Watch the 'Nessie' video

The Scots joke about Nessie. The Scots exploit Nessie - look at the sales of those tacky green stuffed monsters. But the Scots also believe in Nessie.

Speak to people who live beside the loch and you’ll discover a kind of quiet respect. They believe there’s something mysterious about the deep, dark water of Loch Ness.

They know the loch and its moods. They admit they have seen things out on the water, bizarre things, inexplicable things, but they just turn and go back inside their houses again. These are the kind of folk who don’t rush to talk to newspapers.

“There is something about the loch that is unlike nowhere else in the world. It draws you to it,” Margaret Davidson, a lochside dweller and local councillor, told me.

"It is mysterious. It's deep and imponderable and -dare I say it -all of us who live on the lochside have seen weird things out there. We don't rush to claim any prize from Ladbrokes, but we know.

"The loch holds you, especially on grey days when you can see how still it is. The loch is so cold that you don’t get the normal amount of wildlife on it - and yet so deep that it has never been known to freeze.”

So will the legend ever die? It’s unlikely. The latest film “evidence” of something strange in Loch Ness was captured by Gordon Holmes, a 55-year-old a lab technician from Shipley, Yorkshire, last week.

"I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this jet black thing, about 45-feet (15 meters) long, moving fairly fast in the water," said Mr Holmes. His film shows something moving at about 6 mph (10 kph) in a straight line.

"My initial thought is it could be a very big eel, they have serpent-like features and they may explain all the sightings in Loch Ness over the years."

Adrian Shine, a marine biologist form the Loch Ness 2000 centre in Drumnadrochit, on the shores of the lake, regards the video footage as some of the best footage he has seen.

What’s makes it particularly useful is that Holmes panned back to get the shore into the shot, allowing for measurement of scale and speed.

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