Loch Ness and Glen Urquhart Castle

We have been back for a few days from our trip to the Highlands, and are again unpacked and preparing for the next trip…an overnight to New Lanark in southern Scotland. In the meantime, here’s a recap of the last days of our Highland fling!On Saturday morning in Inverness, we continued with the one-surprise-per-family-member-theme of the trip, and went to Leakey’s, which is a huge second-hand book store in an old church a block from the river in Inverness. The place is dark and musty, and there are stacks and stacks of books in front of the stained glass windows. The choir loft has been renovated into a small café that sells homemade soups and breads, so the whole place was also filled with the smell of lentils and parsnips and coffee beans. I took the kids up to the café with some copies of Asterix books from the shelves, and let David browse the theology section for a few hours. The kids were more than happy to hang out…they had good books in front of them, and I ordered them a Sprite and a sticky toffee pudding to share, so they rode out their sugar rush with their noses in the books. I had my own stainless steel French press of dark roast and an old book about the Jacobite uprising, so I was happy to sit still as well and let David shop. He came away with a big bag of books, and I added to the pile with a Jamie Oliver cookbook to take home as a souvenir.

We drove from Inverness south along the A82, which hugs

Loch Ness for over 20 miles. Loch Ness is part of the Great Glen, which is a series of long, narrow lochs that run from north to south and follow the geological fault that splits the Highlands into two parts. The Caledonian Canal links the lochs, so one can

travel from Inverness in the north all the way to Fort William in the south. Not only are the lochs beautiful, but they are full of historic sites as well, since they were used by the various Scottish clans to travel and to seize land from each other—this was an

especially important area for Bonnie Prince Charlie during the Jacobite uprisings (as I learned earlier in the bookstore…). Of course, most people driving down the A82 are not doing so in search of historic sites from the Bonnie prince’s day—they are too busy keeping one eye on the

black water of the loch in hopes of spotting the Loch Ness monster! The small town of Drumnadrochit (even the Scots can’t pronounce it, and just call it “Drum” instead) capitalizes on this with not one, but two Loch Ness Visitor Centers…one right next door to the other. There’s not much else to see in the town (though I did enjoy taking pictures of all the road signs in Gaelic) except the centers, and we decided to skip them, though I did take Emma into the gift shop of one because it had the largest collection of stuffed animals in all of Scotland—and that was her surprise for the trip. She passed on my suggestion to purchase a stuffed “Heilan Coo,” and opted for a pair of Scotty dogs instead.

In Drumnadrochit, we stopped at the Clansman Hotel, and took a Jacobite cruise out on Loch Ness. The cruise line gave all the kids on board small backpacks full of colored pencils and coloring books, and they spent the whole cruise hunched over the books reading about the Monster. For me, the cruise was interesting because the boat had a sonar screen mounted on top that displayed the current depth of the loch (it got to 730 feet while I was watching, though the loch is a bit deeper in other spots), and the captain provided running commentary about the history of the loch and the various Nessie sightings (and hoaxes!). When the cruise was over, a little girl sitting next to the kids who had also been hunched over her coloring book the whole time turned to her father and said, “Oh, darn, Daddy, I was messing aboot and forgot to see the Loch Ness monster. Did YOU see the Loch Ness monster, Daddy, or were you messign aboot as well?” It was pretty cute!

The weather had turned a bit bitter at this point, so we drove through Drumnadrochit to Glenurquhart for the night, where we stayed in possibly the cleanest hostel I have ever seen. In true Scottish fashion, the owner saw us pull up and came out of his house with his dog, and when I unrolled the car window, he said, “Hiya, Julie!” I think I had exchanged exactly two emails with him (and hadn’t paid him a dime yet…or a pence, I suppose) but he still greeted me like family.

This hostel was a hit with the kids as well, because it included a huge “adventure playground” outside the communal kitchen and had free wifi so they could rent the next Harry Potter movie to watch before bed. The next morning, we drove back to Loch Ness to see Glen Urquhart Castle, which is possibly the loveliest castle ruin we have seen so far (and has probably the most well-considered visitor center I have yet seen…it features a short film about the history of the castle with a little surprise twist at the end…and I won’t give it away in case you visit someday!)

One of the castle attendants noticed that John had brought his own wooden sword (the one we bought in York at the Viking exhibit), and took us into a back room to let us see a real sword. He let John put on an incredibly heavy helmet as well, and David put on the chain mail with him. After that, John’s wooden sword seemed to lose a bit of its luster for him!

After the castle, we got back in the car and headed towards home, driving past Ben Nevis on the way and stopping by the side of the road to take some photos. We stopped for lunch in Pitlochry, which is a small village of about 2,500 people on the River Tummel, and a popular tourist resort with a Victorian style high street that’s home to Scotland’s smallest whisky distillery. As a result, the sandwiches we managed to find at a small bakery were unusual…I got smoked duck with lemongrass marmalade, and David had a pheasant and green apple chutney baguette. We got Emma a toasty with “sun-blushed tomato, mozzarella and pesto, and John wanted venison (again!), and we took our lunch to a small park by the river to eat. Then we continued on our way, stopping in Dunkeld for a quick hike to the Hermitage, which is a wild garden built by the son-in-law of the Duke of Atholl in the 1750s. We made it to the waterfall and

to Ossian’s Hall, which is perched high above the waterfall and

affords a stunning view. We intended to carry on further down the path to Ossian’s Cave, but at the waterfall the kids wanted to play on the rocks a bit, and when I tried to follow them, I slipped on a rock and fell right in! David was right behind me and said it was a spectacular fall, but I was just so relieved that I somehow had the presence of mind to hold my camera up high enough to keep it out of the water. The rest of me wasn’t so luck, and I was soaked from the waist down. I did learn something from the experience: if I though the water in Scotland in April was cold, it was only because I hadn’t yet experienced the air temperature in Scotland in April while wearing soaking wet denim! I

managed to hang out with the kids for another 20 minutes or so, stopping periodically to wring water out of my socks, but after a while, I was too cold to continue and left the three of them there to go look for dry clothes back in the car!