BACK in August 2015 I wrote in these Ramblings about the Loch Ness monster. Since then the mystery of what curious beast, if any, occupies the dark clouded waters of this most picturesque of Scotland’s many lochs continues. Nessie, as some called her, continued to hit the headlines.

Today virtually everyone carries a mobile phone with a good and easy-to-use camera so it comes as a bit of a puzzle why more pictures of the Loch Ness beast have not been captured.

Last month the beloved paper of Tory idiots — the Daily Telegraph — revisited the monster story by rehashing a story from 2007. This was that the beast of the Loch could actually be a giant frog or toad.
  
An old theory about what the Loch Ness monster could be really be has resurfaced — and it has taken social media by storm.

For decades, the famed mythical beast has baffled scientists and monster-hunters, as nobody has been able to prove beyond doubt that something does indeed live at the bottom of Scotland’s Loch Ness.

Now a group of scientists from New Zealand and the United States have declared the waters of Loch Ness are suitable to support the life of a group of large living organisms. I think we could have told them that.

In 2005, a team from United States performed a full deep-water scan of the loch, in the hopes of finding the mysterious Nessie. All they found was a frog — living at an astonishing 325 feet deep below the water.

For some reason, Twitter rediscovered the report, and the photos of the poor frog, and went mad for it. One headline read: “A living toad 325 feet deep at the bottom of Loch Ness.”

Has anyone ever proposed that Nessie is a giant frog? I know that one well-supported theory is that the monsters here are giant salamanders related to those in China. Salamanders are like our newts but the Chinese species can reach up to six feet (2m) long. 

The Chinese giant salamander (Andrias davidianus) is fat and lumpy, black in colour and lives in freshwater lakes, only coming to the surface very infrequently. That description matches exactly many of Nessie’s reported sightings.

Giant eels, too, are again in the frame, they have long been suspects as the monster. Recent tests have revealed high concentrations of eel DNA in the Loch’s waters but with no indication if the DNA is from the normal-sized eels that we know live in large numbers in the loch or from 20 foot (6m) long giant eels.

In January of 1934 the Daily Mail — just as much of a reactionary rag as it is today — excelled itself with its most despicable and notorious headline. “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” it proclaimed above a paean of praise for Oswald Mosley and his fascist bully-boys.

In the April of that same year it was the first London newspaper to report on a strange unknown creature in Loch Ness and the first to publish a photograph.

In the Daily Mail you could read about horrible slimy reptilian monsters emerging from the primordial depths to wreak mindless death and destruction.

But when you had finished with Mosley’s anti-semitic cretins, what did the Mail have to say about the creature in the Scottish loch?

Well, some of its story was nicked from the Inverness Courier which the year before was the first to report on the loch monster with an article headlined “Strange Spectacle on Loch Ness.”

The rest of its story and picture it bought from a prominent London gynaecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson. He wanted to remain anonymous and the picture was nicknamed the “surgeon’s photograph.”

The Daily Mail paid Wilson £100 for the picture (over £6,000 today) but he was later fined £1,000 (£60,000 today) by the British Medical Association for allowing his name to be associated with it.

In his story Wilson claimed to have been walking by the loch when he saw the creature break the surface. He hurriedly took four photos, only two of which came out and one of them was rather blurry.

Tales of a beast in the loch had first came to national prominence in 1933 when a new loch-side motor-road gave easy access to unrestricted views of the loch.

One of the first sightings from the new road were from a couple named Spicer who reported seeing a 25-foot (7.5m) animal with a long neck crossing the road in front of their car before splashing into the loch.

The Daily Mail sent big game hunter Duke Wetherell to investigate and, like many a good Mail reporter before and since, when he found no real evidence, he made some up.

He used a hippo-foot umbrella stand from his hotel to make giant foot prints in the loch-side mud. The Mail printed the pictures.

It has even been suggested that the Mail’s man Wetherell created a plastic head and neck and attached it to a toy submarine that much later proved to be the real object in the surgeon’s photograph printed on the front page of the Daily Mail.

The legend of a loch monster is an old one. A 7th century book relates how St Columba rescued a man who had been attacked by a water beast in Loch Ness.

Perhaps the commonest theory about the creature in the loch is that it is related to plesiosaurs, marine reptiles that existed in prehistoric times. No less a naturalist than Peter Scott held this view.

Since 1933 over 1,000 sightings have been recorded. Most are controversial, with much argument and debate about their veracity.

Many have been proved to be inert floating objects, seals, swimming deer and driftwood. Over the years many hoaxers have eventually come forward to admit their deceit.

A million people visit Loch Ness each year and nearly nine out of 10 say they are there to try and spot the monster. They put more than £25 million into the local economy.

Despite all those visitors and despite the fact that virtually all of them today carry a high-definition camera, if only in their phone, there have been very few sightings and even fewer reliable photographs or film in recent years.

So with the lack of recent sightings it may be that the last specimen of whatever it was, frog, toad, salamander, giant eel, dinosaur or anything else is lying rotting at the bottom of the loch. As that is 755 feet (230m) down, we’ll probably never know for sure.

But I am sure that won’t stop many people heading for Loch Ness for many years to come. I wish them all good hunting.

Meanwhile many other places with deep and mysterious lakes have seen how much tourist interest and income can be generated by a lake mystery beast. 

Many deepwater lakes and rivers across the globe are discovering that they too have their own relative of Loch Ness’s Nessie.

In Scotland Loch Mhorair (or Loch Morar) is a freshwater loch near Lochaber. It is the fifth-largest loch by surface area in Scotland and the deepest freshwater body in the British Isles. 

This loch is developing a reputation for having a long-established monster legend to rival that of Loch Ness. 

Other places worldwide claiming a lake monster include Iceland, Italy, Argentina, Colombia, Turkey, South Africa and many states of the US including the Great Lakes that border Canada and the US.

No doubt more and more deep water lakes both in Britain and all over the globe will discover they too have their very own “mystery monster of the deep.” I’ll try to keep you posted.