Monster-Less at Loch Ness

(Must be read with a strong Scottish accent!)

"Among the heathy hills and ragged woods
The roaring Fyers pours his mossy floods;
Till full he dashes on the rocky mounds,
Where, thro' a shapeless breach, his stream resounds.
As high in air the bursting torrents flow,
As deep recoiling surges foam below,
Prone down the rock the whitening sheet descends,
And viewless Echo's ear, astonished, rends.
Dim-seen, through rising mists and ceaseless showers,
The hoary cavern, wide-surrounding, lowers:
Still thro' the gap the struggling river toils,
And still, below, the horrid cauldron boils." - Robert Burns

Cultural moment

Considering there has not been any sightings of the 'Loch Ness Monster' in many years, and with technologically advanced studies all but eliminating the chance of anything large living in the Loch, Inverness still bases a lot of its tourism around 'Nessie'! Oh well, I guess we're one of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who encourage this by visiting with the hope of spotting a long neck popping out of the Loch.

Wow moment

Today we followed the 'Loch Ness Tourist drive' from Fort Augustus anticlockwise towards Inverness. Travelling around the right hand side of the Loch was amazing, with the roads climbing high up into the mountains, offering us breathtaking views as far at the eye could see. It really is some of the most spectacular countryside we have seen on the trip. The trail then took us right back down to ground level where we visited the Falls of Foyers. Pretty impressive waterfalls, you could hear them long before you saw them, and they inspired Robert Burns so much he wrote a poem! We shot through Inverness and headed around the Loch to return home at ground level on the other side.

What we learnt today

We decided to give in to 'Nessie fever' and visit the award winning Loch Ness Centre & Exhibition Experience. It was expensive to enter but the museum was well put together. You walk in groups through a series of rooms each which has an audio and visual presentation explaining a part of the Loch Ness monster story. The use of lights and lasers to make you feel like you were under the sea, or part of the surveying team was clever, but the main problem I had was that the content was just too technical. I count myself as a fairly intelligent person, and I was struggling to follow the audio explanations. Add to this the fact that many of the tourists were foreigners who were trying to translate what was being said to each other in loud whispers, not helped by the fact that they couldn't read the fact sheet they were given in their language because it was dark, and the whole thing was just hard to follow!

Forgetting the Loch Ness monster aspect (most of the photos were hoaxes and many, many studies using a variety of machinery have found nothing), the most impressive thing we learnt about was the Loch itself. Situated on a fault line, it was created by tectonic plates ripping the land apart. It is a staggering 230 metres deep at its deepest point giving it an average depth deeper than the English Channel. Amazingly, it contains more fresh water than all of the lakes in England and Wales combined!