Loch Ness Monster Explained

Chapter 21a - MONSTROUS - Abbots, Popes and Priors

[I need readers to understand that this book was written around 2010, which is long before we discovered the paedophile ring which existed at the abbey. Abbot Mark Dilworth was not a paedophile, but did use corporal punishment when he was headmaster of the Abbey School in the fifties. I later discovered that he beat some of the children so badly that they were hospitalised. 

[I could never be friends with someone who behaved in that manner, but at the time of writing this section of the book, I had no idea of his extreme violence towards pupils, nor of the paedophile ring which was active prior to 1994. 

[This leaves me with a dilemma - should I rewrite this chapter or leave it as it was. To change it would allow me to escape from having a record of being friends with this man, but we were friends in the nineties and to deny that now would be hypocrisy. For that reason, I have left the chapter more or less as it was when I did not know the Abbot's true nature.

[The image at the top show the Abbot on the left during the exhibition opening. Keith O'Brien, also in the image, is another disgraced cardinal for having sexually harassed young men in the church. And these guys believe in God!!]

I will long remember Abbot Mark Dilworth OSB of Fort Augustus with great fondness as he taught me much medieval history, new ways to look at problems and historic questions. He had a wicked sense of humour for a monk. I always found him kind and understanding, although I know of some Abbey schoolboys who would not have agreed. Conversely, he had no concept of normal domestic essentials. He did not "see" the squalor the monks were living in prior to my refurbishment and yet he could be most incisive when it came to finding a path through the minefields we faced in setting up the tourist businesses at Fort Augustus.

Over the nine years I knew him we became very good friends and I remember many a long phone call from Edinburgh in his later years when he faced his frustrations over fighting the legality of the Abbey's closure.

He was some task master too and I remember one occasion during the construction of the new visitor centre at Urquhart Castle, when he asked me to stop with him for a while to see what was going on.

After a few silent minutes he turned to me and said, "Tony, why does the path bend as it approaches the guard houses?"

I told him that I didn't know, but I'd find out for him.

"No, no, no," he said, "I know why it bends, I want to know if you do."

Again I said that I had no idea and asked why it does bend. He told me that he wanted me to work it out and to tell him when I had.

Well, I asked everyone I could think of why that path bends. I even got on to Historic Scotland. The custodian had no idea, neither did the protectorate at Fort George. I was stumped.

After a couple of weeks I had to see the Abbot on another matter and, while in his office, I said that I had made no progress whatsoever on why the path bends.

"That's your trouble," he said, "you can't think medieval. What was between the two gate houses?"

"A portcullis," I said.

"And how do you get through a portcullis?"

I thought for a moment and said, "I suppose you use a battering ram."

He then smiled like a chess player who knows it is mate in two, "And how do you get thirty men with a battering ram to run in a curve?"

The curving path was just a simple medieval defensive device to slow down any attack. So obvious when you think about it.