Lewis in a Day

Lewis is very bare. Coming in on the ferry to Tarbert, I saw one or two trees and every here and there a house or two, and also the bridge that connects Harris and Lewis. There weren’t many beaches to see, just rock dropping straight into the ocean and marked clearly with a high tideline. The colours at this time of year are shades of brown, from golden to black, very dark purple, occasional green, and - in the right weather – a variant of blue for the sky and the lochs and ocean.

Lews Castle

It takes an hour on the bus to get from Tarbert to Stornoway, the main town at the other end of the island with one of my favourite place names. It was a brilliant chance to see the scenery as, apart from free-roaming shaggy sheep and the occasional little village, there doesn’t seem much else. The barren hills look like mountains, simply for their barrenness and proximity; there are barren moors with peat and heather, stretching out forever. You wind and curve and rise and drop. And suddenly, it breaks into a proper little town – not just houses perched on the land, but a town with a tangle of roads and buildings small and large, shops, houses, places to eat, and trees. There were lots of trees. The castle grounds, on the other side of the little stab of bay that prods the land here in two, has a wood on it with a golf course in the middle and (unsurprisingly) the castle looking across the other side. The castle was being repaired when I walked past it the next day, so I followed the walkway at the water’s edge for a while. Then it rained.

I had dinner both nights with a woman from Switzerland, who had been on the same bus and who was at the same hostel. (I had a tower of chicken stuffed with apricot and spinach the first night (honey-drizzled vegetables to accompany), and on the second night, tired after lack of sleep and a fantastic whirlwind tour of Lewis’ most renowned attractions, cheesey bacony chickeny pasta.) She is studying in Glasgow for a year, and has been on a few short trips – to the Highlands, to the Orkneys, and she was just drawing her trip around the islands to a close. Like me, she’s had a lot of rain, but has been even more constrained it seems by the public transport times, as it’s been the islands she’s been exploring on foot. “Do it in a car,” she said.

She came along with me on a tour kindly provided – and provided only on kindness (and in a car) – by the friend of a family friend who I’d never met. Having written some historical books on the place, as well as being a local, he knew his stuff and was generous in sharing it. He picked us up from outside our hostel in the rain, his little dog on the backseat, and drove us out of the falling weather towards the Callanish stones, where the sun decided to come out. The weather also was kind, and for most of the day we had sun.

The biggest circle of Callanish stones are perhaps the most famous attraction on Lewis, but those stones are but one of the attractions, and but one of the stone sites. We went to see one of the smaller circles first, a short way off the road simply sitting in a paddock with all around the yawning land of lochs and hills. Other stones, including the famous ones, were visible in the distance, along with houses and sheep and at least one tree. The stone itself is quite beautiful – Lewissian gneiss, a native of the island, in slabs, with the grain in it forming subtle patterns, and the glint of minerals in the light. They’ve found traces of pollen, we were told, from a time when the island had a softer climate, from a time around 5000 years ago when the people who lived here shifted these heavy chunks of rock and placed them upright in the ground, aligning them with the stars to mark time’s passage.

One stone in the first circle

The other stones – the ones with their very own visitors’ centre – are are arranged in the shape of a Celtic cross a little below the highest point of the hill where once a temple stood. In the centre is the circle, a small heart in the geometrical arrangement. Many of the stones here are bigger – though the largest standing stone on the island, which we later saw, stands solitary and dwarfs these all. The purpose of this largest stone is uncertain, though they have ventured a guess that it was used for executions, placing the criminal against it then pelting them to death with rocks.

Traditionally, with wood very scarce, the main material for constructing buildings is stone. We saw this clearly in both the Carloway broch and in the blackhouses. The broch was fantastic. With the walls partially recycled for other stone constructions, it gives a good cross-section, showing off the double walls. Signs of the different levels are still apparent, and you can walk up one of the partial staircases that still sits inside the space between outer and inner wall. Don’t bang your head on the low entrance way. It hurts.

Carloway broch

Blackhouses were the traditional and rather Vikingesque style of living on the islands – a building with all from beds to cows under one roof, but before you jump on the barbarian wagon, there were separate rooms and the structure was cleverly designed to allow people to survive in the harsh winters. The ‘barn’ part, which housed livestock in the barren season, was sloped down a little to prevent effluence moving into the wrong part of the structure, and there tended to be a hallway between the different spaces.

