Up at the Loch again

About six weeks after my day trip to Loch Ness, it was time for a longer visit to Britain's largest stretch of freshwater. We pitched up at the Foyers campsite where we have been going for a number of years now and always found a great place to stay. That site is up for sale and we wish Donald and Lyn Forbes well in their retirement and hope the good work continues under new ownership.

Now I do not normally go up north in July as I anticipate a surge of tourism crowds and it is generally hotter for moving around. As it turned out the crowds did not turn up and it looked more like May than July to me. Well, a lot of foreign tourists did not make the trip this year and the staycation people may have gone abroad in bigger numbers than I thought. 

As usual, I took a walk along Foyers beach to take in the views but also this year with a task in mind; as will be explained later. Back in the tent as the sun descended, I read my usual chapter from Ted Holiday's 1968 book, "The Great Orm of Loch Ness". The chapter was "Foyers at Sunrise" which describes Holiday's first trip to the loch in August 1962, a spartan affair in an old van with fishing rods and frying pans which ended with Holiday catching his first sight of the creature from Upper Foyers. 

The "orm" was down below in a small estuary beside the old aluminium works, but today I wondered if there was any chance of recreating that view due to the surge in growth of the intervening trees and other foliage. That depends where Holiday was standing, but the loch is not as accessible as it was sixty years ago.

One thing to check on this initial walk was that curious depressed area of grass I had found almost exactly a year before. The first photo shows what this large area looked like then and the second what it looks like now. Clearly some large weight had laid upon it a year ago and at some point it recovered its normal position. Actually, it looked a bit threadbare compared to last year. No worries, I jokingly mused, Nessie's toxic slime must have killed them off.

The following day, the hot and humid conditions continued as we took a leisurely drive up to Inverness, stopping at various points to watch the loch and consuming Pot Noodle for lunch. This was what is traditionally considered, "Nessie Weather", though how much of this is due to monsters or humans is unclear. More people are looking at the loch in good weather and the surface conditions are far less choppy, though there was a cooling breeze travelling up the loch.

In Inverness, we visited some bookshops and took in the reopened Museum. It has to be said that books on the Loch Ness Monster are hard to find in the largest centre of population just eight miles from the loch - apart from the usual kids' books. Even a visit to the well stocked Leakey's Secondhand bookshop had nothing. No Holiday, no Dinsdale, no Whyte or Gould (though their Abebooks account did have two Whyte books). But go online and you will find everything you need.

The next day we did a circuit of the entire loch from Foyers, through Fort Augustus, Drumnadrochit and back down via Dores. Stopping at Kilchuimen for supplies, I had one task which involved walking along the River Oich. There is a path you can take which lies tight between the river and the petrol station. Just remember to bring a machete at this time of year. Once the towering but derelict bridge arch came into view, I remembered Ricky Phillips.

I wondered if the branch he had photographed about two and a half years ago and palmed off as the monster was still there? Yes, it was as the photo below demonstrates. It is right in the centre and the zoom in shows it more clearly. As it turned out, the focus of this trip was all about famous hoax pictures.

Once we were back at base, there was work to be done. The waders were donned and the Garrett Ace 250 metal detector was taken out of the car boot. What has this to do with the Loch Ness Monster you may ask? The answer is the Surgeon's Photograph and the alleged toy submarine employed by Marmaduke Wetherell. Back in March, I had written an article suggesting that the site for this hoax was the western end of the beach at Foyers which I had walked along many a time. 

There was therefore two questions to answer. Did Wetherell leave any pieces of the toy sub when he crushed it underfoot and how detectable would such fragments be today, eighty seven years on? My assumption was that it was a long shot that anything would be found, but there was only one way to find out and start metal detecting.

Since I was searching in the waters of the loch, there was no need to seek the permission of the owner of the beach. Fortunately, the Garrett detector is waterproof up to the control unit at the top. That gave me a couple of feet of water to work with. Since Ian Wetherell stated that his father had stepped on the sub as the water bailiff approached, it did not sound like too deep a waters.

I must admit I felt like that chap, Gary Drayton, from one of my favourite programmes, "The Curse of Oak Island". Would I manage that "top pocket find" and draw the curtain on the infamous picture? As I kicked off and swept the coil above the submerged rocks, the detector began buzzing almost right away. The rocks underfoot are quite big on this beach, going up to a foot across, so it was more about moving rocks than digging.

I reached down into the now cloudy waters and moved the rocks, retried the coil, gathering up handfuls of gravel for testing until I pulled up a very rusty sliding bolt latch. This was followed by hits on some metal bars, a door hinge and a fly tackle. The Gary Drayton effect had moved more onto what some of these objects were. They would send them off to a specialist blacksmith, I had to make my own educated guesses.

I suspect some of this was related to farming equipment, as the fields above used to be farmland. Fragments may have made their way down the hill from the fields above and kids just picked them up and threw them into the loch over the years and decades. How old the items were was not clear. But their thickness certainly helped preserve them over the years. What was also surprising was that they were buried under quite large rocks. I just expected those rocks to not move and things to lie on top.

So nothing related to the Wetherell hoax found, but I did not cover all the possible areas. After such a long time, my expectation was that perhaps the wind up motor unit would survive the longest, but of course, we do not know what was left behind as the Wetherells headed back to London. But all in all, it was a worthwhile exercise.

The next day, everything was packed up and we slowly headed back south. The weather was brilliant throughout, I had also done some reconnaissance on where to place trap cameras on our next visit and the metal detector as a device performed beyond my expectation, though what else one could employ it for in Loch Ness research is not so clear. Any ideas are invited.

As an aside, I listened to some of Scott Mardis' "Haunted Sea" chats on the "Monster X" podcasts in my tent in the evening. I would recommend his interview with veteran Nessie hunter, Henry Bauer and his chat with Ken Gerhard here. All good stuff.

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Back to the Surgeon's Photograph

It is time to look over some recent debate on this photograph and perhaps some new information that leads to the true location of the picture. It is the most iconic photograph that purports to be of the Loch Ness Monster and it just about features in every documentary or major article devoted to the monster. Since 1994 and the publication of "Nessie: The Surgeon's Photo Exposed" by Alistair Boyd and Dave Martin, it concluded that the photo was a hoax perpetrated by big game hunter. Duke Wetherell, his family and associates in revenge for how the Daily Mail handled his expedition.

