Heart Highlands of the To the

From monster-spotting to clan history and blockbuster scenery, here’s how to make the most of your time in the Highlands

Words by SALLY COFFEY

PREVIOUS PAGE:

The Scottish Highlands is a place of epic landscapes, where legends and stories permeate the heathercoated hills and glassy lochs – some of them true and some of them perhaps not.

It’s renowned for its haunting beauty, from its ruined castles that speak of tragic love stories, families split by allegiances, and merciless power battles to vast areas of natural beauty with empty white sandy beaches at their fringes and small communities hidden within, as mighty Munros all around guard their secrets.

Unless you have several weeks or more to explore the Highlands, you won’t see it all – not even close – but luckily many of the Highland’s most iconic places are within easy travelling distance of each other, making an itinerary that reads like a bucket list of Scotland’s most memorable experiences highly achievable: Loch Ness, Ben Nevis, Glen Coe, and Glenfinnan.

There are two main ways to reach this Highlands heartland. You can travel from Glasgow by road or train, up through Loch Lomond and The Trossachs, skirting along Rannoch Moor before crossing through Glen Coe to reach Fort William and the great hulk that is Ben Nevis.

From here, you can board the Jacobite Steam Train to cross the famous Glenfinnan Viaduct, or follow the route of the Great Glen up from where it spills into the sea at Loch

Storytelling is in the blood in Scotland so it’s no wonder the story of the enigmatic Loch Ness Monster has endured

Linnhe all the way to Loch Ness.

For this piece, we’re taking the other route, from Inverness, which plunges you into Highland scenery within minutes of leaving the city.

For very soon you will reach the shores of Loch Ness, the largest of all Scottish lochs by volume – it is said that if you took all the water from all the lakes, rivers and reservoirs in England and Wales, it wouldn’t fill it. And here, according to legend, lives a mysterious creature, which lots of people have claimed to have seen but no one has been able to provide a genuine photograph of.

Storytelling is in the blood in Scotland so it’s no wonder the story of the enigmatic Loch Ness Monster has endured. But who or what is Nessie? A giant eel? A plesiosaur that has somehow survived since the Cretaceous period? The same monster who inhabits Loch Morar (near Mallaig) who travels between the two lochs via a secret underground tunnel? Or is she simply the figment of some very active imaginations?

In 2019, a team of scientists led by New Zealand’s University of Otago who examined the DNA in 250 water samples from the loch said the most “plausible” answer was she was some kind of large eel.

So that settled it? Hardly. You don’t dispel a thousandyear-old myth (and almost a century of monster-mania) with a simple thing like science.

The first recorded sighting of Nessie is found in an ancient biography of St Columba. According to the text, in AD 565, the Irish monk banished a strange water “beast” to the loch after it attacked one of his followers.

There were various mysterious sightings in the ensuing centuries as the idea of kelpies in the loch became woven into local folklore.