We were so excited about this leg! We had a 37ft cruiser waiting for us to spend a few days boating on Loch Ness and the Great Glen.
Day 3, Tuesday 11 August: All Aboard for the Great Glen
We booked our boat from Caley Cruisers, who we’d definitely recommend. Their customer service was so helpful and friendly and the boat, Eriskay V, was immaculate. She had a little deck out back, with french windows leading into a sitting / dining room with nice comfy chairs and lovely views in all directions, a little galley with two-ring hob, grill and oven (all gas of course) and fridge, a bunk bed room and a double bedroom in the prow. You could also sit on the prow to get the best view in the boat. She was one of Caley’s least posh models, but we couldn’t have been happier with her.
We’d tried our best to shop forensically for provisions, so that we didn’t over-load and didn’t run out of any basics, as we didn’t know where there might be any useful shops. We were a bit unnerved as we watched the family next to us unload gallons of bottled mineral water from their massive people-carrier, followed by several cases of champagne and a range of spirits suitable for the Savoy Grill bar. Perhaps they were going on a longer jaunt than us? The Lady of the House stood by doing some sort of yoga while the menfolk did all the grubby work like loading the boat and learning the ropes.
Caley took safety seriously, and we were solemnly lectured on emergency procedures, flares, rescue ladders, fire extinguishers, engine checks, fenders, ropes, wind and life jackets (worn at all times on deck, until we got bored of it, shhh) and Al was given a skipper’s driving lesson on how to handle the boat. TBH the helm took some getting used to (it turned very late and had no effect at all in reverse) so felt a bit under pressure at first, but soon got acclimatised.
Fully briefed, we set off south from Caley boatyard down the Caledonian canal, with the Champagne Palace boat ahead of us. The Champagne Queen’s bubbly glass glinted refulgently in the sunlight as she reclined, watching her skivvies navigate her royal barque in stately pomp down the canal. It was just before 11 o’clock in the morning; we had a cup of tea.
Caley provide a very useful and detailed navigation guide with lots of pictures to help you avoid any hazards, which we followed to the letter. Dom was voted first mate, Rosa was second mate and mummy was mummy.
The sense of freedom is fantastic; unlike a road where you have to stay in your lane, or even a river where you have your course defined, you can just go wherever you like, turn the helm left and then right as and when you want. Dom was a particularly keen helmsman and Rosa was very helpful especially in the galley. Both of them were brilliant when we had to moor up or go through a lock etc, we were a shipshape crew!
And needless to say, the scenery around the Loch was sensational in every direction. We couldn’t stop taking photos. Mummy was sure she’d seen something big swimming in the Loch out of the corner of her eye once or twice.
At its fastest the boat would do a bit more than 10 or 11 mph, and we’d been told we needed to be at Fort Augustus (the south end of Loch Ness) before 4pm to have a chance to go up the five locks there - a distance of about 30 miles. We floored it and got there for 3.30pm but we were gazumped by a commercial craft big enough to fill one of the huge locks just by itself. We were not getting above Fort Augustus until at least tomorrow morning.
Never mind, Fort Augustus is a very pleasant place to stop for the night, and it was a beautiful sunny late afternoon and evening. Rosa fed the ducks, and the shops in Fort Augustus yielded a special treat for Al - a tartan hip-flask for his Benromach whisky (bought in a posh whisky shop in Invernes).
We nearly had a heart attack when we got back from the shops to the boat, as it was half untied and half way out across the channel. Fortunately there was a good explanation; a lady helping to skipper a very large tourist boat had had to move us a few yards up to be able to fit the big vessel in and was half way through re-trying us up as we arrived. Thank goodness! I swear I had tied us up properly when we left! When the big tourist vessel arrived it was greeted with the first bag pipes we’d heard on this trip yet. It was effectively a floating hotel full of rich Americans, fortunately all of a certain age and therefore not rowdy and in bed before we were!
Sadly we had a failure of the electrical inverter on our boat, meaning that anything which needed to be plugged in to a mains socket didn’t work. It wasn’t as bad as that might sound; anything running on 12v DC was still fine, including lights and fridge, but we’d promised the kids they could watch Pirates of the Caribbean and the TV was out of action. We were also a little bit concerned about phone battery but had battery power packs to cover us for the time being. Credit to Caley, they sent out an electrician (an hour’s journey either way for him) who replaced the inverter, but even the replacement didn’t work so he had to give up.