Most have accepted that theory but others have not and scrutinized the hoax story suspecting it is a hoax itself. I must admit, having read the book, that I side with its evidence and reasoning, but I always keep an eye open for any thinking on the matter. So, well known cryptozoologist, Karl Shuker, recently posted his thoughts on why the Boyd-Martin hoax theory should be treated with suspicion. His article is here.

He has various things to say in his long article, but there are some main points which are worthy of discussion here. The first is his objection that there is no evidence that the submarine toy used to mount the plastic wood monster neck was ever used. No photos of it, written notes of the time or pieces of the contrivance. I agree with him, there is absolutely nothing of that kind to back up what Wetherell's stepson, Christian Spurling, said about his monster model. You basically either accept it or reject it.

That the components for such a hoax were available at the time is not disputed or perhaps even the engineering to make such an item float in the water (though Karl is not totally convinced of that without a demonstration). I myself do not doubt that the model would float, I am not so sure they could make it submerge with that long neck attached, but I am also not sure it had to. In this case, I am quite happy to accept such a model could be constructed and accomplish its task, unless someone can provide evidence to the contrary.

Karl also has doubts about how the model would look in a photo at Loch Ness and thinks the item looks further out than is suggested in the hoax account, perhaps too far to wade out. That is a difficult thing to establish without knowing where the actual location was. Robert Wilson's statement that it was somewhere near the Altsigh Burn is nigh on impossible to prove. However, Boyd and Martin conducted their own experiment with their own model which established that a similar photograph with similar foreground and background could be done from only a few metres from shore.

That may sound like deep water, but you can walk out on level ground in the water for such a distance before the ground begins to worryingly recede from you at the loch. The original uncropped Surgeon's Photograph and the Alastair Boyd experiment are shown below (original first) and you can see the similarities. There is one caveat to these, Boyd said he had to crop his picture to match the original one.

Since he thinks Wilson's accomplice, Maurice Chambers, transferred from a Leica 50mm film to a quarter plate, he thinks this involved cropping as well. Though why he says the top was cropped and not the bottom is not made clear. Apart from that,  I do not think the way the Wilson picture presents itself poses any issues. The only quibble is how different the two cameras sixty years apart were, which could present different results for the same view.

WITNESS ACCOUNTS

But let us move on the main contentious issue of divergent testimonies. There are at least three people testifying that the photograph was faked. The first was Ian Wetherell, son of Marmaduke, who confessed to his participation in an article written by Sunday Telegraph columnist Philip Purser on 7th December 1975. He said he went up with his father and Maurice Chambers to stage the shoot. Ian himself took the pictures and Chambers took the pictures to be developed. However, the article was largely ignored and lost in the noise of the anticipation of the Rines underwater pictures.

The second is the star witness and step-brother of Ian, Christian Spurling who was interviewed by David Martin in 1991 and subsequently by Alistair Boyd. Some of the interviews were recorded but, to my knowledge, have not been made publicly available in any form. Spurling died shortly after in 1993. He said he did not go to the loch and manufactured his hybrid monster-submarine for the Wetherells at his home in Twickenham, London.

The third witness was a Major Norman Egginton, a colleague of Robert Wilson, who wrote to Nicholas Witchell in 1970 claiming that Wilson had boasted of his involvement in the hoax. This letter constituted quite an amazing coincidence as Witchell had merely written to a bookshop seeking some Loch Ness Monster titles. One of the bookshop directors was Egginton who opened up to Witchell how Wilson had confessed all in 1940 to him and two others. Why Witchell ignored this letter in his subsequent book on the monster is not clear, did he doubt Egginton or was this an inconvenient story?

Now the problem is that these three witnesses do not deliver testimonies that are in complete harmony with what is known and this forms a major basis for objections to the hoax theory.

• Wetherell and Spurling disagree on the material for the neck. Ian said rubber tubing while Spurling said plastic wood.
• Both of them agree that the photo is a model but Egginton claims Wilson said it was a monster cut out superimposed on an empty photo of the loch.
• Ian Wetherell says Chambers handled the development of the pictures while Robert Wilson (the "surgeon") himself said he took the plates to a chemist in Inverness.
• Ian Wetherell claimed they shot the model moving to create a V-wake but the photo evidently shows a stationary object.
• Ian Wetherell stated the model neck was a few inches high while Spurling said it was a foot high.

Now let us get onto the general subject of contradictions between witness testimonies as this is not an unfamiliar subject to myself and other researchers on the subject of the Loch Ness Monster. By way of example, a recent case I looked at from September 1933 concerned multiple eyewitnesses to a large creature seen in the loch. That article is here and once read you will note that despite looking at the same object, the eyewitnesses drew and described a creature that was not quite the same. 

Does this mean their accounts are not to be regarded as honest and trustworthy? Of course not, and one will find these degrees of inconsistency throughout the literature where imperfect humans are involved. This leads us into the issue of how to handle parallel stories as one should not just receive them all as acceptable just because people make mistakes. Some people do not make mistakes - they tell lies.

To my mind, there are different levels of inconsistency that exist. The first is a person's testimony which is at variance with empirical facts. For example, they may state that it was a fine, sunny day on the date in question whereas the weather report states it rained all day or they stated a person they met later was named John Smith where in fact it was Reginald Perrin.

The second instance is where a person's testimony is at variance with themselves in what the person recounts at another time. The other accounts may not be related entirely to the first account, but may contain elements which pose a contradiction to the other. For example, the person may state they were at a certain place at a certain time, but in another text they state they were somewhere else.

Finally, there are the testimonies of multiple people which are at variance with each other in the whole or the part. The multiple testimonies of Wetherell, Spurling and Egginton being the prime example here and we also mentioned the group who saw the monster in 1933.