Arnol Blackhouse peat fire

However, it’s the peat fire in the centre of the living space and the thatched roof that filtered the smoke that are the most distinctive parts of a blackhouse. I got to see and smell and taste a peat fire going in the Arnol Blackhouse, a well-restored and rather authentic example of the way of living. It was impressive. I think it gives a fantastic example of the way architecture reflects ways of life, and in perhaps more than the ‘practical’ sense, for it was a very communal and social way of life quite different from the privacy and individual focus that we have in our society today. The chap stoking the peat fire (they were preparing for a group of school children coming in, and it was rather nippy outside) made the brilliant observation that this is where it all began – people, in whichever part of the world, whatever they look like, whatever they live in, clustered together around a central hearth fire.

For the houses in the village at Gearrannan, it’s moved a little more in the Western direction of tourism. These houses were inhabited until relatively recent times. The museum building shows a house almost, I believe, as it was when lived in. There’s a strange mix of new and old, with the cold floor and walls and one end and cute wooden furniture and covered walls, but still the floor is sloped, and there are still boxbeds built into the walls with curtains for warmth. Although the other buildings are becoming hostels and self-catered stay overs, it was nice to see a group of the stone walls and thatched roofs together, with nets and bricks to hold them down from the wind. It also had a fantastic outlook over a beach with crashing waves a little further down.

Blackhouses at Gearrannan

And certainly there were some fantastic beaches to see. Incredible beaches, with sand, and with patterned stones rolled smooth. Dalmore beach had wild surf, battering in on itself, crashing on the rocky edges either side of the little sandy bay. It put me in mind of Keats’s “eternal fierce destruction” – “I saw/ Too far into the sea,” he said. “... I saw too distinct into the core/ of an eternal fierce destruction.” But I had nothing of Keats’ sadness or despair, just his awe at the incredible power.

Dalmore beach

The beach at Shawbost

We visited a smaller calmer beach, where a freshwater loch sat on one side of the stones and the ocean at the other; the Butt of Lewis where the North and the Atlantic oceans meet and crash into each other; the lighthouse, with high rocks, where it began to rain. In addition to that we also visited an old Norse mill, restored as a school project, and a whalebone arch from the jaw of a large blue whale that simply washed ashore one day. How such a huge creature could simply wash ashore, miraculously lying there in the morning where there was no hint of it the day before, I cannot begin to imagine.

The jawbone of a massive blue whale, and the harpoon
that was in the creature when it arrived on the beach.

We returned to Stornoway rather tired, but in the wonderful way you get when you’ve enjoyed your day and seen splendid things. It was marvellous too to have been given the day, as I said, by kindness. I found my way to bed. Maybe I dreamed of the stones. Oh, how they danced, the little people of Callanish.

Portree and Uig: Impressions and The Like

On Skye I found my first one lane roads, just wide enough for one vehicle to fit at a time with dips at the side marked “Passing Place.” Whether you’re in a very wide American car with the wheel on the wrong side, or a smaller car with the wheel on the right, can make quite a difference to the journey you experience. The busses I took, however, went along the main road between Broadford, Portree and Uig, and it seemed that these roads were cleverly designed to fit two vehicles at one time.

Portree harbour

Portree is a beautiful little town. It’s just the right size, neither too large nor too small, and looks across Loch Portree and the Sound of Rassay and shapely hills and headlands. I had gorgeous sun, interspersed though it was with rain, that highlighted the shapes in the land and the smoothness of the harbour. The houses looked dry and inviting, and the little fishing boats caught in that moment between one half of business and the other. I was delighted to be so delighted by Portree, because it’s here that some of my Stewart ancestors come from.

On my walk around the headland

The Gaelic name is “Port Righ,” the King’s Port, and it’s easy to see on a purely aesthetic basis why a King would want to claim such a place, even if it was (reputedly) only a visitation by James V that gave it its name. The use of Gaelic names is something I haven’t yet noted – throughout Scotland, both the native and the English language are used for place names on road signs and often on parts of information boards about sites. On the Isle of Lewis, I found that English was given the smaller font, and sometimes didn’t have a font at all. The ferries also have their English messages cushioned in the native tongue. It’s quite nice.

