“We saw quite distinctly the neck of the beast standing out of the water to a height of about 10ft, said the monk in 1971. “It swam towards us at a slight angle, and after about 20 seconds slowly disappeared, the neck immersing at a slight angle. We were at a distance of about 300 yards.”
Steering my hired cabin cruiser over much the same spot three decades later, it strikes me that belief is a strange and unpredictable thing. Father Gregory is dead, his Benedictine order has gone, and the abbey’s future is uncertain — while Nessie, subject of a thousand blurry sightings, still exerts an almost religious hold on the imagination.
Only yesterday I would have smirked at idea of water beasts. Then I was puttering confidently along the narrow and picturesque confines of the man-made Caledonian Canal as captain of my own 30ft hire boat. But emerging from Fort Augustus locks onto the vast, bruised wastes of Loch Ness is a disconcerting experience.
The peaty waters plunge to a depth of up to 755ft, enclosing the greatest volume of fresh water in Britain, stretching 24 miles between steep hillsides. Surely that’s enough room to hide a monster? Adrian Shine suspects not, though he’s never ruled it out. The director of the Loch Ness Project came here as an amateur naturalist about the same time as Father Gregory’s sighting, and has spent the last 30 years trying to get to the bottom of the mystery.
“There are still anomalies we can’t explain,” says the tall, bearded scientist, who reminds me of the druid Getafix in the Asterix books. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t explain them.”
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We’re on the quayside at Urquhart Bay, a ruggedly beautiful corner of the loch overlooked by the remains of Urquhart Castle, where I’ve docked after a rocky ride at full throttle. The area has been the focus for a large number of Nessie sightings, though Shine attributes most to a combination of natural phenomena and human imagination.
“The human eye, associated with the human brain, will often produce an image that is much more satisfactory than that produced by a camera,” he says with a knowing smile.
His own lesson on the power of the mind came many years ago as a young naturalist on Loch Morar, where a huge head rising from the water turned out to be a rock. “It taught me two things. That what you see and remember may not be what is there. And that if you see something unusual, you should pursue it and follow it to the end. Which is what I’m doing here.”
His explanations are varied, and well covered at the nearby Loch Ness 2000 exhibition, which bears his sonorous commentary. On the mile-wide loch, boat wakes can appear to be the moving humps of a sea serpent, while swimming deer or water birds can easily be mistaken for the necks and head of a monster. His favourite thesis is that the classic sea-beast first encountered by St Columba in the River Ness around 565 AD was quite possibly a wandering sturgeon — a rather ugly fish which grows up to 10ft in length.
Even the quintessential Nessie photo, taken in 1934 by a Harley Street consultant, has been denounced as a hoax by Shine — though it hasn’t stopped him using the now iconic image in the logo for his project, or sanctioning the selling of all manner of Nessie memorabilia in the exhibition shop.
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In any case, he hasn’t completely ruled out something large and astonishing lurking in the silted depths of the loch. In 1981 his team were surprised to discover a population of Arctic charr living at a depth of more than 700ft, which only increased their curiosity about what else was down there.
So in 1987, he borrowed a whole fleet of cabin cruisers like this one, fitted them with sonar equipment and set them to work for a week, combing the loch for unexplained contacts in a media-saturated experiment known as Operation Deepscan. Among a handful of interesting results, one echo seemed to show a “large and moving” object 200ft down.
“There are still some controversial sonar results in Loch Ness,” admits Shine, as we head back down to the harbour. “There are three we still don’t know what they are.” Today we’re less lucky. Our motor launch has no sonar, so instead we take a trip out in the project’s own launch and watch the psychedelic fuzz on the screen as the loch floor drops away. There’s no movement down there today.
Shine is not perturbed. It’s been a few years since anything much showed up on the monster front, but in the meantime, the Loch itself is proving to be a fascinating subject for investigation. Due to the heavy and undisturbed silting, core samples taken from the loch bed are proving a wonderful record of history — even the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster is recorded there.
“The longer you’re here the more things you understand, so the less monsters you see,” he concludes, as we part company. “A monster is just a name for something you don’t understand.”
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Motoring away from the harbour in the direction of Inverness, I feel a little disappointed and secretly hope the scientists never quite get to the bottom of it all. I think the fog of myth has its place.
Father Gregory would have understood. “We ought to leave the monster alone,” he told the New York Times, after his sighting had made him famous. “In this technological age, we’ve placed a label on everything. I am a champion of the unknown. Mystery intrigues people, and so it should remain.”
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Details: Caley Cruisers in Inverness: 01463 236328, www.caleycruisers.co.uk; Loch Ness 2000 in Drumnadrochit: 01456 450573, www.loch-ness-scotland.com