Loch Coruisk — The Cauldron of the Waters

Loch Coruisk, Cuillin, Isle of Skye, Scotland

A dark loch ringed by the Black Cuillin and reachable only by boat or a long scramble. Said to hold a water-beast older than the kelpies — a thing the Gaels named only obliquely, as An Niseag eile, the other Nessie.

Loch Coruisk — from the Gaelic Coire Uisg, the Cauldron of the Waters — lies in a glacial basin so enclosed by the Black Cuillin that the sun reaches it for only a few hours a day in summer. The loch is two miles long, narrow, and reportedly bottomless in places; modern sonar surveys have recorded depths greater than the local ordnance survey suggests possible. To reach it on foot requires either a 9-mile mountain scramble or the Bad Step — a sloping cliff above the sea, traversed by hand-holds, that has killed walkers in every decade since the path was named. The Gaels did not name the creature said to live in the loch. They referred to it as An Niseag eile — the other Nessie — and used a half-dozen indirect circumlocutions to avoid naming it: the One Beneath, the Coiled One, the Watcher in the Cauldron. The taboo against naming it was strict enough that Sir Walter Scott, visiting in 1814, was unable to extract any direct description from the boatman who rowed him across. Scott's own glimpse — recorded in his journal but cut from the published Lord of the Isles — was of a "dark dorsal eminence" some hundred yards off the boat, holding station against the current. The boatman refused to row toward it. Scott, who was not a credulous man, noted that he had never seen a Highlander so afraid of anything in daylight. Mountaineers camping at the head of the loch report the water blackening from the centre outward on certain still mornings — a darkening that begins beneath the surface and rises, as though something deep had turned.