Today, at last, we joined the Great Glen Way, a Highland walk that follows the geological fault line through Scotland from Inverness to Fort William, alongside Loch Ness and Lochy. We’ve been looking forward to this since we started planning this trip. First though, we had a last view of a surprisingly pretty part of Inverness. The Ness islands that sit in the middle of the Ness river have Narnia-like lamp-posts, seemingly growing rather than installed as they are festooned with lichen on strings of lightbulbs.

Nessie herself puts in an appearance….

….and even the subway graffiti has a Celtic heritage look about it.

The Great Glen Way, unlike the John O Groats trail is a well signposted and managed pathway and we were really looking forward to getting up into the Highlands.

No more car dodging on main A roads, the path and vast expanses of heather as far as the eye could see were beautiful.

The air here is also amazing, indicated by the “Old Men’s Beard” lichen taking massive advantage of this fact and covering whole trees in its wispy fronds.

Huge mushrooms look like aliens or how kids draw them…….

And it’s not just the fungi, the moss grows like crazy here too, so we’re confident that when a tree falls, it just bounces softly on the surrounding lush green carpet and no one hears a sound.

There’s proper geography around you, you can almost feel the rocks still colliding into each other, sliding reluctantly past each other, crushed to a new form in the process.

It was all quite lovely.

So with all this immense beauty around me I had to look at the elevation profile on today’s 30km walk. It didn’t look super inviting if I’m honest, but the first third went really well and didn’t feel that steep so we only had a little tiny steep bit later to contend with.

However, just as the ascent on the steep bit started, so did the rain. Mark and I were both convinced this was just a shower, like we’d had a couple of times last week, no big deal, no need to get the heavy duty waterproofs out that would keep our backpacks dry too. Nope. At the summit of the main steep bit, not only was Mark reassuring me, as always, that at the top of the next ridge we’d have a breathtaking view down Loch Ness and our destination, Drumnadrochit, he also remarked that the rain had stopped. This is what it looks like when the rain has apparently stopped in the Scottish Highlands:

The rain stopped like this for the next two hours.

Eventually we reached the viewpoint marker for the breathtaking view. We dashed off the trail, cameras ready and there was Loch Ness at last.

Loch Ness contains more water than all the freshwater lakes throughout the whole of the UK, it is huge. So I have circled the cruise boat we saw to show just how huge it is.

Brilliant huh?

We could not have got wetter if we had swum to the boat.

The experience reminded us of being in Romania, running through the  Carpathian mountains for a half marathon that got us a bat shaped medal as we entered Dracula’s famed, Bran Castle to eat pizza (this genuinely happened).

As we neared the hotel, the view cleared slightly, could we possibly catch a sight of Nessie after all?

Drumnadrochit seems to cash in on an imaginary entity almost as well as the Church of England, with both a Loch Ness experience and Nessieland within 300 yards of each other. 

We are staying dangerously close to Nessieland where we have discovered that it is possible to have too much tartan:

We also realised just how wet we were. We turned up every heater in our room, hairdryer in the bathroom included, and wrung out our clothes. Our backpacks are not as waterproof as manufacturers’ marketing would suggest either. We have made a mini clothes BBQ on the heater and made sure we turn our clothes regularly.

Then we escaped to eat more battered and deep fried food, a bit of a(nother) walk away, but worth it for the cocktails alone.

So now it’s back to the hotel for a nightcap and an early night for us as always. We thought the guests in the hotel bar were borderline comatose, but it turns out the man was actually serving.

We will hopefully sleep as well as the woman in this photo tonight, in the land of the imaginary monster. 

Distance – 31km