Loch Ness - a natural wonder
Loch Ness is probably the most famous body of water in the UK. But how was it formed? What shaped both it and the landscape that surrounds it?
It's an amazing story - so read on to learn more about:
How Loch Ness was created
A small matter of the monster
Loch Ness nature
Loch Ness local history
Local links
Look at any map of the UK and it's not hard to miss the Great Glen. The whole valley stands out like a massive topographical tear across Scotland.
It stretches up to 70 miles and runs in a diagonal line starting at Inverness on the east coast and through to Fort William on the Atlantic ocean. Loch ness - the largest freshwater body of water by volume in the whole of Scotland - forms a large part of this enormous glen.
The Great Glen itself was formed as a result of a seismic collision between the northern part of Scotland and the rest of Britain around 400 million years ago.
Glacial activity during the last Ice Age deepened and smoothed the Glen and, as the ice retreated around 8000 BC, it left behind a string of lochs - Lochy, Oich, Ness and Dochfour.
The Great Glen dramatically dissects the Scottish Highlands but quite why this massive division happened in the first place is something geologists continue to puzzle over.
The widely held view is that it's all due to the Great Glen Fault, a feature which geologists call a long, strike-slip fault, and which runs the entire length of the valley.
The reason both geologists and scientist take this view is because of the straightness of the fault, the shattered rocks on both sides and similarities between granite found at Foyers just above Loch ness and Strontian on the Fort William side.
When the first fracture took place, Loch Ness would have been filled with broken stones rather than water. It became a loch only when the glaciers bagan to retreat, pushing the stones back towards Inverness and filling the huge chasm with water. Loch Ness is, in fact, a very large example of what's known as a glacier trough.
There's another strong theory which holds that Loch Ness was at one time a salt water loch.
However the large deposits of sand and gravel, which the glaciers left in their wake, eventually blocked up the Inverness end of the loch, acting like a large plug, and Loch Ness became a fresh water lake.
And what a lake it is. Surrounded by mounains and rich with history and legend there's no place on earth quite like it. 23 miles long and 230m at its deepest point, it can hold London's BT Tower and still have room to spare.
What put Loch Ness on the world map was the sighting of a strange creature, now known as the Loch ness monster or, more affectionately, Nessie, and who has captured the public's imagination.
The first reported sighting was in 565AD when St Columba is said to have summoned a water monster in the River Ness and sent it packing.
Since then, more than one thousand sightings have been logged. The first modern day one happened on May 2 1933 when a Mr and Mrs John MacKay told a local newspaper they'd seen an "enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface".
Word of their sighting spread. Monsters were suddenly in fashion, helped in part by the release of
the film "King Kong" and soon Nessie was in demand with rewards of up to £20,000 being offered for her capture.
One of the most unforgettable images of this enigmatic monster is the famous photograph taken by RK Wilson, a London surgeon, in 1934. This really grabbed people's attention until in 1994, it was proved to be nothing more than a fake.
Since there have been many more reported sightings and a number of scientific studies, all of which have done nothing to solve the mystery.