Posted 22 March 2013 - 01:34 PM
There's a ancient tradition of lake monsters in Scotland, so of course there are stories about strange creatures in Loch Ness and many other Scottish lochs going back a very long time. The trouble is, they don't resemble Nessie at all. They're mostly about the kelpie, an especially evil and dangerous breed of fairy otherwise known as the water-horse. It was supposed to transform itself into an especially beautiful horse and stand around on the shore until some traveller decided to claim this valuable beast for himself. Of course, the moment he got on its back, it would leap into the water and drown him. Some kelpies could turn into pretty girls as well.
Some of the more rabid Nessiologists have suggested that, because Nessie has sometimes been reported as having a slightly horse-like head, and occasionally some sort of growth on its neck resembling a mane, these legends are evidence that people have been seeing it for centuries. The only slight difficulty is that you have to ignore almost all of the actual story to make it fit.
Likewise, the creature St. Columba met was a savage monster that had just killed a local fisherman, but he was able to miraculously tame it through the power of God. The only way you can make this fit in with modern sightings is if you assume that St. Columba tamed the beast so thoroughly that it permanently became non-aggressive and rather shy, and remains so to this day. Which is a bit of a stretch.
Even the early eye-witness accounts from 1933 don't really fit the modern stories, or each other. It's been a while since anybody claimed that Nessie has "eyes like headlamps", for example! And one of the more prominent early witnesses reported something that lumbered across the road on stumpy legs and had almost no neck at all - basically a giant hippopotamus. People didn't consistently see or photograph plesiosaurs until that became the paradigm for what it was supposed to look like, mainly because of the huge publicity given to the famous "surgeon's photograph", since proven to be a hoax involving a toy submarine.
All of which makes it sound suspiciously like a mythical beastie rather than an actual animal. By the way, if you've ever been to Inverness, or the tiny lochside village of Drumnadrochit, and seen the number of ways the locals are making money out of Nessie, you'll understand why, for a lot of people, keeping the myth going matters a lot more than whether or not it's true.
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Moon Gazer, on 08 March 2013 - 10:02 AM, said:
