Lachlan Stuart's Three Humps Photograph, Loch Ness

Whitefield. A croft on the slope about 100 ft above Loch Ness, nearly opposite Urquhart Castle. Lachlan Stuart lived there and worked for the Forestry Commission. A fellow woodsman, Taylor Hay, lodged with the family for about 12 years. Below the croft, down through the trees, lay a pebble beach that cannot be seen from the road.

Saturday 14 July 1951. About 6:30 in the morning. Stuart was up to milk his cow when he noticed something on the loch. He took it for a motorboat. Then he saw a rounded hump. A second hump appeared behind the first.

He called his wife and Taylor Hay. The two men scrambled down through the trees to the shore. Now there were three humps. The object had changed direction and was moving quickly southwards, about 50 yards away. A long neck and head had surfaced, held parallel to the surface and slipping under at intervals. The head was "sheep like but without the ears."

Stuart readied his box camera and took one picture. The shutter, already faulty, jammed. The creature swam back out into the centre of the loch and submerged. Stuart put its length at about 50 ft. Three humps, standing about 2 ft, 4 ft and 3 ft above the water. Uniformly blackish skin, not hairy. Behind the last hump, a commotion that might have been a powerful tail.

Constance Whyte, a local doctor, saw the photograph the day it was taken and interviewed the witnesses at the site within days. "I could not put forward this photograph with more confidence if I had taken it myself," she wrote in More Than a Legend (1957). The picture ran in the Sunday Express. Stuart was paid "just shillings, less than an old pound." Researchers including Tim Dinsdale, Ted Holiday, Nicholas Witchell and Roy Mackal accepted it as positive evidence.

More than twenty years later, researchers stood at the spot and realised the humps would have been in extremely shallow water close to the shore. That work is linked to Alastair Boyd. Then Richard Frere, a Loch Ness author, wrote Boyd a letter. Stuart, the letter said, had led Frere to the pebble beach and shown "three or four bales of hay" hidden in a clump of alder or hazel. These were the humps. "He was proud of his joke, in which he saw no harm." In the 1988 book Loch Ness, Frere called the picture "a deliberate deception, and a bad one at that." Ronald Binns is said to have suggested a small model instead.

Roland Watson, on his Loch Ness Mystery blog, found four inconsistent versions of Frere's story, one of them told by Adrian Shine on the BBC in 2008. Frere did not move to Loch Ness until 1959. In 1951 Frere lived at Carrbridge, about 35 miles away, and spoke only after Stuart died in 1979. Watson called the hoax story "unacceptable as evidence", though not proof that the photograph is genuine. Stuart's daughter remembers her father as "the most honest person she knew."

The negative is lost. The camera is still with the family, somewhere. Today the photograph is widely regarded as a hoax, often set beside the Surgeon's photograph of 1934. The family still disputes it. And the three dark humps off a pebble beach remain among the loch's most argued-over images.