I left my nice wool and possum hat on the bus and dropped off my luggage at the Bayfield Backpackers hostel, then walked back along the road out of town towards the Aros Centre, which contains a cinema and many Scottish-themed items for sale, but also has an exhibition about sea eagles. Sea eagles once populated the islands but like other predatory animals (wolves and bears, for example) were hunted down to nothing. A programme has been running for decades now to reintroduce sea eagles from, I believe, Norway, and has started to meet some success. There is a nest about a mile for Portree, and there have been sightings around the place – even in Ullapool.

Sadly, I saw no eagles on my trip, but I did have a long chat with the fellow there about New Zealand birds and conversation in both countries. He was also interested to hear I came from the Portree Stewart line, and remembered there was a large house that had been owned by two Stewart brothers. I wasn’t able to locate the building, nor to find any Stewarts in the graveyard along the roadside. I did find a man declared ‘Seaforth Highlander,’ with the MacKenzie stag crest embossed on his stone. I found it a nice touch that all the headstones faced towards the loch, giving the dead a prime view even when it might be more inconvenient for the living to read the stones.

The late afternoon took me, through the same startling sun and bursts of rain, along the headland, above black rocks and up a steep hillside beside farmland. The shadow of a hill fell just on the borderline of a stone fence, as if it somehow formed a boundary for the light. It hailed on me, very hard. I think two great tits tried to warn me, fluttering about in branches near my head with their blue and yellow feathers. The weather cleared and the rabbits came out in force to absorb the golden light. The best views, I think, came on a path I took out away from Portree for just a short while, on the top of farmland hills, from which I could see everything. It reminded me, just a little, of our hill at home.

The next morning I caught the bus to Uig, where the ferry to Tarbert leaves. I had enough time to wander around in the rain – up a hill road with views across farmland and the overcast harbour, through the little community wood with a double-step waterfall at the end, to the Faerie Glade of small and strange land formations. There are conical hills and a protruding peak of rock and turf. Around it people have arranged stones. There even seems to be a miniature Pet Semetary, the stones in a spiral and the bone of a sheep placed in the middle.

Odd formations. Must be faeries again.

Spot the Semetary cricle

Waterfall in Uig

One enjoyment I've found, which I’d heard travellers found but hadn’t really considered, has been meeting people in passing. In Broadford, two chaps from Italy arrived late to occupy the other two beds in my room. They had driven up from Edinburgh in a hired car, and had part of the following day to drive around Skye before heading towards the Orkneys. Two weeks, they had, to do an insane amount of driving around Scotland and England. We went for dinner at the only place still open at 11 on a Saturday night in Broadford (which they most unexpectedly and kindly paid for), trying to describe animals we’d seen to work out the names for them in our languages, and working on my Italian phrases of which I knew and still know none.  They were particularly interested in the average income in NZ, the comparative price of renting an apartment, and purchasing a NZ$20 bill for ten pounds to add to their currency collection. In Portree I met a girl with the same name as me. She was also travelling alone, had delegated herself two months, had left behind a boyfriend with an Irish name she’d been dating for just over a year and a half, and loved Scotland. She was an artist from Oregon.

Skye is quite stunning. The landscape is so varied, and there is a lot that I didn’t see. There are certainly limitations to not having your own transport on Skye, and I think that next time I come – for I will – I will aim to have a vehicle at my disposal.

Rook

I made it to Skye

The Caladonian MacBrayne ferry runs the main services between the mainland and the surrounding islands. For the Small Isles – Eigg, Muck, Rum and Canna – this isn’t necessarily daily, and even if it passes the island you want to set your feet on you might have to wait for it to do the rounds before it makes your stop. In some ways, I imagine that this would mean a little more planning if you lived on the island (I understand there are only eleven inhabitants on one at the moment, and just three on another) because if you missed your ferry that would be it. But in another way it would also give a more relaxed pace for your life. You don’t have eighteen buses for fifteen destinations to do any selection of varied activities to choose from. You’re constrained, and perhaps there’s a freedom in that. This, of course, comes from someone who’s never lived on an island with just one ferry almost daily, and hasn’t actually spoken to anyone about it.