Now in my estimation, when assessing claimed events, these three levels are ranked in importance. So the first level poses more problems for a story than the second. Likewise, the second poses more problems for it than the third. I say that because it is more likely for separate minds to produce disharmony than one mind and if a story does not line up with reality, there is little hope for it (unless in our example, the witness got the dates wrong).

So, it is really down to one's tolerance levels as regards inconsistencies. I tolerate the inconsistencies in group accounts because we are not perfect recording machines, but if the inconsistencies become too great, a judgement call has to be made. When that call is made is different for all of us depending on our levels of reasoning, prejudice and how much data is at one's disposal.

So what about Wetherell, Spurling and Egginton? In the case of rubber tubing and plastic wood, we assume Spurling is right as he used the material and Wetherell never asked him and guessed it was rubber when he inspected the submarine at the loch.

Egginton has Wilson stating it was a photographic overlay which makes one wonder how much Wilson was in on the details of the creation of the photo as his role was to hand in the final negatives to the chemist in Inverness and repeat the story given to him? There is a degree of compartmentalization amongst the participants in this story.

The discrepancy between Chambers developing the pictures or Wilson may be explained by Chambers (said to be a keen amateur photographer) developing the originals, checking they were up to the job and rephotographing them for development by Wilson in Inverness. Here we have two distinct but separate developments processes. 

The V-wake versus stationary object is on the face of it not resolvable. Either Wetherell made it up or he had an imperfect recall of events 41 years on and the same goes for the few versus twelve inches for the neck. Spurling must be more likely correct as he made it and Wetherell is again making it up or not recalling properly. Make up your own mind on these and weigh the pros against the cons.

However, there is no reason why someone (like Karl Shuker) should not stick to these objections as a basis for doubting the story behind the hoax. As Karl says, this may not preclude any hoax, but it would preclude this particular hoax story concerning a toy submarine and a moulded head-neck.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but the main reason for me why it is true is because three or more people have come forward claiming either direct participation in the hoax or hearing a confession to the deed. Despite the problems with points of testimony, this counts more for me than the finer details. If one person came forward and claimed they did it, I would be dubious about it. If they came forward, not claiming participation, but heard a confession, I would be even more dubious. But these three are separated in time and space. Egginton did not appear to know Wetherell or Spurling and Wetherell had died some years before Boyd and Martin met Spurling, so no chance of collusion or preparation.

That is the way I see it and that leaves us with the issue of the second photograph which is raised in objections to the hoax story. This is not a contradiction per se as no witness mentions it. To be frank, this doesn't surprise me as it never entered the public view until Constance Whyte published it in 1957, and even then, I am not sure it ever appeared in the newspapers.

Nevertheless, the photo exists and a satisfactory explanation for it, if one believes the main photo is a fake, is still beyond our grasp. The claimed differing head shape is not conclusive to me as it is a bit more blurred than the main one (see overlay above). The wave patterns are certainly different, indicating a sufficiently different time or place, unless a gust of wind opportunely came in to ruffle the waters. It is possible they are indeed pictures of the same object.

Boyd and Martin do not offer an explanation, but cast some doubt on the story of the chemist who developed the Wilson plates who claimed he kept the second photo after Wilson expressed no interest in it. Perhaps there is something there to explore, but currently there is no evidence to take it further and there we leave it.

 

ANOTHER LOOK AT THE PHOTOGRAPH

Moving on from the current arguments for and against the Wetherell hoax, I thought I would take another look at the photograph itself and see if there were any clues in it. And why not? There have been plenty of opinions given as to what is visible in the picture beyond the main subject. These range from wires to seagulls to monster limbs to second animals. That is on top of the general views that the main object of interest is a bird, an otter's tail, a branch and so on. I was once told eyewitness testimonies were subjective but photographs were objective. The truth is more likely to be somewhere in between for both cases.

Like the three witnesses to the hoax, there may be three "witnesses" to where the photo was actually taken. So, there are three observations I wish to make which I may class as speculative or even deductive, but not perhaps empirical. The first concerns waves. Below is an uncropped version of the photo and below I add lines to give a clearer view of where the waves are coming from. They are coming in at a slight angle from the left. I estimate (in the absence of a protractor) about 5 degrees from the horizontal.

Now the thing to point out about Loch Ness is that the prevailing wind is from the south west as low pressure fronts from the Atlantic come in rotating anti-clockwise and air currents are forced through the funnel of the Great Glen complex. As the waves that are pushed north east by these winds travel up the loch, the waves weaken as they bend into the two shores along the loch until they roll onto the shore in a parallel fashion. I believe the waves we see coming in from the left in the photo are those weakening waves.

What has this to do with the Wilson monster debate? If Robert Wilson was near Invermoriston on the northern shore as he said, the photo would have the south on its right and the north on its left. Therefore, the prevailing south westerly wind would be coming in on the right and so would the waves they are pushing along. The main reason that they would be coming in from the left is because the photo was taken from the opposite shore where the south is to the left.

Of course, that cannot be presented as a cast iron argument. Perhaps there was some unusual wave generation going on due to boats or a rarer weather front coming in from the east. Perhaps one could even argue the photo is inadvertently reversed. I would deem it unlikely it was boats as Ian Wetherell and his co-conspirators would have sought a place where there was no one else around. However, on the balance of probabilities, the normal prevailing wind is causing those waves.

Now let me move onto the second observation. If the hilltops on the opposite shore had been visible, there would have been a good chance of establishing the general vicinity of the picture. Unfortunately, the hilltops are cropped out and it would be no surprise that this was the intention of Maurice Chambers. But there is a feature present that may offer help. It is the white line on the upper left of the photo above. 

It doesn't look like a stream or the main road which would be largely flat along that stretch, so what is it? With this in mind, I began to search through old photos and postcards for a feature that would match this. I searched both sides of the loch in this case and the best feature I came upon is best shown in this postcard from the 1950s (click on the image to enlarge it). Notice the line heading up at angle on the opposite shore on the right of the postcard. This was taken from a vantage point high up near the village of Foyers which is to the left and out of sight in the postcard. The land feature on the near side of the loch is the spit of land surrounding the estuary of the River Foyers. The old aluminium works is beyond the bottom left near the shore.

