Arthur Grant's land sighting of the Loch Ness Monster on the Abriachan road, 1934

By January 1934, the Loch Ness Monster was already news. In April 1933 the Inverness Courier had reported Aldie Mackay's sighting of a "whale-like creature". In July the Spicers described an animal crossing the Dores to Foyers road. In November Hugh Gray took his photograph. In December the big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell produced his "hippo-foot" spoor, a hoax. Into this story rode Arthur Grant. He was 21, a veterinary student at the University of Edinburgh and a keen motorcyclist. Commentators would later say his veterinary training added weight to his report.

5 January 1934. About 1 a.m. The moon was out. Grant was riding the Glasgow to Inverness road, now the A82, approaching Abriachan on the north-western shore, near the loch's north-eastern end. In his own words: "I was almost on it, when a small head on a long neck turned in my direction, and the object, taking fright, made two great bounds, crossed the road and plunged into the lake."

It moved with great speed. By the time Grant had jumped from his motorcycle, it had rushed into the loch, splashing the surface violently. He followed it down to the water. Only ripples remained where it had entered.

Grant's description was precise. "It had a long neck with an eel-like head and large oval-shaped eyes, just on the top of the small head. The body was very hefty, and I distinctly saw two front flippers. There were other two flippers, which seemed to be webbed behind, and there was a tail, which I estimate would be from five to six feet long."

He put the whole animal at 15 to 20 feet long. A dark object. Unlike any animal he had ever seen. A cross between a seal and a plesiosaur. He made several sketches from memory, and one was printed in the San Antonio Light in 1941.

No official body looked into the case. A. F. Hay, a Fellow of the Zoological Society of Scotland, led an expedition that examined the road and the beach. His report appeared in The Scotsman. He proposed a walrus. Marmaduke Wetherell also came to the scene, and sceptics later used his presence as guilt by association. Rupert T. Gould covered the encounter in The Loch Ness Monster and Others, published in June 1934.

The zoologist Maurice Burton examined one of Grant's sketches. He found it consistent with the appearance and behaviour of an otter. Steuart Campbell reached the same verdict in 1986. Darren Naish suggested Grant may have seen either an otter or a seal and exaggerated his sighting over time, with poor lighting stretching its apparent length.

Other sceptics argued that walls along the newly rebuilt road would have stopped any animal crossing. Roland Watson answered with the Ordnance Survey Popular edition of 1921 to 1930 and a 1940 military map, which show unfenced boundaries near the pier approach. He also moved the site, to a spot about 40 yards from a shadowed stretch of road, now the Clansman Hotel, rather than the commonly cited location a mile away at Abriachan. No confession or proof of a hoax has ever surfaced.

The New York Times carried the story on 6 January 1934 and ran an editorial titled "Sea Serpent" three days later. In 1950 Time quoted Grant's two great bounds once more. In 2018 a plaque marking the sighting went up at the Clansman Hotel, beside a large Nessie model. It was part of a plan by the owner, Willie Cameron, for about 25 plaques around the loch. A Monster Trail.