Dores: The Beach Everyone Stops At, and the Walk Almost No One Takes

Quick reference:

• Distance: roughly a mile each way to the jetty — there's no waymarker, so treat it as a guide, not gospel
• Time: 20–30 minutes out, the same back — 45 minutes to an hour there and back at an easy pace
• Terrain: forest path behind Feltham's caravan, through two gates, hugging the shoreline the whole way; flat and easy underfoot, dog-friendly, until just past the second gate where it climbs briefly to a minor road

Fifteen minutes down the B862 from Scorguie, past the turn for Loch Duntelchaig, and you're dropping into Dores before the XC40's even properly warmed up. I know which car park I'm aiming for before I've left the house — the church one if it's a weekend, the Dores Inn one if it's not — because after enough trips down here you stop needing the signage everyone else is squinting for. Most visitors don't have that advantage. They miss the turning once, double back, and end up wherever there's a gap in the verge wide enough for two wheels. Either way you end up walking down through the gorse, and the water hits you before the view does: cold, peaty, and completely still, the way it gets on the days nobody bothers coming.

That stillness is the whole point, and it's also the thing worth being honest about before you drive out here expecting a monster. Steve Feltham has spent more than three decades on this shore, watching the loch for something that hasn't shown up yet. Ask him and he'll tell you straight — most days, nothing happens. Somewhere out past the shingle, twenty-three miles of black water hides whatever it's going to hide, and it isn't obliged to perform for you.

The Man Who Never Left

Steve Feltham arrived at Dores on the 19th of June 1991, sold his house in Dorset, quit his job fitting burglar alarms, and moved into a converted mobile library on the shore to watch the loch full time. Guinness World Records now credits him with the longest continuous vigil hunting the Loch Ness Monster — more than three decades and counting. He has no running water or electricity: he uses the pub's outside tap, charges car batteries off solar panels, and heats his shower on a saucepan over a potbelly stove. He funds himself selling small clay Nessie models to whoever stops to chat, and after years of watching, he now reckons the likeliest explanation is a large Wels catfish — which hasn't stopped him watching.

Go for the View, Not the Monster

Whatever you make of Nessie, the reason to actually come to Dores is simpler: this is the best free view on the whole loch. Because the village sits right at the head of it, on the eastern shore, you're looking straight down the full twenty-three-mile length of the water — something you don't get at Urquhart Castle, where the loch is something you view rather than something you stand in. At Urquhart you pay to get near the water. At Dores you walk straight onto the shingle for nothing, and nobody moves you along after twenty minutes.

The Walk Nobody Takes

Here's the part almost everyone misses, and it's the real reason to come. Most visitors do exactly what I did the first time: park, stand on the sand for ten minutes, take a photo, leave. But walk past Steve Feltham's caravan — yes, past the actual Nessie hunter's front door — and you'll find a path behind it leading to a gate into the forest. Go through, and the path hugs the shoreline the whole way to a second gate. Just beyond that, on the left, right at the water's edge, there's a little wooden jetty, half-forgotten and clearly built for something that isn't there anymore. That's your turnaround point for an easy there-and-back — dog walkers and the odd cyclist for company, and nobody else. If you want more, keep going past the second gate: the path climbs a short way to meet a minor road, and from there you're properly on the South Loch Ness Trail, free to pick a direction — Inverfarigaig one way, Torbreck and Inverness the other. But for anyone just wanting a decent leg-stretch with the loch on one side and the trees on the other, the jetty and back is the walk.

What the Beach Doesn't Tell You

Bring proper shoes. The "beach" tag oversells it a little — this isn't sand, it's loch-smoothed shingle that shifts underfoot, cold even in July, with the water dropping away fast if you're tempted to wade in. Parking is free but rough and gets chaotic on sunny weekends, so go early or go on a weekday if you can. And the Dores Inn, long the natural stop for food after a walk, is currently closed for a major restoration and not expected back until 2026 or 2027 — there's a pop-up food van running in its place, so check ahead rather than planning your visit around it.

There's an energy that pours off the Loch.

— Steve Feltham, The Spectator

Dores won't give you a monster, and on a grey Tuesday it might not even give you much of a view. What it will give you, if you walk past the car park instead of stopping at it, is twenty-three miles of loch almost entirely to yourself — which, thirty-odd years into someone else's very patient vigil, feels like the better bargain.