I did catch a ferry for part of its Friday round to two of the Small Isles, Muck and Eigg, just for a cruise to get a closer look at those shapes visible on Mallaig’s horizon, though that hardly makes me an expert. The weather was giving the same mix of rain and sun from the previous day, and the entire journey we passed through shadows and skiffs and sure them in turn chase over the land forms, islands and mainland alike.

‘Eigg’ comes from an old Norse word meaning ‘notch.’ It’s quite apparent how it got this name on looking at it, as the cliffs on the island align in such a way as to produce quite the notch in the island’s silhouette. It was quite impressive to see the notch separate, the thrusting peak of it turn into a long cliff to match that on the other side. We sailed on by the first time of passing, going to Muck where a farm vehicle was loaded on and a couple of people (possibly exactly a couple, but at least one) boarded. Muck was green and comparatively flat to Eigg. Its name apparently means ‘pig.’ Why exactly it’s an island of pigs I’m not sure, and haven’t yet found out. There was much more foot traffic off and on at Eigg, where we stopped long enough for me to watch twin lambs attempted to scale a steep side with their mother’s encouragement. As a side note, it seems that all lambs come in pairs over here.

Some kind of sea flowers
on the beach at Broadford

From Eglol pier

We came back to Mallaig, and I exchanged the Congratulations-You-Won letter for my free ticket to Skye, and managed to find a home for the spare with not a hot fisherman as proposed to me by one of the woman, but a somewhat flustered looking chap in the terminal who’d just come from Eigg with an ungainly backpack. On the ferry I took advantage of the discount coupon that came with the ticket, having two biscuits and two hot chocolates to myself. The ride to Armadale was short. Skye is very close - after all, there is a bridge to it on the other end.

Now, I know that some of you are waiting for a description of a marvellous pier on the Isle of Skye, enhanced with the meaningfulness of stepping out onto the island of my ancestors. It was just a pier, with black rock and seaweed, and a bus that had been instructed by the lady who sold me the biscuits to wait. It became more than ‘just’ as we drove on. I saw low rocks jutting out into the sea, sea that cut into the land. I saw big hills I don’t know the names of, green farmland, some forboding moors, and more big hills. There were round hills and pointy hills, hills that seemed to be leaning in on themselves, and even, dare I say, some little hills.

Broadford is small, and somewhere between dull and charming that I can't quite pinpoint, and makes me think of Jethro Tull’s ‘Broadford Bazaar’ and want to learn swear words in Gaelic. It's right on the waterfront, with the ocean enclosed by hills all around, and a couple of small islets over which smears of rainbows like to lurk. Behind it are the peaks of the eastern Cuillins. The beach is pebbles and sand and slabs of broken rock that form a broken grey pavement. There’s a short walkway out to a pier that passes an old cairn that was once accidentally broken to reveal a burial mound, and which now has trees growing over it. In the pine trees behind the backpackers I stayed at, which I simply can’t bring myself to recommend, I found a treehouse with a printed notice pinned beneath it, declaring that someone had built it because it made their heart happy. It also had a more formal notice hammered underneath it, warning not to go up because of the possibility of death (I assume from the possibility of falling).

I had intended to spend to following day biking out to Suisnish, largely because it seemed a ride I could do comfortably within the time and would allow me to see some more of the island. However, I had forgotten to email the bike hire place, and the fellow wasn’t there. Instead I caught a lift with a local woman, who was going to Egol. She’s been a resident of Skye for a couple of years now. She originally came from Sweden and bought a one way ticket to the UK, took any bus, and ended up on Skye. She didn’t leave.

She recommended to me taking a boat out to Loch Coruisk. It can also be reached from land, either on a long walk from Sligachan or a shorter one across the steep and terrifying-looking ‘Bad Step’ from Egol itself. On a boat, you don’t have to walk as far or risk dying quite so much, and you also get to pass by some seals. “I can recommend the white shed,” she said, for there are two companies that offer rides, and the white shed is run by locals. I arrived just in time for the white shed Misty Isles Boat Trips departure. There were just three of us (and the very affable and quite handsome young man piloting the boat). One passenger was, though I try not to seem cruel saying it, somewhat of a caricature – the accent of Moss from ‘The IT Crowd,’ the aged appearance of one of my old University tutors, likely well-travelled and a consumer of travel plans (I expect he knew his train timetables), rather talkative, and a fan of the phrase ‘it’s quite pleasant.’ He was also, let me reassure you, quite friendly.