Not to worry; we sat out on the back of the boat enjoying the sunset, giving thanks for our propane midge-repellant kit and citronella wrist bands which seemed to be working a charm, and had a chinese takeaway for dinner. Daddy won tonight’s game of Gubs, thinking he would lose all along.
Day 4, Wednesday 12 August: Fort Augustus to Urquhart Harbour
The sun rose majestically over the glass-still waters of the Loch and it promised to be a glorious morning. After much deliberation we decided not to attempt to go up the locks; the canal above is by all acounts idyllic, but we’d only be stressed out by the prospect of having to get back down in time to return the boat to Inverness on Friday morning. Instead Rachel and Al went for a canalside walk up and above the locks, surrounded by flowers and sunshine. This would actually be the most southerly point we’d reach for quite some time - until we pulled out of Aberdeen station on day 15; from here we were heading relentlessly northward. By the time we finished our walk, the first lock ascent was just underway and would have taken an hour and a half. We were glad we’d chosen the simpler approach.
We took a chillaxed cruise back around Loch Ness, taking in a splendid fry-up, cooked and eaten while on the move, based on provisions we’d unexpectedly scored at the mini-market in Fort Augustus. The kids loved being at the helm of the boat and it was lovely not being in such a hurry as yesterday. We tied up in the little harbour at Urquhart, a beautifully sheltered spot.
The plan for the afternoon was to visit the Loch Ness Monster Museum nearby. It was a warm walk noticeably uphill along a main road - specifically the A82, the same road we got caught having to walk along just north of Loch Lomond five years ago, except at least there’s a pavement at Urquhart! The pavement forms part of the Great Glen Way (I hope most of it is off-road?) and we found ourselves in a spread-out phalanx of walkers heading down to Fort William. By the time we got to the museum we were melting and urgently needed cold drinks. At least it would be downhill on the way back!
The Great Glen and Nessie
The Great Glen is a colossal fault line stretching all the way across Scotland from Fort William in the SW to Inverness in the NE. It was formed by continental drift; essentially Scotland was ripped in two when it collided with the European Landmass, 410 million years ago. The Glen is very narrow (a mile wide), very long (60 miles) and very deep - at its deepest (230 m) it’s deeper than the North Sea; incredibly, it contains more water than all of the inland lakes in England and Wales combined. There is so much water in Loch Ness that it generates its own tides; the moon’s gravity has a measurable effect on it.
And it is very murky at the bottom! And a bit isolated….
Near Urquhart harbour is the village of Drumnadrochit, in which is the Drumnadrochit hotel (the ‘Drum’) which now hosts the Loch Ness Monster Museum.
There, we learned that a deadly monster was first supposedly sighted by St Columba while he was crossing the river Ness in AD 565. Columba made the sign of the cross and banished the beast back to its depths, deeplly impressing the local Pictish pagans. There are also pictish depictions of a fantastical creature which could have been the antecedent of the monster.
But the Loch Ness monster we know of today is a 1930s hoax (with some self-delusion and a lot of honest misunderstanding mixed in), prompted by General Wade’s military roads making the area more accessible to holidaymakers, by the spirit of adventure left over from the Victorian colonial era, by the Drum hotel realising what was good for business, and by the Daily Mail needing some lurid headlines. Many people really wanted a plesiosaur-like creature to exist in the deep murky waters of the lake, having survived extinction somehow (after all, the Coelocanth been rediscovered in 1938), and many people have spent many well-meaning hours through the 20th century in scientific observation trying to find it.
Many names come up in the sequence of ‘witnesses’ to the beast’s existence and of hunters for it; the most entertaining is Marmaduke Wetherall, the Daily Mail’s man, an actor and big game hunter. He appears to have used an umbrella stand in the shape of a hippo’s foot to make ‘footprints’ in the mud (plesiosaurs had flippers not feet, but let’s not get hung up on the details) which he then photographed and sent to the Daily Mail. By the time the British Museum spotted the hoax, the Daily Mail had already run the headline and so turned on Wetherall, calling him an incompetent idiot.
The famous black-and-white photograph of a long-necked aquatic creature, supposedly the Loch Ness Monster, is also a hoax which can be traced back to Wetherall: it was made by his step-son out of a toy submarine and a bit of wood, and photographed by his other son, in 1934. Being carefully released to the public via ‘a Surgeon’, a willing stooge who ‘did not want to be named’ this hoax was much more long-lived than the hippo-foot one: the Wetheralls flew under the radar more successfully this time, and now the joke was on the Daily Mail when the photograph made it onto their front page (though the joke was not fully revealed until the 1990s, when the hoax was finally proved).
