The Water Horse — About the Setting: The Great Glen and Its Loch

The Water Horse is a tale filled with imagination and wonder. Read about one very real setting where this imaginative story is said to take place.

The Water Horse is set in Scotland. Scotland is part of Great Britain, which is also called the United Kingdom (UK). Scotland is one of the four countries that make up the United Kingdom. England, Wales, and Northern Ireland are the other three countries.

When people think of Scotland, they usually think of bagpipes, kilts, Braveheart, castles, and stories about creatures living in lakes -- or lochs as they are known in Scotland. One famous group of lochs in Scotland lie in what is called the Great Glen. The Great Glen is a large valley that seems to cut Scotland along a diagonal line. It runs from the city of Inverness in the north to the town of Fort William in the south. The Great Glen has three lochs, Loch Lochy, the furthest south, then Loch Oich, and then Loch Ness. Loch Ness is the most northern of the three lochs.

Loch Ness is the largest of these three lochs. In fact, Loch Ness is the largest body of fresh water in Great Britain. Loch Ness is nearly twenty-four miles long and between one and one and a half miles wide. At its deepest point it is 754 feet deep. The bottom of the loch is flat. Loch Ness holds more water than all the other lakes in England and Wales put together. Does it also hold the Water Horse?

This page is excerpted from Walden Media’s Activity Poster for The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep. Click here for a complete copy of the poster in PDF format.

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