Loch Ness

Loch Ness lies along the Great Glen, the fault line that splits Scotland from coast to coast, and it is long and narrow rather than wide: thirty-seven kilometres by about a mile and a half, but 227 metres deep, which gives it a greater volume of fresh water than all the lakes of England and Wales combined. Suspended peat makes the water almost black and visibility beneath it close to nothing, which is part of why the monster story has survived. It never freezes, because the volume holds enough heat to keep the Great Glen a degree or two milder than the land around it. Urquhart Castle stands on a promontory halfway down, held and lost repeatedly between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries and blown up by its own garrison in 1692 to keep it from the Jacobites.

What you actually see

• Urquhart Castle - a ruined fortress on a promontory with a working trebuchet replica.
• The black water - peat suspension that kills visibility a metre down.
• The Great Glen - the fault line the loch sits in, running coast to coast.
• The Caledonian Canal - Telford's waterway linking the loch to the sea at both ends.

When to go

May to September for boat cruises and long daylight; the loch is at its most atmospheric in autumn mist and in winter, when it is empty of visitors. Midges are a genuine problem on still summer evenings on the shore.

Honest expectations

The monster is a tourism industry, not a mystery: the 1934 surgeon's photograph was admitted as a hoax in 1994, and sonar and environmental DNA surveys have found nothing unexplained. Two competing exhibition centres in Drumnadrochit sell rival versions of the story. The A82 along the western shore is busy, narrow and has few places to stop, and most of the shoreline is screened by trees.

Nearby

Inverness lies at the northern end; Fort Augustus and the Caledonian Canal locks are at the southern.