After that nice foot bath the path left the shore of the river and became intense and steep and when I was ready to take a stop on the top of a hill we had this most amazing view down a huge valley: A gigantic waterfall fell from the mountains down to a green valley with a meandering clear river, some colored points caused by tents, birds singing and and butterflies surrounding us.
We wanted to do a small hike today and we chose to walk along River Nevis to Lower Falls. Wonderful views to the surrounding mountains accompanied us and a very mysterious and picturesque abandoned burial ground lays peacefully next to the river.
Next to Lower Falls I got an ice cream from a pink ice cream truck when I saw an old man starring eagerly at the mountains. He said only one sentence to me, but this sentence really caught me and didn’t let me go. Read the story on the bottom of the pictures.
We had to leave our cute clamping hut this morning and woke up in the rain but when we left we saw some glorious lights over Loch Ness. This day we hiked through another magic forest along the Caledonian Canal. Just follow the canal from Fort Augustus.
We went to see Urquhart Castle this day and walked down to Drumnadrochit afterwards. The castle is a very well visited spot overrun by families, busses and instagrammers. The castles history is well explained by a short movie in the movie theater. But the sensation of the movie is the curtains opening at the end of it with a view on the real castle in bright sunshine. With some imagination you can see, how the people lived there.
Fort Augustus is interesting for the Caledonian Canal Staircase Locks. Otherwise it is very overcrowded with tourists. But we had a wonderful day with a little bit of fog and with great lights which enlightened the flat landscape around the canal very beautifully.
Behind our camping site a small magic path lead to the Great Glen Way which brought us to Invermoriston a small town with two old bridges next to Loch Ness.
On Culloden Moor on the 16th of April 1746, the English Army of George II under the lead of Bonnie Prince Charlie defeated the weakend Catholic Jacobites in less than two hours. On this ground, where the soldiers of both sides sunk into the mud just until their hips, the Highland Clan Culture came to its end forever.
When visiting places like Culloden Battlefields everyone must become aware of the futility of war. But only nearly 300 years later, on the site where it happened and with a lot of research done by experts, the meaninglessness becomes palpable. Greedy, deluded and immature leaders and a succession of bad decisions led to thousands of dead soldiers in the fog of this place and millions who suffered the consequences of war, years and centuries after it.
Like in all other wars.
A day with classic Scottish weather and a lot of beautiful landscape around Inverness. We started directly from our boat on the Caledonian Canal and made a big tour to the country side.
On a rainy day we went sight seeing.
We made our way through the mountains that day. The ground was wet and swampy and we had some difficulties finding our way, because where there was a path once, there was now a tiny creek. But as always the landscape was vast and beautiful and on a plateau we saw a boothy already from far away. We didn’t know at the time that something like that exists here and we were quite staggered by the welcoming atmosphere around and inside of it. There was a guestbook and we saw that there have been many international overnight guests during the last days.
hikeminded 