The internet has been fairly miserable up in the highlands so my blogging has been thwarted, but now I'll have to try and catch up (we're actually in Edinburgh now!) In Fort William we stayed right beside the loch (Loch Linnhe) and our window looked out across it. It was mostly cloudy and wet, so this is mostly what we saw:
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| Summer in the highlands! |
Part of the appeal of Fort William is to see the highest peak in Britain, Ben Nevis. However that was never going to happen with the weather like this. Instead we drove to Glenfinnan to see the famous (thanks to Harry Potter) curved railway viaduct. You can't actually see the curve from this level, but it curves towards us:
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| The Jacobite Express crossing the Glenfinnan Viaduct. |
We climbed a muddy track and waited in the drizzle with dozens of others for the daily "Jacobite" steam train to cross.
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| Tourists waiting for the train to cross the viaduct. |
Fort William is also one end of the Caledonian Canal, which cuts right 100 km across Scotland from here to Inverness. If you have a boat you can sail across country via this series of canals (35 km), locks, and lakes (65 km, actually lochs). At this end it descends through ''Neptunes Staircase", a series of 9 locks to bring it down to the level of Loch Linnhe, and we went to see the locks in action. It takes an hour or two to get through just this set of locks:
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| Four yachts waiting to get up one step in the locks. |
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| One set of gates, with the next set in the distance. |
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| The same four yachts lifted 3 metres, ready to pass through to the next step. |
