Model Railway Forum

I like to have fun with this charming Scottish legend, but after this find in Rutland Water Nature Reserve near Leicester, who needs her?

https://www.foxnews.com/science/massive ... -reservoir

That's enough to keep me out of swimming pool.

When I was about 7 years old ( over 50 years ago) we went on a family holiday to a caravan site at Drumnadrochit ( might not be the correct spelling) which is on the banks of Loch Ness. on arrival we found a movie film crew on-site filming a Sherlock Holmes movie and they had their own floating monster, which was a black dragon on pontoons with a swaying head and fire coming out it’s nostrils.

As if this was not scary enough it was moored at a jetty right next to our caravan and the monster’s head used to sway in the wind...... our caravan did not have a toilet and we had to walk past the monster at night to go to the loo !

They also has a small yellow midget submarine which they used to dive below the surface and tow the monster along...... one day they went out filming and the tow rope snapped and the monster sank and they never found it !

Fast forward some 45 years and I was at a business conference in Atlanta where the guest speaker was one Dr Robert Ballard, a renowned Oceanographer and the man who found the Titanic. During a Q&A session, I asked if he believed in the Loch Ness monster and if he ever thought of looking for it, to which he replied been there, done it and there is no monster.

He explained that for a prehistoric monster to have survived from the ice age, there has to have been a colony of approx 14 so rather than hunt for the elusive Nessie, why not hunt for granny and granddad’s bones !....... he and his team using state of the art equipment scanned the Loch and found nothing, but they were not encouraged to published their results as there is a whole industry and many people’s livelihoods in the area around the monster myth, eg Nessie burgers.

He went on to say that on the last day of his survey and using the best in the business GPS Technology, they sailed their boat exactly down the centre of the Loch, throwing off a wave that bounced back of the granite sides causing a massive ripple - that day the phones went crazy with Monster sightings !

I told him about my Sherlock Holmes monster from all these years ago and the fact that a couple of weeks before I went to Atlanta, the Loch had finally relinquished my monster.

Wow, that is a fascinating story! The loch, even though populated by harmless mudfish and scrappy, has a rather sinister look to it. I love to
swim in wild waters, but not when I perceive that I am not at the top of the food chain. I don't believe you could pay me enough to put a toe
into that murk.

Never the less, living fossils appear fairly regularly in the water. It is a little understood fact that dinosaurs eat poodles. And, to one's regret, the occasional small child that ventures to the shore line or the homeless person sleeping off a drunk. This dinosaur is the American Crocodile, fossils of which are found well into the Jurassic period. Turtles and tortoises, generally much more benign, are also living fossils. A species of fish found in the depths of South Africa, the coelacanth, turns up in the fossil record 400 million years ago. Like to eat chicken? Well, enjoy your dinosaur meat. Chickens are directly descended from raptors. The expression, "rare as hen's teeth" is actually a misnomer. Birds, and chickens, do not have teeth, but chickens actually do: they simply are unformed because of a recessive gene. Unlock that gene, as has been done, and you have a chicken with sharp, pointy teeth. Sharks, for that matter, simply lost one gill slit along the way, though there are six gill sharks which, like the humble coelacanth, are as much dinosaur as T Rex ever was. The great beauty of it all is that dinosaurs never went extinct. Many species of dinosaurs hit a dead end, as all species eventually do, but for the large part they merely evolved into new things, like turkeys and chickens, and in other cases, they changed not a wit!

Rutland Water has a cycle route all the way round and a few years ago I took my bike there in my car, parked on the south side and rode around it.
At one point the route runs within 500 feet of where the beast was found but of course nothing was known of it then.
The route at the Western end follows a road for a short distance and runs under a railway bridge. This railway line runs South to the Welland Valley Viaduct which is the longest brick built viaduct in the UK with a length of over 1 KM and has 82 arches. It can be seen from the A47 Leicester to Peterborough road and is quite spectacular.
Coincidentally I bought an electric bike a couple of years ago from a dealer in one of the Rutland Water car parks.
Colin.

My sister lives in Burley next to the water, we always go down when staying over, really is a lovely place.