Saint Columba and the Beast of the River Ness

Columba, also known as Colum Cille, was an Irish abbot who founded Iona and died in 597. About a century later, around 697 to 700, Adomnán of Iona wrote his life, the Vita Columbae. Adomnán gives no date for this episode. His second book is grouped by kind of miracle, not in time order. Tradition puts it in AD 565, while another estimate is around 580.

The place is clearer. Columba was "living for some days in the province of the Picts" when "he was obliged to cross the river Nesa." The River Ness, near present-day Inverness. Not the loch.

On the bank, he found locals burying a man. According to those burying him, the man had been "seized, as he was swimming, and bitten most severely by a monster." Men in a boat had come to help, but they were too late. They took out his body with a hook. Columba asked one of his companions to swim over and bring back the coble moored on the far bank. Lugne Mocumin obeyed at once, taking off all his clothes except his tunic before he leapt in.

The monster was lying at the bottom of the stream. It was "so far from being satiated" that it was "only roused for more prey." It felt the water disturbed above. It "suddenly rushed out." Then, "giving an awful roar," it "darted after him, with its mouth wide open."

Brethren and strangers alike stood stupefied with terror. Columba raised his hand and formed the sign of the cross in the air. "Thou shalt go no further, nor touch the man; go back with all speed." Terrified, the beast "fled more quickly than if it had been pulled back with ropes." By then there was "not more than the length of a spear-staff between the man and the beast."

Lugne returned in the boat, safe and sound, and the monks gave glory to God. Even the "barbarous heathens" who had watched were forced "to magnify the God of the Christians." No first-hand testimony or physical description survives. Only Adomnán's account, drawn partly from earlier material such as Cumméne Find's De uirtutibus sancti Columbae. The oldest copy was written before 713 by the scribe Dorbbéne.

Sceptics point out that water-beast tales were extremely common in saints' lives. Ronald Binns, in The Loch Ness Mystery Solved (1983), argues that Adomnán probably reused a common motif and attached it to a local landmark. Jacqueline Borsje reads the chapter as a demonstration of the saint's spiritual authority to the pagan Picts. Christopher Cairney links it to older Celtic water-beast folklore and to Irish water serpents. Jason Colavito places it among medieval saint-versus-monster stories built on the St George pattern.

Others look for a real animal. One academic suggested a walrus that strayed into the river. Binns also discusses the Scottish kelpie tradition.

Believers cite the story as evidence that a creature lived in the area in the 6th century. It is widely called "the earliest written reference to Nessie," and it usually opens the timeline of the modern Loch Ness Monster story that began in 1933. Sceptics answer with a simple point. It happened in a river, not the loch.