bruce saw that something had gone wrong. He brought his boat to Newbold, and managed to get a hold of him. Nicholson moved over, but their attempts to bring Newbold aboard were hampered by the aqua-lung equipment. Eventually a rope was put round him, and he was brought aboard the yacht. He was semi-conscious and delirious, and the yacht put about, and went back to Dochgarroch Pier. Newbold was rushed by car to the Royal Northern Infirmary, where he received treatment and was detained overnight, leaving hospital on Saturday afternoon.

The drama of the situation was further captured as Newbold lay on the deck and was heard to mutter the words "The water, the water. I'll make it. I'll make it" amongst other incoherent words. As the crew watched, the Journal states that he then "threw out his arms as if trying to get to his feet". As he "shivered violently" he was wrapped in blankets and put in the bunk as they raced to shore.

So what had happened down below in the murky depths? Months later, in late March 1960, the popular Australian magazine "Weekend" published an article entitled "He Fought the Horror of Loch Ness" accompanied by a dramatic illustration of Newbold tackling a tentacled beast in something reminiscent of a giant octopus attack from "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas". I have not seen the illustration, but if anyone can find it, I will include it with thanks!

The Press and Journal article did not go down that path as it related how the men on the surface tracked the air bubbles, counting the minutes towards the thirteen minute limit. It was not until about the eleventh or twelfth minute that Newbold "shot to the surface". The newspaper speculated that he dived too deep, for too long and had ascended too quickly. Given the seriousness of the situation, light-hearted speculation about monsters would seem out of place.

On his discharge from hospital, the Inverness Courier correspondent got some information from a now more lucid Newbold:

Newbold stated on Saturday that he had had a frightening experience. He had dived to a depth of about 30 feet, and then went down a further 30 or 40 feet. It was very dark below, but he noticed something which appeared to be a thick ribbon of white-coloured slime, and he went to investigate it. It was very eerie and forbidding, he said, and looking up he could see no light at all. He had the impression that eyes were watching him, and he went straight to the surface, and remembered nothing more until he recovered consciousness in hospital. Newbold added that he doubted if he would ever again make another attempt to dive into Loch Ness, and he certainly would not do it alone. 

At a depth of about seventy feet, one is pretty much surrounded by darkness. In fact, disorientation may set in without a frame of reference such as the touch of the bed or sides of the loch. Quite what made him think he was being watched may be the paradoxical psychology of utter blackness - who can see who in darkness? Having said that, one presumes John had some kind of torch with him, though it is not stated as far as I know. Finally, a newspaper local to Newbold, the Staffordshire Sentinel, spoke to him for its 17th August edition:

He went down to 30ft., levelled out, and then plunged another 30ft. to look for his prey. Suddenly he noticed the water all around him was black and the only thing he could distinguish in the gloom was a patch of whitish coloured slime ahead of him. He swam towards it, and as he was about to start investigating it he suddenly had "a queer and most frightening feeling." He looked up, but could see no shadow on the water. That decided him to get out of the water quickly, and experts now believe that his state of semi-collapse was brought about by surfacing too quickly. 

But what about that lurid Australian article? It was discussed in "The People" newspaper for 28th March 1960 which quoted this account from down under:

He suddenly realised there was a certain slimy something between himself and the surface. When he pushed against it the object turned with the motion of a fish. The magazine went on:

"It was then that something like the tentacle of an octopus gripped his right leg. The object was long and slimy and about the circumference of a man's leg. The armlike object was twisted twice around his leg and the leg was growing dead from lack of circulation. Newbold could not move it, and terror began to grip him as he felt himself being taken into deep water."

The article goes on to describe how, eventually, Newbold, gasping for breath as his air supply failed, managed to free himself from the monster's grip and shoot to the surface. It also describes how doctors who examined Newbold's right leg found "a vicious red circle from the ankle to just below the knee."

And how he was given treatment in a decompression chamber to prevent an attack of "bends", the dangerous condition suffered by divers when they surface too rapidly. 

Douglas Jack, the author of The People article, tracked down John Newbold in Stafford, who told him:

I don't know where the Australians got their story from. Apart from the fact that I saw dense layers of slime about 70 feet below the surface, nothing else happened. There was no tentacle around my leg and no injury. The only struggle I had was getting myself to the surface before my last gasp came. As I may one day go on tour in Australia, I can only hope that people who have read this nonsense about my dive won't think that I am the hoaxer.

Jack confesses that he does not know how that version of the story reached Australia. No one seemed to know, either in Australia where the article was inspired, or in London. So ends the story of John Newbold and what do I personally make of this account? It is perfectly reasonable to see how the foreboding darkness and diminishing supply of oxygen is enough to explain what happened that day. If there was a large creature lurking nearby, we and he are none the wiser.

But the one objective thing that requires an explanation is what is called "slime" floating seventy foot down in the darkness. The various accounts describe it as "a thick ribbon of white-coloured slime", "a patch of whitish coloured slime" and "dense layers of slime". What we normally understand by slime is the mucus that coats animals such as eels, frogs and snails which offers various advantages in locomotion, protection and so on.

That outer layer of slime, like the skin underneath can be shed by certain animals at certain times. How that relates to John Newbold's account is not certain as the size and extent of the slime is not described. Bigger animals leave bigger slime trails or sheddings but there should not be much floating around in that dark area of water seventy feet near the thermocline. Small amounts of detritus from small fish may float around but ribbons of slime is a different matter and dense layers of slime sounds off the scale. Moreover, fish tend not to shed slime unless in a stressful situation.

So this is perhaps a bit of a puzzler in and of itself unless it is not slime but looked like it from a distance. Was it entanglements of decaying vegetable or organic material, fecal matter or some garbage dumped from a boat? Explanations such as masses of algae bloom do not count in such an oligotrophic lake. We weren't there and so if John Newbold said it was slime, I'll accept that. There was some news a while back of some whitish organic material found in the loch, but I could not find details. If anyone has information on that, I will add it here.

Tentacles may not have gripped our terrified diver but Newbold saw something which still needs explaining.

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