The drive to Egol was very scenic, taking me past the Red Hills, past the jagged and magnetic Cuillins, and a variety of other hills between. The other surrounding peaks that look over the bay in Egol have names like Bla Bheinn, and only go up. The little boat took us out towards them and into a bay, where seals (of the common variety) lounged and flopped about on the rocks. Their hides are speckled and smooth, not like our fur seals.

Loch Coruisk is out of sight on first landing, but walking around the mouth of a river that emerges here it becomes quickly apparent. It is surrounded by the black Cuillins. At the end of the loch they were covered in snow. Our Edinburgh friend Walter Scott said of the loch,

Rarely human eye has knownA scene so stern as that dread lake,With its dark ledge of barren stone.

I walked as far as I could in half an hours, stopping to gawk at the blacks and greys and heavy blues. I climbed over the sloping rocks. I looked for red deer and sea eagles and saw none, but it didn’t matter. I saw Coruisk. Then I turned back to catch the ship, for we only had an hour allotted. It seems it was timed well, as the clouds began to move in as we left.

The other passenger on the boat was an older man who I rather liked. His brother had once been a sea merchant, but was ejected from his homeland for some misdemeanour or other and had resolved the situation by marrying a Maori woman in New Zealand, and so he has family who live in the Bay of Plenty. He had been travelling there, and said that it had been one of the few places he’d visited that had tempted him at all to move. He also turned out to be a writer, mainly of short stories, and so we conversed a little on the matter. He was able to give me a lift back to Broadford. It was by far the best company I’ve met so far.

 Things like that day to Egol are what I had hoped – chance, fate, aventure.

Glencoe - Mallaig

In this part of the world, rainbows emerge directly from the ground and the hills are all made of time.

I'm sitting in a dining room surrounded by photographs of lochs, islands, and highland cattle. The walls are as green and blue as a badly-decorated Sims house, and you really don't want to spend very long in the kitchen. Behind me is a small pine forest containing a tree house (marked with a warning about death from falls), and outside is, occasionally, rain. There's been rain like this, drifts that suddenly come and suddenly clear into stunning sunlight, over the last few days in the places I've been. I'm in Broadford. I'll tell you about that later.

 

View from Glencoe Visitor Centre

Glencoe gave me more rain than sun. I wasn't sure if I ought to change my plans at first, but I knew I'd regret not going, and I was already walking down the hill with a German girl from my room who was catching a train at the same time as my bus (8.45; she was going to Windemere via Glasgow, a nice 3 hour stop for her in uugh).

The road between the little village and Fort William runs along the edge of the water with hills and mountains on the opposite (and, often, the same) side, but all I could really see were gloomy possibilities within the low cloud and steel grey water with lashes of white striping the surface.

From the visitor's centre, just a little beyond the village, I got the start of a sense of what it is that makes Glencoe such a popular site for scenery lovers - the centre and caravan park is surrounded by close, tall, and steep heights of land with rock and snow. The cloud covering their peaks gave something of an ominous air to it. I had all my gear with me, and with them and the rain combining powers didn't want to try any real walking, so instead wandered through the little forest around the centre and then went in and had a look at their exhibition. It showed a documentary about the massacre, about which I didn't know very much. Rather than just a clan dispute, it was commanded on government orders to try and crush the 'rebellious' MacDonalds - whose representative had already gone out of his way to sign the required documents of peace. Walking to the village I passed the ruined stone walls of one of the houses that was reputedly destroyed in the massacre, though rumours say that one boy lived, for his assailant couldn't face murdering a pleading child.

It was only as I was leaving that the weather began to clear, first for just a moment while I was sitting in the Glencoe Hotel with a hot chocolate, and then as I was returning on the bus. Then I really understood what it is that draws people to Glencoe, and saw what I'd hoped to find. I can't describe the hills very well. I've described lots of landscapes already, often ineffectually. I have no pictures to give you, because they rarely look good through a window, and even if I did have them I don't believe they could convey what it was like. It was better than anything I saw in Fort William. It is extreme and contrasting, with the breaching hills and the low flat lochs, with the sudden rain and the bursting sun. I'll go back, one day, and I'll walk there.

