There aren’t too many people who can say they have swum the length of Loch Ness, but that’s certainly a claim that can be made by long distance swimmer Izzy Weatherall.

The 23-year-old achieved the feat earlier this month and it’s something that understandably makes her very proud.

“Fewer than 50 people have done it,” she said. “It was 22-and-a-half miles.”

Readers of The Local Answer online will know that the former Brockworth School pupil is a very experienced swimmer – she swam the English Channel last year – and she certainly needed to call on her experience in Scotland.

“Loch Ness had very different challenges to the English Channel,” she said. “In the channel there were lots of different tides but it was a lot colder in Loch Ness.

“It was also very choppy, you’d have thought, because it was a loch, it wouldn’t be so choppy.”

Fortunately, she had the wind in her favour.

“It was blowing in the right direction,” she continued. “I was aiming to complete the swim in 13 hours, 45 minutes but I finished in 13 hours, 18.”

Watching her all the way in the support boat was her mum Jo, while dad Marc was on dry land at the finish when she completed the epic challenge.

And while long distance swimming is, by it’s very nature, a lonely sport, Izzy wasn’t completely on her own in Loch Ness.

“There were quite a few tourist boats while I was doing my swim, I think I was an interesting feature,” she laughed.”

Izzy, a businesswoman who lives just outside Painswick, has no big swimmimg plans for next year but she says she’ll be back in 2027.

“I’ve got a couple of challenges in mind,” she said. “They are outside the UK so it’s very exciting.”