Inverness
Our first real stop in Scotland was Inverness, the largest city in the Highlands and Islands area of the country. The city sits right on the mouth of the Caledonian river where it empties into the North Sea. We got in at about 7:00pm local time on Thursday night, so we didn’t have a lot of time to explore, but we did fortunately find a non-sketchy hostel with free wi-fi and a very nice cat to pet. The city is really beautiful, and we spent a while on Friday morning walking around the city and taking some photos. We didn’t spend enough time to actually figure out anything of the history of what we were seeing, but the snow made it nice to look at and take pictures of. The weather was really not unlike Minnesota, and the smell of the cold snow really brought me back.
I got some good pictures of the river, what I presume is St. Andrew’s Cathedral, and the castle.
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It was a nice time, but aside from stopping for food and staying at night, we didn’t spend a lot of time in the city. Still, it’s a nice city, and it’s small but hardly lacking anything. Check out the full set here.
Drumnadrochit
We spent most of our time in the area hiking around and doing a little sightseeing. Our first expedition was on Friday, to Urquhart Castle on the northern tip of Loch Ness. We took a bus to the tiny town of Drumnadrochit, and walked through to the loch, taking photos on the way.
This part of Scotland is really cool to walk around, because the weather is not unlike Minnesota, but there are a lot of mountains everywhere, so it’s really great to take pictures of it all, and it looks amazing without being unreasonably cold. When we were at Drumnadrochit it was snowing, but it wasn’t too cold and it only made the pictures cooler. We finally came over the hill and saw the castle on the loch, and as you can tell it’s not much of a castle anymore.
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- It’s said that St. Columba converted a Pictish leader at his military camp there in the sixth century. This was long before the castle itself was built, but the site’s use as a military camp goes back about 1500 years, and it was pretty cool to know that St. Columba – who’s a hugely important early medieval figure – had walked there before. The ruins of the castle are really extensive and there is a surprising amount of space to explore. Each room of the ruins is marked showing its original purpose, and we weren’t guided along on a fixed path, like at Oxford Castle. It was great to walk around, take our time, and get lots of photos of the loch, the ruins, and the mountains.
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After we left the castle, we had planned to go on a walk through the Urquhart Bay Woods, a local trail through the forest, but our feet were starting to hurt and neither of us wanted to “get dead in the woods”, as Jarred put it. We had about three hours to kill before the next bus came for Inverness, so we assumed we could stop in and relax at one of the cafes we saw in Drumnadrochit when we first arrived. A reasonable expectation? Apparently not! As it turns out, literally everything in Drumnadrochit closes at 4:30 or 5:00. In Oxford, most things close from 5:00 to 7:00, but restaurants, cafes, and pubs always stay open late, so this came as a bit of a surprise and we found ourselves with no idea what we could do for the next few hours, since we were cold and sore. Thankfully, the post office/general store was open until 5:30, so Jarred got coffee and I got some chocolate, which I knew from my boundary waters days to be a great source of rejuvenation. Check out the full set, pre- and post-chocolate, here.
Corrimony
We eventually caught the bus back to Inverness, and we were so tired from all the walking and standing that we ended up falling asleep at about 7:30, hoping to get up early for Saturday’s expedition: Corrimony. The plan was loose: we wanted to take a bus to Corrimony Road End, walk to the Corrimony Chambered Cairn, and then play it by ear.
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The cairn is a burial chamber that dates back to the third or fourth century, and it consists of a low pile of small, round rocks with an open chamber in the middle, surrounded by about a dozen larger, upright stone monuments in a circle. Presumably it’s a modest draw during the summer, but we were the only ones brave enough to trek through the snow and see it that day. We crawled inside the cairn (and I do mean “crawled”; the tunnel leading into the middle of the cairn was so small we had to get on our hands and knees to get through. We had a good time looking around and dancing on the graves of the dead pagans, before setting out to go further along the road. We didn’t know exactly what we were going to do from there. We had about five and a half hours to kill before the only bus for Inverness would be coming by at 7:15, and since it gets fully dark by 4:30 this far up, we wanted to get our hike on while we could. We followed the road, stopping to take pictures of the farms, the mountains, and the streams alongside it.
