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Scottish Folklore & Myths: The Podcast

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My name is Lily-Anna Smith, I am a student at Forth Valley College currently studying my second year HND in Creative Industries: Media and Communications. 


Scottish Folklore & Myths: The Podcast was created as part of my Podcasting class for college. Episodes will be published bi-weekly. I chose this topic because I grew up with some of these stories and they have always fascinated me so I wanted to share them with more people. 

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Lily-Anna Smith

Episode 1; The Loch Ness Monster

Updated: Dec 19, 2019

Listen to the podcast here;




Many over the years have claimed to see The Loch Ness Monster, a creature that is meant to call Loch Ness it's home but George Spicer's account, published in the Inverness Courier in the early August of 1933 was one that would lead to the local newspaper getting flooded with letters (usually anonymous) claiming to have seen Nessie.

George Spicer, manager of a firm of tailors, claimed he and his wife saw "the nearest approach to a dragon or pre-historic animal that I have ever seen in my life" while driving by the Loch. The animal was apparently crossing the road towards the Loch with an animal in its mouth. Spicer also claimed it had “a long neck, which moved up and down in a manner of a scenic railway” that the body “was fairly big, with a high back but, if there were any feet, they must have been of the web kind, and as for a tail I cannot say, as it moved so rapidly, and when we got to the spot it had probably disappeared into the Loch.” – it’s interesting he could notice all those details about what the Loch Ness Monster but it moved too quickly to notice any feet.



Credit; https://www.donttakepictures.com/dtp-blog/2017/4/19/the-loch-ness-monster-turns-83-the-story-of-the-surgeons-photograph

Above is the famous image of the Surgeon's photograph. You might be more familiar with the left, as that is the cropped edited version that is most commonly used and the right is the original photo that was taken by Robert Kenneth Wilson. When the public first saw the image, they believed it to be proof of the Loch Ness Monster's existence but in recent years we have become less trusting and believing photo evidence has been edited.

The right image, with the black band across the top of the photo gives us a sense of scale between the monster and the Loch, while the left - first published by the Daily Mail was cropped in and blurred the shape of the monster which makes it look a lot larger than it truly is. In 1984, Stewart Campell compared the two images and came to the conclusion that the monster in the original couldn't have been longer than a few feet and it was likely to be a bird or an otter. Unfortunately, the Surgeon's Photograph is not evidence of the Loch Ness Monster but just another hoax.


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