Day 6 - Inverness — Wayfaring Abroad

After a gorgeous sunset on Loch Ness and an enjoyable night in, we got up before sunrise and headed out into Inverness. The clouds were out, the sun was barely poking through and the streets were almost empty.

Our apartment was just down the street from the River Ness and a block from St. Andrews Cathedral. We began our day in St. Andrews Cathedral where it was completely deserted. At first we weren't sure if we were even allowed to be inside yet but the door was unlocked and the lights were on so we wandered around looking throughout the Cathedral.

St. Andrews Cathedral from across the River Ness.

From the Cathedral we made our way down the River Ness to the Infirmary Bridge and across the river to wander up towards Inverness Castle. We were trying to plan out our day and figure out exactly what we wanted to see and decided to start the day with a drive west to The Falls of Foyers.

The Falls of Foyers sit along Loch Ness and the drive takes you directly along the lake. It is a single lane road with turnouts every couple hundred meters. The road has incredible views of the lake and the sun was shining at this point with distant fog covering the hills along the opposite side of the lake.

We arrived at the town of Foyers and parked by the entrance to the trail to the waterfall. The wind was howling with a little force and there were only a couple other people at the entrance. We made our way along the trail down the hill to the falls. The trail was quite beautiful and led to a small cutout where you had a beautiful view of the falls pouring out into the River Foyers. We spent sometime just standing there enjoying the view before heading back up the trail. There are a couple trails off this main one that lead to a smaller set of falls and along the perimeter of the river to the lake. We weren't completely sure how long the walk would take us so we decided after some debate to hold off. The big decision really came down to when sunset was and that we only had so much daylight left.

We got back in the car and headed back to Inverness to wander around town and see Inverness Castle. The view from the top of the castle was quite beautiful and showed off Inverness beneath us.

Inverness as seen from Inverness Castle.

We'd planned on finishing our leftovers from dinner the night before for lunch but we had to leave our apartment before we could do so and didn't have any utensils. We spent the next 20 minutes attempting to find a plastic fork or spoon so we could have lunch but completely failed at this task so we gave up and grabbed a couple sandwiches before leaving Inverness and heading off to the Culloden Battlefield.

The Culloden Battlefield is a wide open ground where the Jacobite uprising ended after a battle between the Jacobite's and government troops. Some 1,500 men died in the battle. There is a visitors center with a artifacts, videos and presentations to give information about the battle. We chose to skip this and instead walked out on the battlefield.

It had been raining for the past half hour and we had a small window where it seemed to stop so we got back in the car and headed off the find the Culloden Viaduct. The drive wound through the countryside and by small farms until the viaduct was just there in the fields.

We wound our way up and under it and then were off on a single lane road clearly meant for the farms alongside. We had to pull over to let tractors and Land Rovers pass. We took this road until we made our way to a two lane road again and off to see Fort George. At this point it was beginning to get dark, there was still about an hour until the sun set but the clouds were making it feel like it was minutes away. We wandered around the entrance to Fort George for a bit before deciding with the wind in our hair and an hour and a half drive ahead of us that we were going to skip it and start our journey to Inverurie.

We set off from Fort George to Inverurie and it wasn't long until we were driving in the night and feeling like it was already past midnight. The night really feels like it swallows everything around you and stamps out the beauty around. The drive was still enjoyable and on the way to Inverurie we made a quick detour to drive through Dufftown and past a couple of the closed distilleries we had been hoping to visit.

Once we got to Inverurie we were able to kick off our shoes and relax.