Fortean Slips: Loch Ness Politics

Loch Ness Politics

by D. Trull
Enigma Editor
dtrull@parascope.com

Among the sites of the most catastrophic hostilities ever waged over bodies of water, one might list Pearl Harbor, the Bay of Pigs, the Persian Gulf... and Loch Ness. The 23-mile-long freshwater lake in the Scottish highlands has long been the theater of an intense amphibious engagement, yet the age-old controversy between Nessie believers and Nessie skeptics is only half the battle. Lurking beneath the surface, there dwells a dark and hidden conflict that has nothing to do with whether the elusive local mascot is real. The secret war of Loch Ness is purely political: the forces of Historic Scotland vs. the allied Loch Ness Monster tourist industry.

There is a long history of Nessie being entangled in the dueling machinations of government and commerce. Newly released archives have uncovered plans for a Scottish government-funded Nessie hunt in 1967, the year of the Patterson Bigfoot film that made the whole world koo-koo for cryptozoology. But the plan was scrapped, reportedly because the Loch Ness tourist attraction was judged too lucrative a riddle to risk with an answer.

The present political imbroglio at Loch Ness ignores ontological questions, and, falling more in the classical tradition of so many other wars, it's primarily a territorial pissing match. Loch Ness is fairly isolated in the Scottish countryside, with the nearby village of Drumnadrochit being the closest populated area. Through an accident of geography, this tiny town that sounds like a stopover in Gulliver's Travels has become the international capital of all things Nessie. Drumnadrochit is the proud home of both the Official Loch Ness Monster Exhibition and the Original Loch Ness Monster Exhibition, and all manner of Nessie memorabilia and monstrous tourist crap are vended in the streets. But the one attraction the village doesn't have to offer is a view of the loch itself, which lies two miles distant.

A perfect vantage point for would-be Nessie-spotters is Urquhart Castle, an ancient structure on the shore of Loch Ness whose dilapidated grandeur provides bucketloads of gothic ambiance no souvenir stand could ever match. It's a wildly popular tourist destination, as you might well imagine, but in the small gift shop beside the castle, the name and likeness of the lake's theoretical resident are conspicuously absent. And for some reason, the shop's windows facing the lake are kept closed up and shuttered. You don't have to be Fox Mulder to think there's something fishy going on here. And the key to this conspiracy, naturally, is the government.

The custodian of Urquhart Castle is Historic Scotland, an executive governmental agency established in 1991 for the purpose of "safeguarding the nation's built heritage, and promoting its understanding and enjoyment." Certainly, the rest of the world considers Nessie one of Scotland's most treasured exports, ranking right up there with Big Country, Highlander and Scotty from Star Trek. Nevertheless, it would seem that Historic Scotland does not deem her worthy of its mission of cultural preservation. The agency puts on a public show of looking down its nose at the Nessie phenomenon, insinuating that ye olde monster detracts from the true historical traditions of Scotland.

But evidence suggests that Historic Scotland's hands-off policy vis-a-vis Nessie is more complicated than that. One must not forget that there's gold in that there loch, and Historic Scotland would surely love to get a piece of the action, whereas the monster marketing machine in Drumnadrochit wisely doesn't want the government mucking around in its wee bonny pond o' profit.

The already uneasy situation has been brought to a head by Historic Scotland's recent plans to build a new visitor center and parking lot near Urquhart Castle. The castle presently has parking spaces for only 39 cars, woefully inadequate accommodations for a site whose visitor count has exploded in recent years from 70,000 to 250,000 -- which is even more than Roswell is getting these days. Police have warned that the castle will have to be closed to the public unless something is done about the intolerable traffic congestion it generates.

Drumnadrochit's merchants plainly wouldn't want the lakeside tourist magnet to get shut down, but it would be an even more disastrous scenario for them to see Urquhart Castle transformed into a full-service tourist wonderland. If visitors could stop and eat and buy souvenirs in a cool castle on the lake where they can look for Nessie, it's no mystery that crappy old Drumnadrochit would be two miles up a certain creek.

As a tactical response, the tourist-trap entrepreneurs retaliated in the most potent way imaginable: by hoisting Historic Scotland on its own petard. Drumnadrochit accused Historic Scotland of plotting to commercialize and desecrate the venerable sanctity of beloved Urquhart Castle.

"They are supposed to be the custodians of Scotland's heritage," said Gordon Menzies, chairman of the Drumnadrochit Community Council. "But what they are proposing is its destruction." Ronnie Bremner, owner of the Official Loch Ness Monster Exhibition, protested that Historic Scotland's visitor center would "bastardize the jewel in the crown of Scottish tourism."

Pot? Kettle? Black? Maybe so, but Drumnadrochit's masterstroke of a rhetorical counterattack ignited a firestorm of public outcry against the visitor center. Historic Scotland had no choice but to withdraw its initial proposal, quickly sketching out a less ambitious alternative that might stand a chance at approval. The revised scheme calls for a visitor center at a grassy slope just down the road from Urquhart Castle, with parking for 120 cars and 12 buses. There would be a small tearoom, instead of the full restaurant first proposed, and visitors would have to pay admission upon entering the center, to keep casual passersby from using the tearoom and restrooms. Most importantly of all, Historic Scotland explicitly agreed that the visitor center would sell no Loch Ness Monster souvenirs.

Aha! So now the big picture is slowly coming into focus, isn't it? In reconsidering the current Urquhart Castle gift shop's lack of Nessie goodies, we have to ask ourselves: is this "no monsters" policy really in place because Historic Scotland scorns Nessie as pop-culture trash, or because the agency fears a turf-war uprising from the Drumnadrochit mafia? Or is it just out of spite? When asked why he doesn't stock Nessie items, the shop's manager pointed disdainfully in the direction of the village that has a lock on Loch Ness's star attraction. "It's their monster, you see," he said.

It remains to be seen whether the revised plan for Historic Scotland's visitor center will be approved. There seems to be increasing support for the proposal, and even Margaret Davidson, Drumnadrochit's representative in the Highland Council, has conceded that this solution would be "the best in an imperfect world." But there's no budging the diehard opponents, such as Alastair MacPherson, head of the village's chamber of commerce. MacPherson is promoting his own project, a park-and-ride system from Drumnadrochit to the Loch. Conveniently, the parking lot would sit opposite MacPherson's art gallery, where he sells landscape paintings of Urquhart Castle. Wheels within wheels, agenda within agendas.

This tempest in a teapot becomes seriously ironic when you consider that the two sides duking it out will both be screwed if people ever stop caring if there's a monster in that damn lake or not. Sure, Loch Ness is enjoying a booming business now, but most of that's an X-Files fad destined to peak and erode. That leaves the hardcore monster-hunters and cryptozoologists, but they're already getting sick of Nessie, having tired of her profound improbability and all the cheap commercialization that tries to cover it up.

Drumnadrochit and Historic Scotland may thus rue the day they reap the bitter harvest they sow. In the event that there really is something down there at the bottom of that dark Scottish loch, it's likely she'll still be alive and well long after all the visitor centers and souvenir shops have sunk into oblivion.

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