This would imply the photo was taken from the shore nearest to Foyers, somewhere near where its river empties into the loch. As to what the feature on the opposite side is, it may be a logging road or something similar, but that is secondary to the fact it is there and a good match for the Wilson photo feature. Now, I could be wrong and someone may come up with some other feature on an old photo, but let us carry this a bit further. A modern satellite picture shows the feature on the left (marked A) starting at the loch and rising into the hills.

Which leads me to the third and final observation. Ian Wetherell was quoted in the 1975 Mandrake article as saying:

We found an inlet where the tiny ripples would look like full size waves out on the loch.

If we draw a line across the loch from the track to Foyers where this feature would be to the left of the field of view, we do actually come to an inlet marked at B, one I have visited on many an occasion at the end of Foyers beach. Could this be the very location where the Surgeon's Photograph was taken those long years ago?

The proposed location obviously fits the prevailing waves theory I presented and it kind of fits in with what we know of the Wetherell expedition. When Marmaduke Wetherell was commissioned by the Daily Mail in December 1933, he started along the south shore going from Dores down to Fort Augustus, so he knew it was a quieter part of the loch and offered better spots to stage a later hoax with less likelihood of interference. In fact, Wetherell's infamous hippo tracks were made on a beach somewhere south of Foyers. Let us just say he was familiar with the area.

When the Wetherells headed to the loch with their toy monster weeks later, they sought that inlet to create the impression of a larger object. How that subplot panned out is not clear. There may be some others inlets around the Foyers river, but the further north you go, the closer you get to the busy aluminium works and the power station (though I suspect this happened on a Sunday). The fact that a water bailiff turned up (Alex Campbell?) suggests it was indeed near the river where anglers are more likely to fish and perhaps closer to April than January as the fishing season ramps up.

All speculation, of course, but food for thought. Eighty seven years on, I camp by the River Foyers once or twice a year and walk along that stretch of beach to its very south end, watching the loch, enjoying the views, contemplating various things. Could it be that yards away, the minuscule remains of a toy submarine with a plastic wood neck now lie amongst the rocks and pebbles, beyond detection but still causing a controversy which echoes down the decades even unto this day?

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Bobby the Sea Serpent of Loch Ness

 

On my usual strolling through the Internet in search of Loch Ness Monster curiosities, I came upon this item for sale on eBay. It was a copy of the Chicago Sunday Times dated 18th March 1934. The item can be found here. You can zoom into the article and read it for yourself, though the seller has only put the first page of the article on display.

By then, the Loch Ness Monster phenomenon was about ten months old and news of this Highland creature was now a worldwide topic of discussion. However, the memory of sea serpent tales from last century lingered in the American mind as the journalist presumed this to be an ocean going monster which had somehow got stranded in the loch. This was a line of thinking which has persisted in some form to this day.

The catalyst for the article was the recent offer of a reward of £20,000 by circus owner Bertram Mills for the capture of the monster with that famous cage to hold her in shown. This equates to £1,440,000 in today's money. The article says this was equivalent to $100,000. What are the odds of getting five US dollars to the pound any time soon? 

Fifty one sightings are referred to, relying on Rupert Gould's compilation researched a few months before. George Spicer's famous land sighting is given not a few words and Arthur Grant and W. Goodbody's sightings are given some publicity too. Spicer's sighting is stated as happening at 4pm.

With reference to its sea serpent characteristics, mention is also made of two sea serpent accounts. The first being the 1915 account of the U-28 submarine commander, Baron Von Forstner, followed by the 1918 account by another submarine commander, Captain Werner Loedisch. Finally, the only photograph of the monster to that point, taking by Hugh Gray, is discussed. 

The other fact of interest is the sentence "What is it which has affectionately has been christened 'Bobby'?". This is a name of the monster which has long been lost to the mists of time as the public coverage of the creature evolved. The origin of this name is likewise a bit of a mystery and even Loch Ness historian, Nicholas Witchell, admitted in his book, "The Loch Ness Story", that he did not know where it came from. 

I have seen the name used of the creature before, but its use is rather fleeting. After all, "Bobby" seems a ridiculous name to use for the monster and this is enough to explain why it faded from view. One clue as to its origin comes from the contemporary sea serpent researcher, .A. C. Oudemans, who says the name was given to the beast by the Daily Mail newspaper on the 12th December 1933. I have not seen the original source, but it nicely ties up with the expedition to the loch by Marmaduke Wetherell which was sponsored by the Daily Mail.

In fact, newspapers of the time stated that Wetherell was to leave London for the loch on the 16th, a few days later. I would therefore speculate that the Daily Mail felt they had to christen the monster which they thought they were about to shed light on - but never did. The name "Bobby" never got past 1934 but what about its better known name of "Nessie"?

Oudemans makes a similar claim for the Daily Mail, saying they first used this name in their Sunday edition dated June 24th 1934. Again, I have no sight of that edition, but further research showed this not to be the case. The oldest reference I found to "Nessie" was from the Edinburgh Evening News dated 9th January 1934, over six months before which discusses the then recent film taken by Malcolm Irvine. In those days, there were no YouTube clips to view, it had to be at the cinema or private cine reel showings.

Looking at the old newspaper archives suggests the name began in Scottish publications and slowly percolated down south to other British newspapers over the years. But I found no 1933 references to the name "Nessie" which makes me wonder if this was a Scottish response to the London Daily Mail's insipid attempt to use "Bobby" only weeks before? This further report from the English Tamworth Herald dated 31st March 1934 shows the name heading south.

Here is a tale of a group of Scottish rugby fans down for the Scotland-England match towing a model monster named "Nessie". Having said this, the Inverness Courier continued to use the appellation "The Loch Ness Monster" or simply "The Monster" since it had come up with this original formulation which has stuck to this day. But what did Loch Ness Monster researchers think of the name "Nessie"?

Rupert T. Gould as far as I can tell, makes no mention of the name "Nessie" is his June 1934 book "The Loch Ness Monster and Others" preferring the term "Loch Ness Monster" which he attributes to the Inverness Courier. It is possible he had not heard of the term from his London base or perhaps he thought it a term too vulgar to use in serious research.

