Reflections on still water, Loch Ness, mid-winter.

We’ve just had a pretty hard winter, by UK standards. The coldest for about eighteen years. I didn’t manage to get up to Scotland this winter so this is an image for a few winters back. I am originally from this part of the World so it brought back childhood memories.
A winter high had settled over the highlands, leaving the air still, clear and bitingly cold. A dense layer of fog slowly rolled across the surface of the loch. Fog such as this is known as evaporation fog or steam fog, as the warmer water of the loch evaporates into the bitterly cold air above. Loch Ness is the second largest, by surface area, loch in Scotland (and lake in Britain), second to Loch Lomond. At 230 metres deep its volume is far greater and so it is the largest freshwater body in Britain, containing more freshwater than all the lakes in England and Wales combined. Thus in winter this huge mass of water cools slowly, rarely falling below 5 degrees C. As I watched a survey vessel appeared out of the fog like a ghostly apparition. A few moments later it was lost in the fog again like a modern-aday Marie Celeste. As always my images are available for licensed use. If you’d like to use any of my images just email me