HE or she is the most famous Scottish creature alive or dead, a myth or a legend depending on your point of view, but certainly no one should be trifling with a monster from the depths of Loch Ness, even if it does not exist.

Nessie is yet again back in the news, this time because a Scots-born author has implied that the monster was nothing more than a 1930s public relations gimmick dreamed up to boost hotel occupancy.

Professor Gareth Williams is the latest writer and historian to commit to paper some words that many Scots and plenty people elsewhere may consider almost sacrilegious – that Nessie may just be a figment of the imagination, in this case the fervent mind of one Digby George Gerahty, a publicist by any other name.

Several people around Loch Ness are known to have taken the hump, so to speak, with Prof Williams though none would put their head or neck above water yesterday.

Williams was born in Glasgow and raised in Belfast. A graduate of Cambridge University, he is now the Emeritus Professor of Medicine at Bristol University and previously wrote the acclaimed history of smallpox, Angel Of Death.

Williams’s claims about Nessie have made headlines, but the man himself did not seek them and he is convinced that he has not trashed the story of the monster, but merely told it in a new light as a scientist doing careful research on the entire history of Nessie’s legend.

He explained: “As a medical researcher, I am very used to finding and presenting all the evidence, and that is what I have tried to do with this book.

“There have been dozens of books for and against the Loch Ness Monster, but I believe mine is the first that sets out to tell the whole story of the monster in as dispassionate a manner as possible.”

Portrayed in one English tabloid as the man who was out to debunk the myth of Nessie, Williams was anxious to point out that is “absolutely not” his intention – but then he is heading north of the Border next week.

His starting point was the discovery of the monster link to DG Gerahty, aka the novelist and short story writer “Stephen Lister” or “Robert Standish”, the name under which he wrote the novel Elephant Walk, later filmed with Elizabeth Taylor and Peter Finch.

In his semi-autobiographical novel Marise, Gerahty, writing as Lister, describes how he and two public relations colleagues dreamed up the monster story in London in 1933. Now Williams has found some startling evidence that may just prove that Gerahty was justified.

Williams said: “I have been to Inverness and elsewhere and I searched through the records of local newspapers such as the Inverness Courier and Northern Scot and in none of them could I find any reference to a monster in Loch Ness in the decades prior to 1933.

“Furthermore, I was able to find the records of the local field and natural history society, who recorded all the flora and fauna around Loch Ness, and whose minutes show they were fascinated by unusual animals, but whose only reference to a water creature was a ‘sea serpent’ found in the Sound of Sleat at the other end of the Great Glen.

In his book, A Monstrous Commotion, Williams does indeed give exhaustive evidence for and against claims of sightings and encounters with Nessie, and says he is able to provide explanations for the findings of experts such as Sir Peter Scott.

“And what I find fascinating is that so many people were willing to risk their reputations on something so illogical,” said Williams.

There have been many claims of sources for the Nessie story prior to the 1900s, but Williams points to the lack of contemporary evidence to substantiate claims of a monster in Loch Ness.

The most famous early claim of a monster in the area was made in the Life Of Columba by Adomnan, in which the Abbot tells how the Saint drove away a sea beast or kelpie that came out of the River Ness.

“The book was written at least 100 years after Columba,” said Williams, “and is full of his encounters with fantastic sea life and animals.

“Columba was trying to convert the Picts, people who featured such monsters in their art, so what better story to tell than Columba dealing with one?”

Williams thinks Gerahty based his wheeze on the Canadian lake monster Ogopogo of the Okanagan Lake in British Columbia, much publicised in the 1930s. Curiously, most depictions of “sightings” of Ogopogo show that it has Nessie-style humps. Or perhaps there is a species of lake-dwelling monster out there...