A five minute guide to the Loch Ness monster

St Columba was travelling across Scotland when, in 565, he found himself by the River Ness. There, the hagiographer Adomnán reported in his Life of St Columba, he found the Picts ‘burying a poor unfortunate little fellow, whom, as those who were burying him themselves reported, some water monster had a little before snatched at as he was swimming, and bitten with a most savage bite’.

Upon hearing this, one of the saint’s companions took to the water and, sure enough, the ‘aquatic beast’ rose from the depths ‘with a great roar and open mouth’. At this, St Columba ‘formed the saving sign of the cross in the empty air, invoked the Name of God, and commanded the fierce monster, saying: ‘Think not to go further, nor touch thou the man. Quick! Go back!’ Nessie did — and became a legend that has endured for 1,460 years.

1. Although St Columba and his men were the first monks to spot the monster, they weren’t alone. In the late 1100s, travelling across Scotland, cleric Walter of Bingham sought passage across the River Ness. A boy took him in his coracle — only for the beast to emerge from the water, with fire in its eyes, and drag the unfortunate youth to his death. Walter didn’t merely write the story, but also illustrated it in a manuscript that is now at the British Library. Severely faded, the drawing — thought to be the earliest picture of Nessie, although Pictish carvings of monstrous beasts also exist — was re-created in 2013 by a team of scientists using a technique called Re-Zoom Spectroscopy. It turns out that the monster Walter saw looked rather like an enormous bear
2. However, by the time Nessie made it into war propaganda in the early 20th century, it had definitely morphed into a plesiosaur look-alike, or at the very least a colossal snake. In a 1914 German cartoon, a deranged cockerel (France), a menacing bear (Russia) and a behatted, pipe-smoking sea serpent (Britain) gang up to browbeat a peaceful farmer (obviously German), in a rather creative reinterpretation of the events leading up to the declaration of the First World War
3. Sightings proliferated in the interwar years, particularly in 1933 and, in November of that year, the first photograph of the monster was taken, in which Nessie had a decidedly serpentine look. Close inspection suggested it might have been an otter or even the photographer’s Labrador fetching a stick, but the theory of a great sea serpent captured the collective imagination and was corroborated by subsequent sightings, films and photographs
4. Inevitably, this is the image that filtered into art. Most painters portrayed the snake-like monster at its most frightening — bursting from the waters with a roar, threatening helpless fishermen and even sinking its fangs into a poor sheep’s neck — although, in 1961, Italian artist and illustrator Walter Molino had it tamely take an apple handed by a fearless child on the cover of a Sunday newspaper
5. Statues of Nessie, surprisingly widespread beyond the confines of Scotland, also tend to show it at its fiercest, soaring from lake or bank with its powerful jaws open to reveal sharp teeth — but not always. Niki de Saint Phalle’s mosaic-encrusted monster, once on show outside the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice, France, is wounded and in pain; the Red Nessie at the Janelia Research Center in Ashburn, Virginia, US, is a bold, abstract reinterpretation of every-one’s favourite serpent; and the latest sculpture to be unveiled (last month, at The Loch Ness Centre, Drumnadrochit) is decidedly friendly. Made by family-run metalworkers Inver-fab, it not only has benches between Nessie’s curly tale and sinuous humps, but also gives people an opportunity to have their say on the beast’s existence by tying a coloured ribbon to its steel frame: believers choose a yellow one, sceptics orange and agnostics blue