Twenty years later in her book "More than a Legend", Constance Whyte associates it as a name beloved of press reports but regards it as "undignified" preferring again "The Monster" or "The Loch Ness Monster" . However, she thinks it transliterates well with the local Gaelic name for the beast "An Niseag". This aloofness seems to continue with Tim Dinsdale in his first edition book who only mentions "Nessie" once in quote marks in reference to a letter from an eyewitness.

Ted Holiday is more contemptuous of the word when he also mentions it only once in his 1968 "The Great Orm of Loch Ness" when putting it in the context of comic tourist postcards. In fact, Holiday preferred the term "Orm" or "Dragon" on line with his more exotic views. It seems that least in the 1950s and 1960s, the word "Nessie" was not regarded as a label for the monster to be associated with serious research.

Doubtless, other monster hunters have and had their own preferences for how they mixed their monster terms. I myself prefer "Loch Ness Monster" but will also use "Nessie". Thank goodness "Bobby" never caught on,

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

Loch Ness Trip Report July 2020

After a long wait, we finally arrived at Loch Ness last week. The coronavirus restrictions had made it nigh on impossible to get to the loch at my usual dates in April and May. By April, I would have usually collected the trail cameras I had left wintering beside the loch. By late May or early June, we would have made our first full trip to the loch. So everything was delayed by about three months until the Scottish Government finally allowed travel beyond five miles from home and facilities, such as the camp site we use, were allowed to open to the public with some social distancing and hygiene rules.

Now we do not usually go to the loch as this time of year simply because it is so busy. The place is heaving with tourists and it is harder to get things done in the quiet and lonesome way that we monster hunters like to do things. However, turning up at the camp, it looked about as busy as it does in May due to the owners having to close down some pitches for social distancing purposes plus the usual rules such as wearing face masks indoors and all the urinals were taped off. The shops were also enforcing these rules. The drive up from Edinburgh was also somewhat easier than usual due to lighter traffic, so I got there in about three hours, which looked like a record time. In fact, we got to the loch early enough to pick up the trail cameras before checking into the camp site.

The cameras had been there three months longer than anticipated, which would normally raise concerns that the increasing number of tourists clambering around the shores would find and steal them (as has happened before). Since there were no tourists at the loch during lockdown, that fear was allayed as all five cameras were retrieved safely. The only annoying thing during that process was a small cloud of flies that had taken a liking to me and followed me down the road. Yes, the midges head net was left in the car.

Once at the site and we had erected the tent, I took my first walk along the beach at Foyers, as is my habit. I strolled to the far end near where Hugh Gray had taken his photograph of the monster in 1933. The loch was in a choppy mood, so it required a bit more concentration to see anything out of the ordinary amidst the churning waves. As it happened, a long but small neck arose from the surface some 30 yards out from me. It was evidently a bird, I would say a cormorant, which quickly dived back below the surface, presumably in search of food. I waited for a few minutes for it to come back up, but with no success, the choppiness of the waters made visual contact harder. I also had a look around the estuary of the river Foyers beside "Dinsdale Island". I had my waders with me and I mused whether I should go over there some time. I also recalled it was the 60th anniversary of the Dinsdale film back in April and his sons had planned to go up for this but were prevented by the lockdown. I wondered if they were due up anytime soon.

A quick check of the trail cameras proved that four out of five had recorded a gamut of images. One had failed to record any images at all, so that would have to be carefully checked before it is deployed again. The other cameras displayed the perennial problem. They record three images on every motion detection. That is great as only boats, birds and you know what will trigger close up images. However, waves coming inshore can also trigger the cameras and produce a glut of useless images unless something coincidentally passes by. The unfortunate result of this effect is that the SD memory card normally fills up within two months and the camera stops, despite the batteries being charged.

Just one camera actually achieved the best balance and recorded only boats and canoes. It is a matter of setting the cameras at the best height above breaking waves but not so high that objects fall outside the conical area of detection. I am still working through these images, though the one of most interest so far was an object or wave in the water which was strongly reflecting the sun behind it, making identification of whatever is was somewhat difficult (see below). The two images are one minute apart as the reflection fades.

The next day, I had a watch at the site where Lachlan Stuart took his famous 1951 picture of three humps. I also brought my metal detector to see if I could find anything of interest, Nothing turned up apart from a wire clip and some old tin cans. I then noticed a helicopter approaching from the south in a manner suggesting they were looking for something in the loch below. I recalled later on that a man had fallen into the loch off Dores the week before. I had no idea whether they had retrieved him dead or alive and whether this helicopter was looking for him. Just as the helicopter passed beyond me, a jet fighter from the nearby RAF base roared past from south to north. I thought, did they know a helicopter was in the area at the same height? That was a potentially unhappy combination of events. As it happened, the jet stayed on the north side of the loch as the helicopter stayed on the south side and both eventually disappeared from view. I leave it as an exercise to see if you can spot the jet fighter in the picture below.

The day was broken up with a trip to Inverness and I went into the Waterstones bookshop. A perusal of their Inverness and Highland section had one paltry booklet on the Loch Ness Monster. This was the slim Pitkin edition I had reviewed before. This was pretty pathetic I thought for the main bookshop of Inverness. Shouldn't they, of all bookshops, be promoting Inverness' main tourist attraction? However, a look at the adjacent Folklore and Mythology section had Gareth Williams' "A Monstrous Commotion". Folklore and mythology, my ....! I quietly moved Gareth's book to the Inverness section, facing front forward, not spine!

Back on the road to Loch Ness, I decided to check out an area where there had been an alleged land sighting in 2003. I covered that story in a previous article back in May where the witnesses described something akin to a giant eel, but which one Nessie expert had decided was just black plastic piping from the local salmon farm. As I drew up beside the Dores septic tank I thought something did not smell right and I went for a walk along the shore where I think they had their encounter.

