Looking North on Loch Ness from Fort Augustus

Weather ... very cloudy. Forecast showers or rain.

Rather than spend the day round Fort William and have showers of rain we decided to go for a drive up the Great Glen to Inverness. There were no more than a few spots of rain as we drove North and we were in no rush so we just enjoyed the scenery and the colour in the trees.

We are familiar with the centre of Inverness having had a number of winter holidays there (a once a year shopping trip) when we lived on the Isle of Lewis. There have been a lot of changes since but the core of main shopping area is still there. We parked In a big supermarket car park just by the centre of town and took Maeve the Deerhound for a short walk. Maeve back in the car, we had a couple of hours wandering round the Eastgate centre and the shops nearby. We weren't really shopping but did go looking for CDs we knew we wanted, there being nowhere in Campbeltown to buy music.

We took a sandwich lunch with us when we set off back South. Again I didn't rush along and when we got to Drumnadrochit we decided to stop at Urquhart castle. There was lots of room in the car park (which was full when we passed by in August) so it was easy to stop and try to find a place to get and angle for a photo or two. The castle sits on the lochside and the car park is above it with a steep slope between the two. There are trees and shrubs all along the castle side of the car park which doesn't make it too easy to sneak a photo. We didn't want to go down the hill and visit the castle today (we had done years ago).

A few miles further down the road we stopped in a roadside/lochside car park and had our sandwiches. As we drove South again it was cloudy but still wasn't raining so we thought we would have a stop at Fort Augustus. We took Maeve for a well deserved wander up the flight of locks (Caledonian canal), then went back down to the viewpoint where the canal meets Loch Ness and you can look North up the length of the loch. There were still tourists in all the places along the lochs today but nowhere near the number of people we had seen in August as we travelled to Ullapool. Fort Augustus in particular had been extremely busy. There were enough people to make the place feel open for business but not so many that put Maeve off walking along and feeling she had enough space to stop and meet people.

It was late afternoon by the time we had made our way South to Spean Bridge. There didn't seem to have been much rain, but the clouds did look dark and heavy over the high mountains towards Fort William. Later we decided it would be daft to drive into Fort William so we had fish and chips from the takeaway in a local hotel and it was very good. Of course we had a big bottle of chilled Irn Bru (no sugar!) with it. If you haven't tried it you have missed the perfect drink to cut though the food and leave your palate clean.

Later still there was packing ...

E-PL5 f/7.1 1/250 sec. ISO-200 14mm


Extras:

Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness

The Locks at Fort Augustus