Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Lochleven Seafood Café
A few miles west of
Kinlochleven on the B836 (north side of the loch)
T
01855 821048,
W
lochlevenseafoodcafe.co.uk.
The
best place to eat near Kinlochleven, this is a relaxed
restaurant with an attractive outdoor terrace. Specializes in
local shellfish such as whole brown crab cooked in seawater
(£12.75).
Daily noon-3pm & 6-9pm.
MacDonald Hotel
Fort William Road
T
01855 831539,
W
macdonaldhotel.co.uk.
This central hotel has ten
reasonable en-suite bedrooms, but is best visited for its
Bothy Bar, where you can join fellow walkers for fish and
chips (£8.90) and other pub meals.
Bar: Mon-Wed
12.30-11.30pm,
Thu
rs-Sat 12.30pm-12.30am, Sun
12.30-11.15pm.
£84
Loch Ness and around
Twenty-three miles long, unfathomably deep, cold and often moody,
LOCH NESS
is
bound by rugged heather-clad mountains rising steeply from a wooded shoreline, with
attractive glens opening up on either side. Its fame, however, is based overwhelmingly
on its legendary inhabitant, Nessie, the “Loch Ness monster” (see box below), who
encourages a steady flow of hopeful visitors to the settlements dotted along the loch, in
particular
Drumnadrochit
. Nearby, the impressive ruins of
Castle Urquhart
- a favourite
monster-spotting location - perch atop a rock on the loch side and attract a deluge of
bus parties during the summer. Almost as busy in high season is the village of
Fort
Augustus
, at the more scenic southwest tip of Loch Ness, where you can watch queues
of boats tackling one of the Caledonian Canal's longest flight of locks. You'll need your
own
car
to complete the whole loop around the loch, a journey that includes an
impressive stretch between Fort Augustus and the high, hidden Loch Mhòr, overlooked
by the imposing Monadhliath range to the south.
Away from the loch-side, and seeing a fraction of Loch Ness's visitor numbers, the
remote glens of
Urquhart
and
Affric
make an appealing contrast, with Affric in
11
NESSIE
The world-famous
Loch Ness monster
, affectionately known as
Nessie
(and by serious
aficionados as
Nessiteras rhombopteryx
), has been a local celebrity for some time. The first
mention of a mystery creature crops up in St Adamnan's seventh-century biography of
St
Columba
, who allegedly calmed an aquatic animal that had attacked one of his monks.
Present-day interest, however, is probably greater outside Scotland than within the country,
and dates from the building of the road along the loch's western shore in the early 1930s. In
1934 the
Daily Mail
published London surgeon
R.K. Wilson
's sensational photograph of the
head and neck of the monster peering up out of the loch, and the hype has hardly diminished
since. Recent encounters range from glimpses of ripples by anglers to the famous occasion in
1961 when thirty hotel guests saw a pair of humps break the water's surface and cruise for
about half a mile before submerging.
Photographic evidence is showcased in two separate exhibitions located at
Drumnadrochit
, but the most impressive of these exhibits - including the renowned
black-and-white movie footage of Nessie's humps moving across the water, and Wilson's
original head-and-shoulders shot - have now been exposed as
fakes
. Indeed, in few other
places on earth has watching a rather lifeless and often grey expanse of water seemed so
compelling, or have floating logs, otters and boat wakes been photographed so often and
with such excitement.
Yet while even high-tech sonar surveys carried out over the past two decades have failed to
come up with conclusive evidence, it's hard to dismiss Nessie as pure myth. After all, no one
yet knows where the unknown layers of silt and mud at the bottom of the loch begin and end:
best estimates say the loch is over
750ft deep
, deeper than much of the North Sea, while
others point to the possibilities of underwater caves and undiscovered channels connected to
the sea. What scientists have found in the cold, murky depths, including pure white eels and
rare arctic char, offers fertile grounds for speculation, with different theories declaring Nessie to
be a remnant from the dinosaur age, a giant newt or a huge visiting Baltic sturgeon.
