Aug 4

Packing up from our hotel at Fort William, we headed north and east toward Inverness. The multiple lakes, or lochs are connected vial a canal which leads to the sea. This is called the Caledonian Canal, as this area is called Caledonia. Since there is a significant height difference, there are locks to connect them. These are the locks of the lochs!


One can see a depiction of Nesie, the famous creature from Loch Ness. One can also see the water on the sidewalk from the ubiquitous rainfall! We drove the length of Loch Ness, the longest and second deepest loch. Most of these lochs are glacial remnants, so the are very deep. Along the way, we stopped at Urquhart Castle, first built in 945, and greatly expanded over the years. In the 1100s, a king gave this land to the Grant clan, as a way of thwarting the MacDonald's power. It was destroyed in 1690 by the Grants themselves as they were abandoning it. The loyalist Grants were being overrun by the Jacobites and they didn't want it to fall into the "wrong" hands.

We went to the Culloden battlefield and museum. As I have alluded, this was the last hurrah of the Catholic Jacobites trying to restore a descendant of the last Stuart ruler, James II and VII, who had been deposed in 1688 by William of Orange. Jacobite refers to the Latin name for James, Jacobus. The Scottish Highlanders, who were Catholic, never liked the Protestants who had become the Kings. Prince Charles, who reportedly was very good looking, or "Bonnie", had been exiled in France and returned in 1745 with a small army to try to regain the throne. He was joined by the Catholic clans. They met in battle on April 16, 1746 with the regular Redcoats after marching all night. They were outmanned and outgunned, and it was a slaughter. Thousands of the clansmen were killed in a short but fierce battle, lasting only a few hours. Think of the battle scenes from Game of Thrones. The French reinforcements never arrived, and Charles retreated back to France. This was the last battle on English soil. The Scots remember and venerate this battle, and there was accurate depictions of the battle on a minute to minute basis. There was also a museum here to further explain all the particulars of the battle.
We proceeded to an ancient Circle of stones. These have been popularized recently via the Outlander series of books (which half the group is reading or has read - Ann in in book 1; I'm in book 4). The basic story is that a woman, Claire Randall, is transports via the magic stones to 1745, and gets involved in the uprising with Jamie Fraser, one of the Scotsmen. As far as I could tell, none of our group left us. These stones date back 2-4000 years, and, like Stonehenge, align with the sun on Solstice.
We headed further north, through Inverness (the "mouth" of the River Ness) and across the Firth or Bay of Moray. We came to Brora, a little town on the Northeast coast and settled into our quaint hotel. Billiard table, dark wood, very Victorian. After dinner, we went into town (all of 3 streets) to a little pub for some brews with the locals.