Alexander Macdonald and the Abriachan Salamander

Loch Ness, before the monster had a name. Abriachan is a scattered village on the north-west shore, north-east of Drumnadrochit. Its pier saw the steamers and ferries bound for Inverness.

The year usually given is 1888. No record from that year survives. There is no day and no month. The story comes down to us through later hands.

Alexander Macdonald was a stonemason of Abriachan, though some retellings call him a crofter. He was standing on the shore when something rose from the water. It was "a large stubby-legged animal." It "propelled itself to within 50 yards of shore." Macdonald was taken aback, and he compared it to a salamander.

One later version adds a setting. Macdonald had gone down to the water to rescue a lamb. The animal was roughly 20 feet long. It paddled toward him with two short appendages. For the rest of his life, he called it "the great salamander."

A second strand of the story tells of more than one encounter. Macdonald often travelled to Inverness on the Loch Ness mail steamer. In the early morning, he saw the creature on the water. Another retelling places him at Abriachan pier, waiting for the ferry.

He was not the only one talking. Into the early 20th century, according to an anecdote credited to Nicholas Witchell's The Loch Ness Story, ferry skippers at the pier would hail the piermaster with a question. "Seen the salamander today?"

The earliest written source is a letter to the Northern Chronicle in Inverness, probably from 1933. By then Macdonald had died "a good many years ago." No one could ask him what he saw. Rupert T. Gould reproduced the letter in The Loch Ness Monster and Others in 1934.

One account says Macdonald reported the sighting to Alex Campbell, the Loch Ness water bailiff. That detail is hard to square with the timeline, since Campbell is known as the bailiff of 1933. There is also a rival date. One tradition places the encounter in 1802 and gives the name used at Abriachan, "an t-salamandar mhor." The Big Salamander.

Doubts followed the distance between event and record. The account was published only after the witness had died, and serious research leans on reports made soon after an experience. Historian Ronald Binns considers all claimed sightings before 1933, apart from the account of St Columba, dubious. No one has published a firm identification of the animal, but the salamander comparison found admirers. Gould and the biologist Roy Mackal were, at least for a time, proponents of a giant amphibian theory.

In 1933, a sighting by Mr and Mrs MacKay near Abriachan set off the modern craze. Arthur Grant later reported a creature with flippers on land at Abriachan. Macdonald's salamander came before them both. On 1 January 2023, the Inverness Courier marked its 135th anniversary.