The Loch Arkaig Lake-Horse: John Stuart's sightings recorded by Lord Malmesbury

Loch Arkaig runs about 12 miles into the hills of Lochaber, west of the Great Glen. A short way southeast of the loch, where the River Arkaig flows out toward Loch Lochy, stands Achnacarry, the Cameron of Lochiel seat. In the 1850s James Howard Harris, 3rd Earl of Malmesbury, stayed here in several seasons. A Conservative politician and former Foreign Secretary, he kept a diary of his days at Achnacarry. It describes one drive through Gerraran Wood that killed six stags and names John Stuart as his stalker.

3 October 1857. Morning. Stuart and his boy gave the Earl an account of "a mysterious creature, which they say exists in Loch Arkaig, and which they call the Lake-Horse." Stuart had seen it twice. Both times "at sunrise in summer on a bright sunny day, when there was not a ripple on the water."

The creature was basking on the surface. Stuart saw only the head and the hind quarters. To Malmesbury that proved "that its back was hollow, which is not the shape of any fish or of a seal." Then came the detail that gave the animal its name: "Its head resembled that of a horse." Whether the boy saw it too, the record does not say.

Malmesbury knew the stories. The same animal, he wrote, had occasionally turned up in newspaper accounts from the Highland lochs, and the late Lord Ellesmere had written an interesting article about one in Loch Assynt. Yet, as he put it, "hitherto the story has always been looked upon as fabulous. I am now, however, nearly persuaded of its truth."

The Highlanders, he noted, were "very superstitious about this creature." They held that there was never more than one in existence at the same time, and Malmesbury believed they thought it had "something diabolical in its nature." He said he wished he could get within shot of it. Stuart answered very gravely. "Perhaps your Lordship's gun would miss fire."

The entry was printed in 1884, in the second volume of Malmesbury's autobiography, Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, on page 83. It is the only primary source. The cited sources present no photograph, tracks, carcass or inquiry. Only a diary entry dated the day a stalker and his boy told their story to a man who called himself nearly persuaded. Many later retellings drop the words "in summer" from the quotation. The printed page keeps them.

No hoax has ever been alleged against Stuart or Malmesbury, and no source has proposed a specific explanation for the Arkaig creature. Malmesbury himself ruled out fish and seals on the strength of that hollow profile. Elsewhere in the Highlands, loch monsters have been put down to swimming deer, ponies, otters and wakes on calm water. In 1852 villagers on Loch Ness armed themselves against two "monsters" that turned out to be "a valuable pair of ponies." None of these ideas has been applied to Arkaig by any source.

Stuart's warning about the gun places the account squarely inside old Highland belief in the water horse, the each-uisge or kelpie. Modern lists of Scottish loch monsters name the Arkaig creature "Archie." Karl Shuker retold the case in 2015 in his survey of the lesser Nessies of mainland Scotland. Its neighbours on those lists include Loch Lochy, Loch Morar and Loch Ness.