The Great Glen - The Rough Guide to Scottish Highlands and Islands - page 193

Loch Ness and around
Twenty-three miles long, unfathomably deep, cold and often moody, LOCH NESS is
bound by rugged heather-clad mountains rising steeply from a wooded shoreline, with
attractive glens opening up on either side. Its fame, however, is based overwhelmingly
on its legendary inhabitant, Nessie, the “Loch Ness monster” (see box below), who
encourages a steady flow of hopeful visitors to the settlements dotted along the loch, in
particular Drumnadrochit . Nearby, the impressive ruins of Castle Urquhart - a favourite
monster-spotting location - perch atop a rock on the lochside and attract a deluge of
bus parties during the summer. Almost as busy in high season is the village of Fort
Augustus , at the more scenic southwest tip of Loch Ness, where you can watch queues
of boats tackling one of the Caledonian Canal's longest flight of locks. You'll need your
own car to complete the whole loop around the loch, a journey that includes an
impressive stretch between Fort Augustus and the high, hidden Loch Mhòr, overlooked
by the imposing Monadhliath range to the south.
Away from the lochside, and seeing a fraction of Loch Ness's visitor numbers, the
remote glens of Urquhart and Affric make an appealing contrast, with Affric in
particular boasting narrow, winding roads, gushing streams and hillsides dotted with
ancient Caledonian pine forests. The busiest of these glens to the north is the often
bleak high country of Glen Moriston, a little to the southeast of Glen Affric, through
which the main road between Inverness and Skye passes.

3

GETTING AROUND LOCH NESS AND AROUND

By bus Using the A82, buses can travel the entire length of
Loch Ness, from Inverness to Fort Augustus. On the eastern
side of the loch, however, regular bus services are limited to
the stretch between Inverness and Foyers.
By car Although most visitors drive along the tree-lined

A82 road, which runs along the western shore of Loch Ness,
the sinuous, single-track B862/B852 (originally a military
road built to link Fort Augustus and Fort George) that
skirts the eastern shore is quieter and affords far more
spectacular views.

NESSIE
The world-famous Loch Ness monster , affectionately known as Nessie (and by serious
aficionados as Nessiteras rhombopteryx ), has been a local celebrity for some time. The first mention
of a mystery creature crops up in St Adamnan's seventh-century biography of St Columba , who
allegedly calmed an aquatic animal that had attacked one of his monks. Present-day interest,
however, is probably greater outside Scotland than within the country, and dates from the
building of the road along the loch's western shore in the early 1930s. In 1934 the Daily Mail
published London surgeon R.K. Wilson's sensational photograph of the head and neck of the
monster peering up out of the loch, and the hype has hardly diminished since. Recent encounters
range from glimpses of ripples by anglers to the famous occasion in 1961 when thirty hotel guests
saw a pair of humps break the water's surface and cruise for about half a mile before submerging.
Photographic evidence is showcased in two separate exhibitions located at Drumnadrochit ,
but the most impressive of these exhibits - including the renowned black-and-white movie
footage of Nessie's humps moving across the water, and Wilson's original head-and-shoulders
shot - have now been exposed as fakes. Indeed, in few other places on earth has watching a
rather lifeless and often grey expanse of water seemed so compelling, or have floating logs,
otters and boat wakes been photographed so often and with such excitement. Yet while even
high-tech sonar surveys carried out over the past two decades have failed to come up with
conclusive evidence, it's hard to dismiss Nessie as pure myth. After all, no one yet knows where
the unknown layers of silt and mud at the bottom of the loch begin and end: best estimates say
the loch is over 750ft deep, deeper than much of the North Sea, while others point to the
possibilities of underwater caves and undiscovered channels connected to the sea. What
scientists have found in the cold, murky depths, including pure white eels and rare arctic char,
offers fertile grounds for speculation, with different theories declaring Nessie to be a remnant
from the dinosaur age, a giant newt or a huge, visiting Baltic sturgeon.