Wednesday was our ‘free’ day from hiking.  Originally, when we booked this holiday we thought to ourselves: “a free day, but we’re here to hike!  Why can’t we hike every day?”  Hmmm, now we know why…  The body that’s not used to hiking every day needs a little downtime, the pile of dirty laundry that’s been growing steadily larger over a week’s traveling needs washing, the lucky one(s) that don’t do laundry need a day to lie in, there’s pools to be swum in and sights to be seen = just one day off?

So with our chores done early, Sheila and I hit the road for a day of driving up and down the Great Glen which bisects Scotland in a roughly SW-NE direction.  This is home to the modern Caledonian Canal system which links the North Sea via Loch Ness and a few smaller lochs with the great fjord of Loch Linnhe on the Atlantic Ocean.  We headed up to Urquhart Castle, which is a fantastic ruin situated smack dab halfway up Loch Ness.

“Can I have one of these for my garden?”

Raided and burned and looted and stormed for centuries, the poor old thing fell to bits in 1692 and everyone gave up trying to put the pieces back together again.  They’ve done a wonderful job in restoring what ruins there were and we enjoyed puttering about the bricks under a very welcome sunny sky.

“Wave hello, Mum!”

 Then it was back in the car to traverse the rest of Ness, all the way up to Inverness.  We’d thought to stop for a nice cream tea lunch but the town wasn’t very appealing so we continued on up to the Battlefield of Culloden.  Unfortunately we didn’t have time to visit the £10 visitor’s center and the grounds itself also doubled as a wheat field and was undergoing harvest so we just piled back in the car and drove south thru the Glen again. 

We stopped at the town of …(?), aka “Loch Ness” for a quick cuppa, then hightailed it the remaining 1.25 hrs home to make it time for dinner!  Couldn’t bear to miss a meal of course!  Which is what I’m about to do if I don’t sign off so news of our latest hiking adventures will arrive in the next blog post…

Urquhart Castle in flowers

Tea at Loch Ness