I had a wait of too long in Fort William, as I wanted to catch the train rather than the bus up to Mallaig. It rained. I wandered aimlessly, and saw a dead sheep or some other such creature tucked up on the rocks of the waterfront, as though someone had just thrown a damp sheepskin over a stone. I got quite wet, then gave up and sat in the train station to read some more of 'The Three Musketeers' and devour a small block of chocolate.

The train to Mallaig redeemed any disappointment in the waiting - it was the best scenery so far. It was similar in some regards to Glencoe, the same kind of hills, though not as big and with more valleys. The Glenfinnan viaduct is perhaps the best example, looking out over an incredible valley and loch and the famous monument - and for any Harry Potters fans, the spot has Harry connections, including the famous bridge over which the train took me. Coming into Morar the train gave glimpses of the ocean with the sun pouring out across it. We passed wild deer, and got glimpses of the beaches that the area is known for. 

And Mallaig, Mallaig - it is beautiful. A small town at the base of hills and scaling up the sides a little, and with an incredible view overlooking the small isles and Skye. I could see the rain above them like clouds pulled down with a swipe of a hand. I could see it moving across, and then coming in - it hit me on a walk above the little town, and turned to hail, which I caught on my green glove and ate. It tasted furry. A rainbow came out of the ground and reached up out of a little valley right in front of me, and I wandered back down through expensive houses with one of the most incredible views. I had dinner in a restaurant called the Cornerstone, which had a view of the hills on the other side of the small harbour. While I ate fish and chips and drank a little Famous Grouse (the Scottish waitress had to check I'd said 'grouse,' my accent is so odd), it rained again and a double rainbow came out.

The small isles from a carkpark in Mallaig

There were two women who had been on the same train and me and were staying in the same place (Sheena's Backpackers or Mallaig Backpackers or the back and upstairs part of The Tea Garden that was tricky to find). One of them had won train tickets and tickets over Skye, and I was surprised and grateful when I was offered the tickets for the ferry. They had enough time to spend a night in Mallaig, but had to return the next day. I think we all found the backpackers a little odd - it was a very nice place, warm and clean and with two spacious wet rooms instead of pokey little showers, but there was no lock to the door or place to store our things, and we were shown the room and abandoned to work things out for ourselves. But the showers were very nice, and the beds were comfortable enough and I slept well.

Getting to Fort William

Advice to travellers: Glasgow has several train stations. If you need to catch a connecting train, make sure to get the connecting bus over to the correct station for your transfer. There are probably signs somewhere telling you this. If not, the lady will tell you where the station is and you can try running to it through strange streets with very tall buildings.

If you miss your connecting train, buy another ticket to Fort William for the following day and spend the night in your very own expensive, quiet room with a big bed and four pillows and a bath tub from which you can view the television while it shows you images of natural perfume makers and seaweed baths in Ireland. And also man-eating sharks, and musth-enraged bull elephants on killing sprees. Then sprawl out in bed, beneath the giant picture of lavender, and go to sleep. The next morning, catch a train to Fort William, a somewhat small town but one of the largest (second, I believe, only to Inverness) in the Highlands.

Glasglow is rather dull looking, and the landscape leaving was nothing special. I fell into a doze and was awakened by Ian Anderson doing something particularly boisterous, just in time to catch the start of some spectacular scenery - for the train line goes right through the highlands. You move through the hills and over the edges of them, past grey stormy lochs, stretches of purple heather, rocks. We passed through grey rain and bursts of incredible sunlight, with the shadows always shifting on the hill faces.

I was secretly afraid that I wasn't going to like it. I was worried that my 'Southerner' aspect, as someone put it, wouldn't go well with the Highlands, and that rugged hills and open spaces would appall and threaten me. Didn't happen. There is a marked lack of bush, but there are forests, and there are dark and paler rocks both and low shrubs that here look in place, and there are the spectacular formations of the hills and mountains everywhere. It feels like a landscape where things have happened, and can happen.