Through the twentieth century, researchers came in their hundreds; they used cameras, sonar, underwater photography, boats, submersibles, hydrophones, drones, and shoreline observation. They came for a variety of reasons, including conservation and bio-diversity. They only prolonged the mystery.
More recently DNA analysis of the waters of the Loch have identified traces of material from common fish, seals, and other freshwater animals, but found no traces of unknown or giant cryptids. This is the best evidence currently in existence that there is no Loch Ness monster.
But the story of the growth of the hoax and of all of the subsequent earnest searching for this longed-for great monument of Scottish bio-diversity is itself very entertaining and very well told by the musem. At the end (before the inevitable shop) the museum gives all visitors the chance to vote whether the Monster is a hoax, a misunderstanding or a scientific possibility. It was surprising how many people did still vote for the monster to be a possibility in the face of all the evidence, and even more surprising that some of those people had the surname ‘Kirk’; to be fair, they were the young and idealistic contingent of the family, whereas the cynical old crust of a dad would have it as nothing but a hoax.
A Solar Eclipse?
Sadly Urquhart Castle was off our itinerary; you can get there by boat, but the pontoon is reserved for commercial craft, and so we’d have to get there by road, another two miles there and two back on foot with lorries roaring past constantly within inches of our shoulders. We didn’t fancy it.
So, having taken in a pint and an ice-cream (as applicable) at the pub in Drumnadrochit, we rolled back down the hill to the harbour, to find that the elecrician had not only fixed our inverter (hooray!), but had paid for the boat battery to be fully charged up at the harbour’s charging point - bravo Caley Cruisers! This meant that the kids could have their promised Pirates of the Caribbean film (which they loved) while Daddy sat by the harbour side and prepped up our tuna pasta bake, which was excellent.
That evening there was due to be a solar eclipse, the first since 1999. We quickly researched how one is supposed to watch it without hurting one’s eyes: we armed ourselves with the requisite colander and paper (no, me neither tbh) but in the event the weather went Scottish on us at the appointed moment: it didn’t rain, but it carefully positioned an enormous, very low, grey cloud over the bit of sky where the sun was supposed to be. It definitely got darker and then a bit lighter again, but the colander was entirely unnecessary. Daddy remembers the 1999 eclipse of August 11, which was truly bizarre as it was in the middle of the day; he was in St David’s in Wales, watching the eclipse over the sea from the top of St David’s Head and Romsey Island, a very distinctive experience!
Our family game this evening was Five Towers, and this time Daddy lost comprehensively.
Day 5, Thurs 13 Aug: Urquhart back through Dochgarroch and mooring up in Inverness
With silvery clouds in the sky and the (thankfully unrealised) threat of storms later, we decided to take a few victory laps of the lake while getting the boat ready to be packed up for tomorrow morning. We got a good look at Urquhart Castle from a variety of angles!
Lunch was aboard again while cruising, using up leftovers, and finally heading into the Caledonian canal, intending to overnight at Dochgarroch lock. When we got there the lock-keeper had gone on a very extended lunch break (you really can’t get through these Caledonian Canal locks in any semblance of a hurry!), so we moored up, dodging the huge Loch Ness tour boat which operates from just above the lock. Al managed to score some of Rachel’s favourite Thistly Cross Cider (sadly they wouldn’t sell it without opening it, with repercussions later).
When the keeper eventually returned from lunch, we learned from her that one of the swing bridges between us and the boat yard was malfunctioning: this had repercussions on local road traffic and they thus weren’t opening the bridge until after the morning rush hour - too late for our 8.30am return deadline.
We therefore had to push on through the two swing bridges and moor up for the night somewhere in the outskirts of Inverness. Happily we found a gorgeous spot, on the approach pontoons to the swing bridges; possibly we shouldn’t have moored there, but given the bridges were closed we figured no-one would be trying to get along past them, and there was plenty of room anyway. The only competition for the spot was some local teenagers who asked us (very politely) if we’d consider mooring elsewhere so that they could dive and swim where we’d tied up. Given that the pontoon was covered in signs from the police saying that swimming there was dangerous (albeit for unspecified reasons), we apologised and said we couldn’t help. We dined on Dom’s pasta sauce and felt very content.
Tomorrow, we get back on dry land and push even further north!