Glencoe to Skye

Wednesday 14 July 2010


We got a much earlier start to our travels the next morning & fortunately with a decent breakfast. Our plan was to drive up the “Great Glen”, check out Loch Ness & then see where we wanted to stay the night.

Our first stop was at Fort William where we did some picnic lunch shopping and where it started to pour with rain. We went to “Neptune's Stairway” - a series of seven locks in a canal linking all the lochs in the Great Glen to the sea. Despite the rain, we caught a group of six boats making their way through the locks. We watched them go through about four locks – each lock had barely enough room for the six to fit & the water level rose surprisingly fast.

We didn't make many other stops as the weather really was miserable – and we arrived at Loch Ness in time for our lunch break. We called into the carpark for the Castle Urquhart, but decided to have our picnic first to see if it would stop raining. No such luck! The continued downpour on top of a very expensive admission charge was enough to discourage us from going in. We decided that we would continue to Skye for the night & were able to book ourselves into a bed & breakfast relatively easily. We did however go into Drumnadrochit to check out any Nessie signs. (This is a long story – Bill used to play in a band & his nickname was Monster, so we wanted some corny monster photos). We found a couple which we braved in the rain & the laughing made the weather seem not so bad.

We back-tracked to Invermoriston where the rain let up so we were able to get out & take some photos of the lovely old stone bridge & river in the centre of town.

Although the sky remained grey, the rain mostly ceased for the rest of the trip. We stopped again at Eilean Donan – a very picturesque castle on a small peninsula in a loch. Unfortunately the tide was fully out, but it was still very photogenic. We went inside to have a quick look around and then back to the car for the last section of our drive across the bridge to Skye at Kyle of Lochash.

We had booked our accommodation at Portree, which was some distance from the bridge. So despite the lovely light and the stunning scenery, we drove straight to Portree.

We explored this tiny harbour town & found ourselves an Indian restaurant to eat. It had been a very long day and we'd covered a huge distance but we were very excited to be on Skye.