A big mountain

And I haven't yet mentioned the loch and rivers, which Fort William and several of the surrounding little settlements are based around. Fort William is one end of the Great Glen Way, a fault line that can be walked, marked by the characteristic long stretches of water that go horizontally across Scotland all the way to Inverness. Fort William is beside Loch Linne, a sea loch. I could smell the salt when I walked down along the water's edge, though it doesn't smell of the ocean all the time. The rivers that flow there move fast, but not so fast that otters can't enjoy it - I've seen two of them playing in the water together in the late afternoon twice, their heads dipping out and their broad tails splashing as they dove down.

All this water is the reason for both the fort that gave the place its name, and for Inverlochy Castle. Both the fort and castle are in ruins, although the castle has fared much better. It may now be hollow, but the four towers are still standing with signs of the three levels, and the walls are a little broken but all there. They are very thick and heavy-looking. Signs of the old moat are still there, and once the river ran right up to the edge of it for defense. The fort was built on the waterfront for the same reason, initially by Ol-i-ver Crom-well (Lord Protector of England, Puritan) and then was used in the suppression of those darned Jacobites. Unfortunately, the land eventually had a railway station slapped through the middle of it, but the edge of the fort wall can still be seen on the waterfront, and the site of that end of the fort is still apparent. Informative billboards and daffodils cover the stretch of gorgeous green grass, and it so happens that the Great Glen Way officially ends here.

Inverlochy Castle

Braveheart Carpark

Today I went on a couple of the walks that can be done in the hills and forests. Ben Nevis has a lot of snow on it, and looks too big for a short stay in Fort William, but perhaps another time I will venture. Perhaps. I walked instead down to Glen Nevis, and found myself a route to take from the Braveheart Carpark - so named as they filmed some of that wonderful historically accurate film there. I walked up to the site of an old fort called Dun Deardail but not pronounced that way, which took me up through forest and the side of a hill with a fantastic view of Ben and the town and glen below, and pretty much everything else. There's little left of that old fort, including knowledge of its definite history, but the outline of it can be seen on the top of a rise with stones in the ground. The fort was burned down, melting some of the stone together, and surely being the cause for its abandonment, but who burned it down and why is a mystery. There are lots of small waterfalls along the pathway, and lots of moss growing up underneath trees, thick and springy. It reminded me, just a little, of some of the tracks in the Kaweka ranges in Hawke's Bay, half- (and possibly mis-) remembered from childhood, though there is nothing of the stretch of history involved in either habitation or the actual land itself as in Scotland.

I also walked the Cow Hill track, taking me through some steep and delightful forest, then eventually breaking forth into open spaces on the hills. The shadows moving across the land were, again, amazing. Walking up to the summit of Cow Hill I encountered some proper Scottish Highland cattle, introduced to the forest area to try and help reestablish it, for once these fine beasts ran free and added to the diversity of the area. I also had yet another fantastic view. But where doesn't have a fantastic view? Even my bunk bed, when I open the curtains, has a fantastic view.

On my way back I encountered a wild doe, who hesitated long enough for me to take one quick photo before bouncing onwards with a bob of white the only distinguisher and it moved into the trees, and a friendly elderly lady who hesitated long enough to chat with me about Sir Edmund Hillary and New Zealand's rugged landscape. She thought that travelling alone has its advantages, as does cooking dinner. "'Oh, it's all right,' he'll say, and you've been slaving away for hours." It was just her and her two dogs, now. One of her dogs was quite beautiful.

I've been staying at Fort William Backpackers, and can recommend it. The staff there very friendly, and at least one of them (the Irish one) is very... full of energy. It's also a nice building, and is on the hill up above the town and the loch, and with Ben Nevis in view from the right angle. It also has a chap who was an extra in the movie 'Highlander' - Christopher Lambert does not like horses, the American woman who played Heather was nice enough, and the chap who played the Kurgen is good value and has a brilliant sense of humour.

Tomorrow I'm going to Glencoe, if things go according to plan, and then will be heading up north. Before I finish up this long post for tonight, I would just like to reiterate that I have seen otters, wild otters. I was filled with delight. The doe was also wonderful - if she'd stayed where she was she'd have been invisible to me, but instead she decided to run up away from the fence and pathway into the 'shelter' of the bare trees. She blended into the land well.

Huh?