I walked for a mile and encountered no such piping, old or new. I guess the salmon farm must have cleaned up their act since 2003. I found one three foot section of green corrugated plastic pipe which may or may not have had its origin at the farm. So I had no opportunity to be surprised by a plastic pipe masquerading as a thirty foot giant eel. As I indulged in a kind of combination of beach combing and monster spotting, I came across the various body parts of a deer (below). I wondered what had made a meal of that unfortunate creature. It was here that I first thought of that man who fell off the boat at Dores some days back. Not knowing his fate, I became slightly more vigilant about finding something more macabre on the shore but then there was the old saying that the loch never gives up its dead. If he had not been rescued, I suspect the poor chap was a long way down never to come back up. But then again, how did the deer parts get to shore?

As usual there was too much rubbish on the beach. Some had been washed shore, which is fair enough, but the dinghy like object (below) I saw looks like it was just discarded. Did the truck tyre wash in or did it roll in from the road? have Mind you, there was also this monster like visage which glared at me as I headed back. Was it scowling at litter bugs?

One more stop on Friday was inspired by a chapter I always read when I come up here. It is the chapter entitled "Sunrise at Foyers" from Ted Holiday's "The Great Orm of Loch Ness" published in 1968. It describes his first expedition to the loch in August 1962, which also included his first sighting of what he called the "Orm" of Loch Ness. It sums up the mood of the hunt perfectly for me and so I read it as a form of inspiration to me and no doubt other monster hunters throughout the decades. In that chapter he says he pulled up for the first night on the south shore almost opposite Castle Urquhart. I drove back looking for that spot and I plumped for the parking lay-by beside the old ruin of the Change House. I don't think Holiday's spot was just a grassy bank as he says a truck pulled up beside his van with a dinghy on board or in tow. It sounded like a proper lay-by to me and so I took the picture below to complement his inspiring chapter.

After tea there was an evening walk to the spot where Frank Searle used to live and have his rather modest exhibition hut. He left the area in 1984 but I recorded a video clip of the area with a commentary on Frank's last days there which complements the podcast I did with Scott Mardis on famous fakers of whom Frank Searle is numero uno. You can see that video clip here. Saturday brought intermittent rain and shine and I intended to finally visit the Hambro monument on the Glendoe estate. Armed with some directions from a Nessie fan who had been there previously, we got there and followed the main track straight to the hill on which the pyramid-like monument stands to this day since the death of Winifred Hambro in 1932. I covered that tragic story three years ago at this link. The only mystery in that story is how a fit athletic lady like Winifred failed to swim to the near shore whilst her children and husband managed to do so.

The inscription on the monument reads:

WH-ROH

IN LOVING MEMORY OF

WINIFRED HAMBRO

WHO DIED NEAR THIS SPOT

WHICH SHE LOVED

AUGUST 28TH 1932

Some of the letters are now missing and it is not clear what "WH-ROH" means. I assume the "WH" is "Winifred Hambro". Now just below the monument is Corrie's Cave where the notorious sheep stealer, Alexander MacDonald (nicknamed "Corrie"), hid from English soldiers for some years after he shot at the Duke of Cumberland's army about three hundred years. It is a cleft in the rock perhaps about 15-20 deep. It was somewhere directly below the monument as it faces the loch, but the place was completely overgrown with ferns and heather. I made a somewhat sheepish attempt to descend into the ferns of unknown depth but decided to give up and let the ticks find another victim. Nevertheless, the view of the loch looking towards Fort Augustus is splendid, as the picture below shows.

However, not to deprive you of a view inside the cave, Doug, who gave me the instructions, had kindly sent me his video of his descent into the cave which I include here. He descended during the month of February, when I suspect the vegetation was decidedly more sparse.

After that, it was time for some monster watching at Borlum Bay and a walk past the spot where Margaret Munro's land beast was seen to move about the shore in 1934. There was then a visit into Fort Augustus and the place was pretty much like a ghost town despite the easing of the coronavirus lockdown. I asked a shop attendant what normal month the crowd outside would suggest and she said February. It was certainly quieter than when I am usually there in May. We did our bit for the local economy by buying at a few local establishments. After a time at the pier and trying to spot the Hambro monument in the distant hilltops, we went to pay my respects to the great Alex Campbell at his cottage in the town. Actually, I did more than that, I brashly and boldly went up to the door and knocked to the consternation of a growling dog who perhaps thought I should not be there.

The owner opened up and I asked about Alex Campbell. He knew all about him and the history of the man and was quite happy to talk. He never met him, but since the reason I knocked was to find a living relative who knew Alex, he helped me by pointing out one relative who knew him and may still be alive. I took some notes, we chatted in general about the man and his monster and I left with some detective work to do. As you may know, some sceptics give Alex Campbell a hard time. Well, they give anyone who claims to have seen the monster up close and personal a hard time. This blog defends Campbell against these attacks on his character and reputation.

Come Sunday it was time for an unexpected change of itinerary. I was off to Loch Morar. I had hummed and hawed about taking my drone to that loch with its monster reputation and clear waters and was inclined just to use the drone at Loch Ness. So we drove early from Foyers and I shall expand on that trip in a separate report soon. After tea in Fort William, we got back to Loch Ness about 7pm and I did my usual walk around the Foyers beach. However, as I turned to walk along the river, I was arrested by an unusual sight - a large area of flattened reeds right beside the River Foyers. Some obvious thoughts did go through my mind, but I first had to evaluate the situation and go through all the possibilities. The area is shown below and it tape measured out as about 30 feet by 9 feet, with the thirty feet parallel to the river. As you can see, the reeds beyond are untouched as are the ones in the water. A survey of the ground revealed no tracks of any kind, be it deer or larger. There were some human tracks but not much. It was tempting to conclude some massive weight had dropped on this vegetation and crushed them, i.e. they were horizontal with the stalks bent just above the soil.

Here is a video clip of the depressed area.

So it was time to go through the options. Had a storm caused the river to flood and flatten them? That seemed unlikely as the reeds around them were perfectly vertical. I then remembered there were canoeists camping beside me. I told them about this area of flattened vegetation and whether they had launched from there. The answer was they had not, as they take off from the main pebble beach further back where all the boats are moored. Thinking further, I recalled the campsite owners conduct nature tours around the area and have a den building activity for the families, but they don't go there either.

