Have you ever wondered whether or not there was some truth in the stories of monsters in Loch Ness? Here are all of the answers.
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We cannot jump into the monster evidence without a more general understanding of the people and geography of the Highlands. To set the scene for our story about the monster I need to introduce some background, particularly about the enormous valley which splits Scotland in two.
To understand the Great Glen, we need to travel back in time some four hundred million years. At this time Scotland was located south of the equator, perhaps around the latitude of northern Australia. Continental drift is a term we grow up with during our school years and then often forget, but plate tectonics do grab our attention from time to time as adults when events such as the Asian tsunami or a shake in California occur.
[A "glen" is steep-sided valley, often with a loch in its bottom, sometimes described as a U-shaped valley. A "strath" is a shallower valley, often with a river or shallow loch in it and the word "dale"is also used instead of valley. "Dal" was a Viking or Nordic word and is found today in Danish,Norwegian and Swedish,although pronounced slightly differently in each country. The Vikings took the word to Germany, too where it is "Tal". The word valley is rarely used in Scotland except in a scientific context. It is considered very"English".]
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Continental drift is the basic cause of most of these earthquakes yet the land masses, or plates, move as slowly as your growing fingernail.
When continents collide mountain ranges are built. We can actually see this happening in the Himalayas where the Indian continent has impacted upon Asia folding up the highest mountains we currently have on our planet.
Four hundred thousand millennia ago the land destined to become the north of Scotland was actually part of North America which was on a collision course with Europe. When this collision began the mountains which became the Highlands of Scotland were thrust up thousands of metres.
This relentless impact created a huge mountain chain which today we know as the Caledonians. Those from the other side of the Atlantic know these mountains as the Appalachians. They were not just formed at the same time, but are in fact the same mountains.
Whenever I mention this to groups of visitors I am quite often told that the mountains of the eastern United States. do look like our mountains. However, this visual similarity is irrelevant for it is only what happened to the mountains after that collision which gives them their present day characteristics. Any twenty-first century visual similarity is therefore purely superficial.
Four hundred million years ago, however, the mountains would have been very similar, all part of that single mountainous thrust and stretching into the sky, perhaps higher than the Himalayas. Little remains of those 10,000 metre (35,000 foot) high peaks.
Today we like to think that we understand some of the processes which allow the continents to slide about over the earth's mantle, but there is still a lot of speculation and theory involved.
We do know that some twenty million years later, the stresses and strains pent up in the mountains started a process whereby the northern block of the Highlands started to slide down to the south west. This geological fault line became a huge tear through the country and has become known as the Great Glen. Originally with mountains thousands of metres high on each side this must have become a staggeringly dramatic valley, the like of which exists nowhere in the world today.
