There probably isn’t a more Scottish theme than the Loch Ness Monster and although there are already many dances working out this theme it was a thorough DNA research, led by excellent scientists in 2018, which formed the basis for devising this one.
The researchers forwarded the conclusion that no DNA of extravagant monsters could be found, but the existence of eels, especially ones of extreme size, seems to be likely.
So: Nessie, as an eel of extreme size, does exist!
It was the deviser expressing the wish to come up with an existing formation, but then with corners (similar to the 3C (‘chaperoned’) chain progression in the dance Forty and Counting), and the snake pass figure turned out to be one.
For this dance, it was initially called ‘Nessie pass’.
Links between snakes and eels aren’t very strong, there is some relatedness though: the Latin word for eel, which is
anguilla
, is the diminutive form of the Latin word for snake, which is
anguis
.
After the 16-bar snake pass figure with corners the last eight bars, i.e. rights and lefts on the diagonal, presented themselves ‘almost automatically’.