It is the UK’s largest body of fresh water, its volume totalling more than all the lakes of England and Wales combined. It is also the UK’s greatest source of daft stories. For the best part of a century, Loch Ness has used its monster-adjacent status not only to finance a healthy tourist economy, but also to generate a small industry in Nessie-related fiction, from the inspired to the crackpot. The Simpsons sent Mr Burns to do battle with the creature in an episode called Monty Can’t Buy Me Love. From the pen of poet Ted Hughes came Nessie the Mannerless Monster, who was tired of being told she does not exist. And indie folkster Matilda Mann has a song called The Loch Ness Monster, containing this advice: “Stay right down there.” Not wanting to be left out, the Royal Mail has just honoured Nessie with a fine, if rather unscary, stamp.
To these slithery ranks we will shortly be able to add Nessie, a family musical written and composed by Glasgow’s Shonagh Murray and about to premiere in Edinburgh and Pitlochry. Murray was reluctant to tackle such a familiar Scottish icon, until a challenge from her father drew her in. “I had just finished doing a couple of shows about the women behind Robert Burns,” she says. “I was joking with my dad that I needed to find something a wee bit less Scottish. He was like: ‘Oh, there’s loads of Scottish stories that have been told – but not to their full potential. You should do a Nessie musical.’ On a dare, I wrote an opening number. The more I was writing, the more I liked it. There was something charming and special about it.”
Despite claims to the contrary, the story goes back no further than May 1933. That was when hotel proprietor Donaldina Mackay and her husband John, driving along the north shore of the loch, claimed to have seen a large creature on the surface. They said it resembled a whale and described it rolling for a minute before disappearing. Their testimony, reported by the Inverness Courier, set off a summer of sighting claims. At the time, the dinosaur-battling King Kong was becoming a monster hit in cinemas, but here was a fearsome creature on Scotland’s very own soil (or loch).
By October, the Scotsman newspaper, having gathered several testimonies, was declaring: “The fact that the loch does contain a creature much larger than any loch fish is evidently beyond all question.” People did question it, however – and only two days later, the same paper quoted a zoology professor speculating that the creature was a “large lump of waterlogged peat”. His view was countered by those who reckoned it was a plesiosaurus that had missed the memo about extinction.
Any good myth needs a backstory and Nessie advocates were soon looking around for some ancient pedigree. Step forward St Columba who, in the sixth century, supposedly fended off a “certain aquatic monster” by making the sign of the cross. This took place at the river Ness and not the loch, but it was all the evidence they needed to show Nessie had staying power. No one dwelt on the fact that, according to Adomnán, the saint’s biographer, Columba had form on this kind of thing, having variously silenced a storm, raised a boy from the dead, and turned a pail of milk into a demon.
“There are so many could-be-real sightings and so many hoax sightings,” says Murray. “But I like the not knowing. I like the mystery of it and the idea the natural world is playing a trick on us.”
Film-makers quickly jumped on board the Nessie bandwagon. Released a year after that first sighting, The Secret of the Loch was a lighthearted romance that culminated in a young London reporter having an underwater showdown with Nessie. It was edited by David Lean, no less, and called “terrible” by its own writer, Charles Bennett, who co-wrote it with a woman called Billie Bristow. The pair went to Scotland for research, with Bristow declaring: “I never met the monster, but I found a wonderful scotch whisky.” The monster, meanwhile, was played by a young green iguana.
For all its faults, The Secret of the Loch set out what elements were required for this new genre. Choose pretty much any Nessie movie – from 2001’s appalling Beneath Loch Ness, shot mainly in California, to 1996’s Loch Ness, which is worth seeing for Keith Allen as a deranged Nessie hunter – and charge your glasses for a drinking game of monster proportions. Your task is to spot arrogant outsiders, stereotyped locals and sceptical scientists. There are bonus shots for unconvincing special effects, and if you plan to sink a wee dram for every terrible Scottish accent, you should first seek medical advice.
In The Secret of the Loch, Frederick Peisley plays the cub reporter Jimmy Andrews, who is determined to get a story out of one of the few scientists convinced the monster is real. Even before he leaves London, Jimmy is trying out his highland flings and hackneyed Scottish phrases. Once he gets to Loch Ness, he finds himself in a low-ceilinged tavern where the drinkers are as cautious with their money as they are with their conversation.
Much the same pub with much the same clientele appears in every subsequent Nessie film. But there is one change: it tends to be loud-mouthed Americans, rather than patrician Englishmen, who treat Scotland so condescendingly. Countless curmudgeonly locals are shown knocking back whisky, withholding hospitality and fighting ancient clan battles, while the sophisticated incomers sort out fact from fiction. A rare exception is the 1980s cartoon series The Family-Ness, which is told from the perspective of local children (not that you would know from the accents).
As the composer of Nessie, Murray is allowing herself to lean into the Scottishness, but with more authenticity. “It’s Scottish folk meeting musical theatre,” she says when we meet at Pitlochry Festival theatre and look out at the rolling hills and the tree-lined River Tummel with its famous fish ladder. “We’re nodding to the heritage of where the story is. I came up here when I was writing and I would walk in the gardens and over the dam. It massively sped up my writing process. The music has a flow in the underwater moments and gives a grounding to the moments that need a callback to Scottish trad, rather than Instagram.”
As the excellent Mythillogical podcast points out in its Nessie special, The Secret of the Loch also established a trope about the scientific establishment. For belief in the monster to persist, a way must be found to dismiss any rational objectors, so nearly every movie features a diehard sceptic who is ultimately proved wrong in the most dramatic, tumultuous fashion, invariably by the appearance of the monster, rather fabulously in the case of that iguana.
Appropriately, given the number of fraudsters who have targeted Nessie, another common plotline is forgery. In fact, many of the most accomplished – and certainly funniest – films have been about fakes. In their short film Another Fine Ness, the Chuckle Brothers turn the monster lore into a joke as they fake footprints and whip out a tartan glove puppet in an attempt to win a Nessie-spotting competition. Similarly, in the 1961 comedy What a Whopper, Adam Faith plays a hard-up writer who thinks he might find a market for his Nessie book if he contrives a sighting. As his scheme goes hilariously wrong, he comes up with this superb justification for his plan: “I had psychology on my side: they wanted to see something.”
Best of all is the mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness, a great cineaste in-joke in which Werner Herzog is followed by a film crew as he supposedly makes a documentary called The Enigma of Loch Ness. “I’ve always been interested in the difference between fact and truth,” deadpans the director of Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man hilariously, as he asks his producer to find an “obsessed but credible” cryptozoologist to interview. His other requests include shots of Highland games, whisky, urchins and a “shepherd with a flock”. Herzog also has a thing about beards. The more he seeks the truth, the more his producer tries to fake the monster – and the more the “real” monster intervenes.
Murray, for her part, is partly using the legend to question our relationship with the environment. “So many people are flippant and dismissive of the Loch Ness monster,” she says. “You’re more likely to buy into its magic through children. For Mara, our lead character, it’s about speaking up for the natural world that she loves – and cutting through the noise of the adult voices.”
