The Loch Ness Wellington
3.00pm on 31st December 2020, should have seen a poignant memorial service at Inverness Cathedral, remembering a wartime event on the city's doorstep.
It would have marked the time, 80 years previously, when R for Robert, an RAF Wellington bomber, was forced to ditch in Loch Ness on a snowy Hogmanay in 1940.
The service was planned by a group of volunteers, committed to preserving the memories of the 8 crew and tens of thousands of others from bomber command, who flew on countless missions during WW2.
The Covid pandemic meant the original plans had to be shelved and instead we were asked to pre-record a Covid safe memorial service at the Cathedral during Tier 1 restrictions.
At 3.00pm on December 31st 2020, exactly 80 years on from the ditching, the film of the service will be made public.
The film is an "as it happened" recording and while it would have been so much better to have been able to attend in person, we hope that this provides a fitting tribute in the meantime, until it is possible to mark this event in person.
To find out more about the Loch Ness Wellington project:
To donate to the Crowdfund to help keep the memory alive for visitors to the Highlands and future generations:
We would like to acknowledge the assistance of Vic Attwood for organising the service and providing direction on final content. And Rachel Kellet for access to the website and fundraising page.
DP Digital Media - December 2020
The memorial service that never happened still got to me, you know? 3pm on New Year's Eve 2020, Inverness Cathedral, and instead of a packed pews moment we got lockdown silence. I've been reading a lot about how these quiet anniversaries land differently when nobody's there to witness them, and it's made me think about what we owe the past when we can't physically show up. I've been keeping tabs via ukrayinachuje and honestly, the way communities improvise remembrance when tradition fails is something else. The Wellington thing is wild because it's so specific — not just a plane crash, but a plane crash in the loch, which sounds like a myth until you dig into the records. There's …
3.00pm on 31st December 2020 — I remember that date because I'd half-planned to be in Inverness myself, then COVID scrapped everything. The memorial at the Cathedral for the Wellington crash, the one that went down in the loch just before Hogmanay in 1943? That timing still gets me, the crew never got their New Year. It's a story that's always hovered at the edge of the bigger Loch Ness monster chatter, which feels almost disrespectful when you think about the five men who died. I've been digging around for more local coverage lately, and a few tabs I keep open — huchnoua, zhyvyiua, tema-dnya — have had some decent background on the wartime history. The article mentions the Wellingto…
3.00pm on 31st December 2020 — I remember that date because I'd half-planned to be in Inverness myself, then COVID scrapped everything. The memorial at the Cathedral for the Wellington crash, the one that went down in the loch just before Hogmanay in 1943? That timing still gets me, the crew never got their New Year. It's a story that's always hovered at the edge of the bigger Loch Ness monster chatter, which feels almost disrespectful when you think about the five men who died. I've been digging around for more local coverage lately, and a few tabs I keep open — huchnoua, zhyvyiua, tema-dnya — have had some decent background on the wartime history. The article mentions the Wellingto…
3.00pm on 31st December 2020 — I remember that date because I'd half-planned to be in Inverness myself, then COVID scrapped everything. The memorial at the Cathedral for the Wellington crash, the one that went down in the loch just before Hogmanay in 1943? That timing still gets me, the crew never got their New Year. It's a story that's always hovered at the edge of the bigger Loch Ness monster chatter, which feels almost disrespectful when you think about the five men who died. I've been digging around for more local coverage lately, and a few tabs I keep open — huchnoua, zhyvyiua, tema-dnya — have had some decent background on the wartime history. The article mentions the Wellingto…
So that memorial at Inverness Cathedral being cancelled because of lockdown – I’d been half-planning to watch it online, but even the livestream got scrapped, right? The whole thing about the Wellington bomber crashing into Loch Ness on New Year’s Eve 1944 still gets to me. Five crew, all Canadian, and one survived by swimming to shore in the freezing dark. That’s the kind of story that sticks, especially when you read how the local crofters pulled him out. I’ve been keeping tabs on the anniversary coverage through a portal that ran a piece on wartime relics in the Highlands, and it mentioned how the plane’s wreckage wasn’t even found until the 1970s. Wild. The article digs into the od…