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!).

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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

The Loch Ness Hoodoo

 The Autumn of 1971 proved to be a period of interest for Loch Ness Monster historians. The "hunting" season was drawing to a close for the likes of Tim Dinsdale who had been patrolling the waters of the loch in his heavily equipped boat known as "Water Horse". Tim had taken part in some curious experiments, such as piping Beethoven's Sixth Symphony out on an underwater speaker into the  depths of the loch. However, elation and frustration arrived on the 6th September, because after ten years of watching, he had finally caught a second sighting of the Loch Ness Monster as a four to six foot long neck popped out of the waters 200 yards from him by Foyers.

Despite having a bank of five cameras pointing from the boat onto the loch, Tim succumbed to symptoms of what I call the "shock and awe" syndrome. Despite years of searching, all he could do was stare in a "spellbound" state at this mysterious creature. To my mind, you are fighting your own brain to stop going into this instinctive survival mode as you lock into assessing the potential threat before you.

He concluded in the 1972 edition of his "Loch Ness Monster" book that "a close-range sighting was so dramatic, so mesmeric in effect, that it would inhibit any camera drill which tended to obscure one's vision". More frustration was to follow in October as he was patrolling again in his boat, but in the south of the loch. The sun was low in the sky but shining brightly from the direction of Glendoe, making the glare difficult to see the loch towards Borlum Bay. 

He saw a tall man and another man walking down to the Fort Augustus Abbey jetty and was close enough to hear one man say there was movement in the water but Tim was blinded by the sun, Later he learned to his chagrin that the men were Father Gregory Brusey and friend who were about to witness a long pole-like neck in what has become one of the famous Loch Ness Monster sightings. What is not so well-known was that Tim was in a potentially great position to get a shot, but he had neglected to do his routine of getting the sun behind him and his cameras,

Tim writes that this failure to do the simple thing "was very hard to bear" and was "a blow below the belt". Nevertheless, he blamed himself for failing to do the right thing rather than any "hoodoo".

The Animated Chie Kelly Photos

 

Raynor Bubble Video 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tmysl5On4Y

Video 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD38ysGGCKQ

Arthur Grant Revisited

 

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The image below was taken by the Milestone Society and is described at this link. The three sided design would have indicated the distance to Fort William (56 miles), Fort Augustus (24) and Inverness (10).

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!

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

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

 

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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