How about wild campers who had pitched their tent and then moved on? That was a possibility as I had recently noticed two groups of wild campers nearby, further up the river and further along Foyers beach. In fact, wild camping seems to be a bit of a problem in Foyers just now with more wild camping than usual due to the lockdown and some of them selfishly leaving waste and rubbish behind (of which I found none). With that in mind, I surveyed the spot and quickly sketched the directions of the various flattened reeds (below). The distribution of the flattening was not consistent with a large object moving from the water to the land which would have the majority of stalks pointing away from the water, but that assumes a scenario akin to a bull elephant seal coming ashore. Of course, I could probably conjure up a scenario where a large beast could contort to produce this pattern.

My main doubts about the tent scenario was that it was right on the water's edge which is usually a dumb move as a windy night can result in a waterlogged tent and a night time evacuation. There were other spots right beside this one that were good enough to pitch a tent and be away from water. Also, a 30 foot by 9 foot tent footprint looked unusual as wild campers usually move around in smaller tents. It just didn't look right as there were better places to camp nearby, but it seemed to be the explanation that "sucked the least". I left it at that and began packing up for our return home the next day.

On the final day, we stopped by in Drumnadrochit and headed to the Loch Ness Centre Exhibition. I was curious to see if anything had been added since we were last there some years ago. Going in, I noticed the usual covid-19 precautions were in place. We had to supply our names and phone numbers in case someone there turned out to be infected with the virus and we would be phoned and told to self isolate for two weeks. I wonder what Marmaduke Wetherell would have made of the exhibition and the fact that his infamous hippo ashtray was on display? He died about seventy years ago, so we will never know. 

I don't think it had changed much, but perhaps I had forgotten parts of it. We went through various rooms highlighting various stages of the Loch Ness Monster story in a chronological fashion ending up in the penultimate room with the sturgeon theory being expounded. The various propositions delivered to us via the PA system were that the loch was too nutrient poor for large predators and practically all witnesses were fooled by waves, birds, logs, deer, boats and so on. The rest were liars and a few, perhaps just a few, saw an errant sturgeon at some unspecified locations and times in the loch. I found this all just too simplistic and dismissive, but what else do they have to explain the strange things people are prepared to swear they saw?

It was, as it has been for decades, an exhibition designed to kill the monster in a hail of logic bullets. For me, the bullets miss the target. For others, they may wonder why they came here only to be told they were wasting their time. To my disappointment, my favourite feature of the exhibition was closed off. It was the dashboard of eyewitness testimonies. You put on the earphones and press the button to hear the eyewitness recount their own story of what they saw that day. It is the part of the exhibition which is least touched by the hand of scepticism, it is just you and that person from decades past telling a story which raises a defiant fist against logs, birds and boat wakes.

Alas, it was closed due to coronavirus since it involves pushing buttons. Speaking of monster exhibitions, we went outside and I wondered what had become of the competing Nessieland exhibition 100 yards away. I think the business has been sold as I noted that the polystyrene Nessie that dominated the tour was lying in two pieces inside an adjacent alleyway. Perhaps they will appear on eBay soon or end up in a skip along with the other artefacts of the exhibition. I was tempted to take the head home with me, a Nessie discovery in a kind of artificial way.

After that amusing epilogue it was off back home and the end of another trip. Perhaps the thousands of trap camera images will yet give a cryptozoological end to the trip, otherwise it is time to think ahead to the next trip which will be later this year.

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com

The Mystery of the Three Toed Cast

In a previous post, I went over a 1934 sceptical appraisal of the then new Loch Ness Monster phenomenon. There was an excerpt from that article which I held back for this piece concerning the Arthur Grant land sighting:


The Daily Mail, with customary enterprise, sent investigators. These included a big-game hunter. who eventually found two impressions of a large foot upon the shore. Photographs and a cast of these were submitted to the museum, where the impressions were found to have been made on a heaped-up bank of fine shingle with the help of a stuffed foot of a hippopotamus. A wag had been busy - had he used a living hippopotamus the impression would have been different and the big game hunter would not have been deceived.

On the other side of the loch the animal which bounded across the road, described above, left a trail. In that trail was an obscure footprint of which a cast was also made. At the museum it was found that this footprint was also the work of a joker - but this time he used the mounted foot of a rhinoceros.

Now I covered the matter of the Arthur Grant case and tracks found on the shore in my book, "When Monsters Come Ashore". Until recently I was aware of these "rhinoceros" tracks that had been found, but I did not connect them with the Grant story and assumed they were related to the Marmaduke Wetherell tracks found on the remote shoreline between Foyers and Fort Augustus. The plaster casts  taken from the Grant site were sent again to the Natural History Museum, but now it transpires these were identified as rhinoceros as opposed to the infamous "hippo" tracks which were created using Wetherell's ashtray.

The question before us is whether these tracks were another Wetherell hoax or something entirely different? The main point being that a hippopotamus is four toed as opposed to the rhinoceros which is three toed, therefore it is unlikely that Marmaduke Wetherell's four toed ashtray would have produced such a three toed track. Indeed, if one examines the sketch done by Arthur Grant at the top of this page, there is a hint of a three toed rear limb in the bottom right of the picture.

What could be going on here? In pursuit of an answer, I consulted Boyd and Martin's expose of the Surgeon's Photograph which goes into more detail than any on the matter of Marmaduke Wetherell and the fake spoors. Firstly it has to be noted that the authors are dubious of any land sightings when on page 31 we have this general quote: "Alleged land sightings must be regarded with some doubt."

Bearing that in mind, it is no surprise that doubt is then cast by them on the whole affair by suggesting that Grant and Wetherell colluded to produce a sensational story, tracks and all. No proof is produced for this opinion other than the alleged phone call Grant is said to have made to parties unknown at that time - an accusation which has its own problems and is covered in my book on land sightings. Laying that aside, the proposed scenario would have Wetherell producing yet more tracks to fool the Daily Mail and the general public.

The sequence of events may even be used in support of such a conspiracy theory when we consider that the Natural History Museum announced their analysis of the hippo plaster casts on Wednesday the 3rd January 1934, the story made the newspapers on the 4th January and the Grant sighting occurred the very next day on Friday the 5th. Was this sequence of events designed to deceive? There are some problems with this conspiracy theory.

