And finally, we got to the most famous place in Scotland: the Loch Ness.
You all probably know the reason for that fame is Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster. In the end of 19th century, and early 20th century, many people declared having seen a monster in the lake, media covered that, more and more people saw the monster and finally one of them managed to take a picture of the monster…
Loch Ness Monster
That story has surpassed all borders in the world, and nowadays the area of this lake is one of the most touristic ones in Scotland and they should be thankful to Nessie for a great part of this. By the way, the photo was admitted to be a hoax in 1994 by one of the descendants of the photographer. It is a pity that reality ruins such a nice story. 🙂
This is the only monster we saw...
Anyway, we also established our base in Fort Augustus, in the south edge of the lake for a couple of days, as that location allowed us to do some trip days around that area. The lake itself is just another scottish lake (pretty big, though, as it is 40 km long), but it is aligned with a couple more lochs, which form a natural pass, which has been completed with the Caledonian Canal, allowing ships to sail from North Sea and Atlantic Ocean, without surrounding Great Britain.
Loch Ness at dusk
Urqhart Castle, next to the Loch Ness
Fort George is a fortress near Inverness, which was built in the 18th century, and which can be visited as it is really well preserved.
Fort George
It can be visited if you get there at a decent time, which was not our case, obviously. So we just enjoyed the views from outside, and a nice and calm sunset. Not that bad. 🙂
Sun setting near Fort George
Playing with the shadows... like kids. 🙂
Scotland: no place for two cars, unless one of them is occupying the passing place. Very entertaining...
After Aberdeen, the route continued towards the north side of the famous Loch Ness. That meant lots of scottish landscapes and well-preserved modern castles, which in my opinion were less interesting than the ruined ones, as the latters had defensive purposes and therefore were in more strategic locations, like the ones in previous posts…
Crathes Castle
Corgarff Castle
But still it’s amazing the amount of castles in Scotland of different kinds. By the way, in this route, we also tried to visit Valmoral castle, which is the summer residence of Queen Elizabeth. I say “tried” because when we arrived there we realized it was not going to be possible. Lots of people were sitting on the curb of the road when we drove there, and when we asked a couple of policemen, they told us we had to move the car as they were “waiting for the Queen”… So we parked the car as fast as we could and tried to get to a curb to meet the Queen… And in that moment she passed on a Range Rover 10 metre away from us waving her hand like the real royal member she is. I couldn’t take any picture because all this happened quite fast, but I find quite funny that we “met” the Queen in our 9-day trip to Scotland. 😀
After meeting the Queen we went to one of the “must” in Scotland: a whiskey distillery. Speyside is a region full of distilleries, so we just chose one of them: the Glenlivet distillery, which was part of the Chivas Brothers group, and now belongs to Pernaud Ricard.
We realized there that we were visiting the oldest legal distillery in Scotland. The visit was interesting and they show you the way the produce the whiskey and I was quite impressed with the storage of the whiskey. In whiskey production, the cask where they store the beverage is not very important for them, so they just buy used casks from other borboun or wine producers from other countries, including the US and Spain, as they can save some costs there… :-O
