Loch Ness

The water is dark and still and deeper than the North Sea — 230 metres of peat-stained freshwater filling a crack in the Earth's crust that runs clean across Scotland. Loch Ness holds more water than every lake in England combined, and standing on its shore you understand why people have projected mysteries onto it for centuries. The surface is so vast and so black that anything could be down there.

Loch Ness sits in the Great Glen, a geological fault line that splits the Scottish Highlands from coast to coast. Urquhart Castle's ruins jut from a headland at one of the loch's widest points, its tower commanding the deepest water. The Caledonian Canal connects the loch to Inverness in the northeast and Fort William in the southwest, with a flat towpath that cyclists and walkers follow through woodland and locks. Fort Augustus at the southern end has a staircase of canal locks where boats rise and fall between loch and river levels. The monster legend, first recorded in the 6th century by the monk Adomnán, has never been conclusively disproved — sonar surveys regularly detect large, unidentified objects in the deep water.