Ness is the most Easterly of the four lochs - the others, from the West, are Linnhe, Lochy, and Oich -that span the Great Glen, a Silurian fracture of Scotland along a South-West to North-East diagonal, from Oban to Inverness. This fissure, torn by ancient tectonic violence, was pared and whittled smooth by travelling ice, and when the melt came - perhaps ten thousand years ago - the deeper trenches filled with water. In the early nineteenth century channels of human construction bridged the short stretches of land that separate the lochs, and since then this Caledonian Canal has connected the Atlantic ocean on the West side of Scotland with the North Sea on the East.
The loch is the color of its sky - pearl of dawn, black of night, mackerel of coming storm, fine gray of coming drizzle, and sometimes it is blue - pale, deep, or brilliant. Its mile-wide trough stretches twenty-four miles, and it rests, this rapier, easy, a strip of shimmer in a cot of green. But the water itself is fretful. When wind swoops along its steeply wooded banks white caps purl in ordered rows, and even on calm days lone water-humps billow, ripples whirlpool and glide, spray-flurries from nowhere skitter on the surface. Waterfowl, screaming in the hunt, trail scratching claws across the water's skin, or dip clean through and disappear for minutes, then bob back to float prim, with not a feather out of place; flashing salmon jackknife, limply fall, and up around them showers light; and the occasional busy otter noses from bank to bank, with a clean and perfect wake spread out behind it.
The loch is the color of its sky - pearl of dawn, black of night, mackerel of coming storm, fine gray of coming drizzle, and sometimes it is blue - pale, deep, or brilliant. Its mile-wide trough stretches twenty-four miles, and it rests, this rapier, easy, a strip of shimmer in a cot of green. But the water itself is fretful. When wind swoops along its steeply wooded banks white caps purl in ordered rows, and even on calm days lone water-humps billow, ripples whirlpool and glide, spray-flurries from nowhere skitter on the surface. Waterfowl, screaming in the hunt, trail scratching claws across the water's skin, or dip clean through and disappear for minutes, then bob back to float prim, with not a feather out of place; flashing salmon jackknife, limply fall, and up around them showers light; and the occasional busy otter noses from bank to bank, with a clean and perfect wake spread out behind it.
Now and again, a velvet head – rounder than an otter’s, sleeker than a seal’s – bobs on the surface like a black bubble, then swiftly sinks, and once in a very long while a great gray-greenness undulates beneath the blue-gray quilt, which heaves and rolls. Even more rarely, either restless or inspired, she breaks the water into sudden rain that all but obscures her nature before she is gone again – but this almost never when anyone is watching.
New waters run into the loch from rivers all along its length; at the easternmost, northernmost point the little River Ness and the last stretch of the Canal carry those waters six miles, through Inverness, to where the long tongue of the Moray Firth licks greedy. At the midpoint of the Western bank the ruin of Urquhart Castle, shrouded sometimes in mist and always in dignity despite the floodlighting and the admissions fee, guards the long sweep of water from its lonely promontory. Urquhart Bay, close by, is where Drumnadrochit sits, astride the Enrich and the Coiltie as they chuckle to their destinies.