We didn’t know if there would be a public trail, but by the time we got to a small gate that wasn’t locked and which opened up into the forest, we didn’t really care. After all, in the US we’d be liable to be shot at for trespassing, but up in Corrimony the worst we’d get would be a longbow arrow through the thigh. A small risk to take! We walked along the path, took lots of pictures of the trees and the stream as we went through the forest, and finally came to a sign that told us we were walking through a nature preserve maintained by the Scottish government. We kept going and the path left the forest and took us over a small hill or mountain, and we found ourselves overlooking a huge, empty, snow-covered valley surrounded by mountains with a frozen loch in the middle. It was, simply put, probably the most astoundingly gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen.
We spent a long time taking five steps, stopping for pictures, taking five steps, and stopping for
more pictures. It was absolutely incredible.
We also ran into a lady who had been in front of us all afternoon and who was now coming back the opposite way with her three dogs. Neither Jarred nor I are particularly good with dogs and we were worried they were going to maul us and chomp on our skulls, but they were incredibly nice, as was the lady who walked up after them after a couple minutes. She told us that the path kept going for another five miles or so but that we shouldn’t go far past the loch, since it was about 3:00 by this point and it would be getting dark soon. We walked down to the water, took some more pictures, and stopped a while to take it all in. We also decided such a special hiking trip needed a special picture to commemorate it. We started out with a high-five with my camera’s self-timer, but wanted to go bigger, so we decided to do an ‘80s-teen-movie-style jump. The problem was timing it, however, and it took us probably a dozen tries to get a picture we were satisfied with, but it was so worth it. In one of our jumps, my camera’s lens cap flew out of my pocket and we couldn’t find it for the life of us, so we decided it was a worthy sacrifice to the photo gods and headed back to the main road, content with the last photo we got.
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We assumed at this point that we could go back to the town of Corrimony and relax for at least a while until the shops closed, at which point we would only have to wait an hour or so to catch the bus back to Inverness at 7:15. What we didn’t know, though, was that the town of Corrimony doesn’t really exist at all, and that the three farmhouses we had walked by on our way to the path constituted its entirety. The fork in the road we had thought would lead to a town when we first got in the area was now gated off, and we realized that we would be waiting for the bus for three hours.
The day had been gorgeous, and it wasn’t even very cold, so this wasn’t a worry at first; it was a nuisance but one we were prepared to deal with. The problem is that when it gets dark in Scotland, it gets very cold, and three hours is a long time to wait if you’re wearing soccer flats, which I firmly believe were deliberately designed to keep the wearer’s feet cold and to absorb all liquid around it. We spent most of the time alternating between dancing and singing on the side of the road, for the entertainment of passing drivers, coming up with creative swears for the nonexistence of Corrimony, and standing in silence hoping an earlier bus would come.
Thankfully, the same bus we took into Corrimony came by on its way from Inverness, and we flagged it down and explained to the bus driver that we had already bought a return ticket and just wanted to not freeze to death, so he was nice enough to welcome us onboard and not make us wait for him to come back an hour later.
We got back into town finally, went to a tapas bar, where I got authentic Spanish tortilla for the first time in years, and went back to the hostel to sleep. It was a somewhat traumatic experience waiting in the cold like that, since the only shelter nearby was a half-built wooden shack on the side of Corrimony road, but it was still worth it for the wonderful sights we got. Check out the full set here.
I’m writing this in the small city of Elgin, about 40 minutes from Inverness by train. We took a trip earlier today to the tiny little village of Burghead, which is a wonderful little town on the coast of the North Sea and also probably the coldest place on Earth. So stay tuned for another update with photos from that trip!
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