What happened
The oldest account of a monster in the Loch Ness area appears in the “Life of St. Columba,” written in the late 7th century by Adomnán, abbot of Iona. According to the text, Columba, while traveling through the land of the Picts, came upon people by the River Ness burying a man who had been seized and bitten by a “water beast” while swimming. The monk told one of his companions, Luigne, to swim across the river. When the animal rushed toward him with a roar, Columba made the sign of the cross and commanded it to go away – and the beast retreated “as if pulled back with ropes.” The Picts reportedly took this as a miracle. The story concerns the river rather than the loch itself, but since the 1930s Nessie proponents have cited it as evidence that the creature was already known in the early Middle Ages.
Witnesses
According to Adomnán – Columba, his companions and local Picts. The text was written about a hundred years after the events it describes.
Explanations and hypotheses
Historians stress that the Life belongs to the genre of hagiography, in which defeating monsters was a typical motif showing the saint's power, and similar “water beasts” appear in many medieval saints' lives. Ronald Binns considers this account the only serious mention before 1933, but does not treat it as a description of a real animal. Geologist Luigi Piccardi drew attention to the “great roar” accompanying the beast's emergence and linked the story to tremors on the Great Glen Fault. For Nessie proponents it remains the symbolic beginning of the tradition.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
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