St Columcille, who lived in the 6th century, is best remembered as the chief protagonist of the adventure of Irish Christianity to Britain. Some say his exile was imposed upon him, a penance for his dabbling in the politics of the time and creating the local crises which led to the battle of Cul Dremene.
Be that as it may, Columba, as he is often known, established a monastery on the island of Iona off the coast of Scotland, and has a very special place in the history of these islands.
But Columba has another claim to fame: he was one of the first, allegedly, to see the Loch Ness monster. His biographer, Adamnan, tells of a journey Columba undertook to visit Brude, the Pictish king, at his fort beside Loch Ness.
Returning across the water, Columba saw a man being buried, the victim of an attack by a kind of water beast, and just as the saint hove in sight, the monster reappeared and threatened a second victim. Columba raised his hand, made the sign of the cross, and told the beast "Begone!". The monster promptly abandoned its attack and fled.
Nothing further was heard of the Loch Ness monster until 1933. On July 22nd that year, a couple driving down the road between from Dores to Inverfarigaig saw a large cumbersome animal cross the road ahead of them, and disappear into the Loch. The apparition attracted much publicity, and there have been numerous "sightings", even photographs, of a long necked monster in or near the Loch in the intervening years.
Meteorologists have a possible explanation for some of the periodic appearances of Nessie and other similar phenomena: they think that what people really see may be a water-devil - and lest this seem like "a rose by any other name", let me explain.
A water-devil is a whirlwind, poor relation of the waterspout, which is in turn a water-based and weaker version of a tornado. The water-devil is the gentlest of these phenomena, and has a lifetime of anything from one to 10 minutes; it is closely related to the more familiar dust-devil which forms over land in very hot weather. Despite its relative lack of ferocity, a water-devil is capable, nonetheless, of agitating the underlying water into a seething cauldron of activity, and of sucking up spray and water-weed to some considerable height.
Could it be that occasional water-devils of this kind, moving slowly across the surface of a lake and producing the appearance of a long narrow solid-looking "neck", that behind the reported sightings of Nessie and other "monsters" of the lake?