Firstly, why would Marmaduke Wetherell even do such a thing? The Natural History Museum had correctly identified the species of the first set of tracks and rightly put it down to a hoaxer. If Wetherell employed some form of rhinoceros spoor, the result was going to be inevitable when the second plaster casts arrived in South Kensington, London. Why risk a second embarrassment to your reputation as a big game hunter and cause further irritation to your client, the Daily Mail?

Secondly, if for whatever reason, Wetherell decided upon the January 3rd declaration by the Museum that yet another hoax was required, he had little time to organise it. It would demand that a co-conspirator be found and a location, plan and setting of fake tracks be done by the early hours of the 5th giving a day and a half or 36 hours in total. There is no evidence Wetherell and Grant had met before the 5th of January, none at all and so the whole idea really boils down to not empirical evidence, but whether one's bias wishes the whole theory to be true or not.

Thirdly, there is no evidence that Marmaduke Wetherell even owned such a rhinoceros foot. I contacted Marmaduke's grandson, who featured in Boyd and Martin's book and asked him if he recalled his grandfather ever owning such an item. His reply was that he only recalled the hippo foot ashtray. So, on the face of it, Marmaduke Wetherell had nothing to produce his three toed tracks with.

Now it has to be pointed out that Wetherell got away with his fake hippo tracks by hiding the hoax tool in plain sight. Marmaduke was a chain smoker and it would be natural to bring along his hippo foot ashtray while he was at the loch investigating the monster. It was a perfectly innocent item put to a more sinister use and one can only carry so many items around without arousing suspicion. So, in the absence of compelling evidence, let us assume that Marmaduke Wetherell had nothing to do with the creation of these tracks.

Indeed, it transpires that another set of three toed tracks were found days before the Grant affair but before the public announcement from the Natural History Museum. The relevant text is from the Edinburgh Evening News, 1st January 1934 which is reproduced below.

The story here is that after the discovery of Wetherell's four toed tracks, a discovery was made of what appeared to be three toed tracks on the opposite side of the loch. Where this exactly happened is not clear, but my guess is somewhere south of Invermoriston. This is also stated as a location near where the creature is alleged "to have crossed the road". Quite what report this is referring to is also not clear to me.

I have no record of land sightings in that vicinity in the months leading up to the end of 1933. The nearest in time was a report by a Mrs Reid in December, but this happened on the other side of the loch. The nearest by location was by a David Stewart back in May of that year just up the road by the Altsigh Burn who saw a grey coloured creature with a long neck come out of the bushes and disappear into the loch.

But the main point is that another three toed incident happened almost a week before Arthur Grant had his encounter and this was reported as discovered, not by Wetherell, but by a Fort Augustus "official". Should we presume that Wetherell was the instigator of not one but three hoaxes? I think that would indeed be presumptuous as the probability of conspiracy decreases as the size of the conspiracy increases.

As an aside, some looking to tar and feather Nessie personalities old and new may suggest the unknown Fort Augustus official was Alex Campbell. After all, he lived in Fort Augustus, as water bailiff he was a government employee and (as they claim), he was up for a bit of hoaxing. Needless to say, there is not a shred of evidence for this theory. Various other people could be officials (canal managers, police and local politicians) and in my years of scouring the literature, I have never read of Campbell relating this story.

So, are these tracks the real deal?

Of course, there is no way of telling for sure. Others may invoke Grant as the sole perpetrator or some other unknown third party, it is pure speculation and I think I will join in this speculation party but take the opposing side. What does a rhinoceros spoor actually look like? The zoologist does not say what type of rhino they decided upon, so I will assume the most common species of rhino which is the White Rhinoceros of Africa. A look around Google Images gave this example track and it is stated that a typical track is 29cm by 28cm in dimensions.

Clearly these look quite different to the hippo spoor from across the loch shown above. The problem is we do not precisely know what those 1934 plaster casts looked like and so we can only go with the museum's closest approximation to the white rhino. I would also note another mystery in that the second group to visit the site led by A.F. Hay measured the tracks at 24 inches (61cm) long from toe to heel, 38 inches (96cm) cross from right toe to left, and 30 inches (76cm) from heel to heel which is more than double the normal dimensions of a rhino track! So what gives here? Did the Museum err too much on the the assumption this was another game animal or did Hay over-estimate the size of the tracks or were these different but better formed tracks from the site? I suspect the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

I would note that a three toed track is not something unique to this story. In fact of the eleven land accounts that describe the forelimbs, two (18%) mention three toes and these are E.H. Bright from 1880 and Donald MacKinnon from 1979. Other instances of three toad tracks have been claimed elsewhere in the lake monster literature. These include a Robert Duff at Loch Morar on the 8th July 1969 as well as one found at Lake Okanagan (as related by Mark Chorvinsky).

To this we can add the 1948 tracks in the River Nith in Ontario (Lake Monsters and Sea Monsters - An Atlas and History), Huilla of Trinidad and Tobago (in "Water Monsters South of the Border"), Lake Tarpon (People Are Seeing Something), the Natal coast and White River (both in Dragons by Richard Freeman). However, one must not discount hoaxes, such as the Florida case related here.

It was probably a futile gesture since many monster hunters before me must have tried to track down these plaster casts without any apparent success. But I emailed the Natural History Museum archives department and they confirmed that they had no such items. That is no surprise as I assumed they would be returned to the owners. That Marmaduke Wetherell owned and then discarded the hippo casts once they had fulfilled their purpose is one likely outcome. But if the "rhino" tracks were not Wetherell fakes, how would they have been treated and by whom?

Plaster casts from the 1930s can easily survive to this day with proper storage, but frustratingly and nearly 85 years on, this potentially unique cast of the Loch Ness Monster is not likely to be with us today. Perhaps the answer lies with Arthur Grant's descendants.

I end this piece with a delightful poem penned by "glorat" extolling the mystery of the three toed monster, which was published in the Falkirk Herald dated 17th March 1934.

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com