Torquil MacLeod's binocular sighting of a Loch Ness animal ashore

Loch Ness, 1960. The monster had been famous for more than a quarter of a century. Sightings of the animal out of the water were rare. Torquil MacLeod was a monster hunter who corresponded with Tim Dinsdale and Constance Whyte. The sceptic Ronald Binns would later call him "a fervent believer who longed for a sighting."

28 February 1960. About 3:30 pm. MacLeod had pulled over on the north-west shore road, now the A82, "2.5 miles out of Invermoriston." Something was moving on the far side of the loch. He turned his binoculars on it. "I saw a large grey black mass (I am inclined to think the skin was wet and dry in patches) and at the front there was what looked like an outsize in elephant's trunks."

The animal lay half out of the water on a steep slope. He could not recognise a head. For about eight or nine minutes it stayed quite still. Only the "trunk" moved, which he took to be a neck, swinging slowly from side to side, "just like a snake about to strike; but quite slowly." Paddles showed at the rear, where the body tapered into the water, with a large squarish flipper further forward.

Then it moved. A sort of half jump, half lurch to the left. The neck came right round until it faced him. It flopped into the water and apparently went straight down.

MacLeod's binoculars had graticules, fine scale lines in the field of view. He put the distance at "approximately 1,700 yards" and used the graticules to size the animal. His answer was about 60 feet. He drew the view through the lenses and marked the spot on a map.

The account first appeared anonymously in Tim Dinsdale's book Loch Ness Monster in 1961, with the sketch and the map. MacLeod also wrote to Constance Whyte, a letter later quoted by Nicholas Witchell. He never saw the book. He fell seriously ill with cancer and died just before it came out in May 1961. The retellings drifted. Witchell's version of the sketch showed three graticules instead of five. Later accounts gave the animal a visible head, or had it curve into a U shape before it slid away.

In 1983 Ronald Binns argued in The Loch Ness Mystery Solved that MacLeod could not have seen what he described through 7×50 binoculars from the opposite shore. He suggested a man in a boat. Dick Raynor proposed a herd of feral goats on the slope. Darren Naish revisited the case on Tetrapod Zoology in 2009.

Even the place is now in question. The sighting has always been tied to the Horseshoe Scree. But MacLeod wrote that the animal was "near a burn marked on the map." In 2025 the Loch Ness Mystery blog worked from his own figures and placed it at a stream about 1,600 metres north of the Horseshoe. The slope there is gentler, which the blog argues would flatten the look of a group of goats.

One witness. No photographs. Only a drawing, a map and a careful set of numbers. Yet the sighting sits among the classic land sightings of Loch Ness, beside Arthur Grant in 1934 and Margaret Munro at Borlum Bay, who also watched through binoculars. Eight weeks later, Tim Dinsdale shot his own film on the same loch.