Day 68 Part 2: Inverness to Loch Farraline, Inverness-shire
Virtual Walk: Scotland 2021
14th March 2021: Part 2 continues our walk around Inverness before we head down the River Ness and the Caledonian Canal to reach the east side of Loch Ness where we visit Foyers.
We leave the cemetery the same way we entered and head back along Academy Street, reaching Falcon Square at the other end, a fairly recent addition. The Square was named after John Falconer, who opened an iron foundry at the Inverness Rail Terminus in 1858. The old building on the Square formed part of the foundry and was relocated in the 1990s. The Square forms part of the Eastgate Shopping Centre redevelopment which was completed in 2003. From here we turn onto Inglis Street leading us onto the main pedestrianised shopping street of Inverness, High Street. At its end we are back at the Town House, where we turn left this time up Castle Wynd, to take steps behind the Town House up to Inverness Castle.
There is a huge amount of history on the Inverness Castle site. Structures on Castle Hill have been sieged, raided, destroyed and rebuilt a number of times across the centuries so I’ll try to keep it brief! After Malcolm III destroyed MacBeth’s stronghold on Crown Hill in 1057, he built the first castle on Castle Hill in the 11th century. This was destroyed by Robert the Bruce in 1307 during the Scottish Wars of Independence. Having been rebuilt, and now belonging to the Huntly family, it was taken after a siege by Mary Queen of Scots forces in 1562
During Oliver Cromwell’s time here, in 1652 the castle was extended and strengthened. His citadel (or fort) was constructed nearer the river mouth in the shape of a pentagon, using stone from old churches and castles in the region. It was initially called ‘The Sconce’, now known as Cromwell’s Fort, and all that remains of the structure is the clock tower on the aptly named Cromwell Road; the stone was quarried to construct the old Ness Bridge. After the Jacobite Uprising of 1715, the remains of the medieval castle were redeveloped into the first Fort George. Bonnie Prince Charlie and his army did capture the castle in 1745, but as they withdrew from the Fort in 1746, they set off explosions across the site. The fort was never rebuilt on Castle Hill, the new Fort George being built further along the coast at Ardersier for tactical reasons.
Inverness Fort became a castle once more, remaining in poor condition until 1836, when the structure we see today, designed by the architect William Burn, was built to house a Sheriff’s Court and prison. It continued to provide this service until fairly recently, when a new Justice Centre opened in March 2020, allowing Inverness Castle to begin a new chapter in its life as a tourist attraction. Part of the castle is already accessible, however, as a panoramic viewpoint, which opened in 2017, giving 360-degree views of Inverness and beyond. We climb up the steps of the north tower to visit the presentation rooms, showing drone footage and telling the Brahan Seer story, on our way to the viewing platform.
After our visit, we walk through the castle area taking in the view across the River Ness to the cathedral and Eden Court. As we do so we pass a statue of Flora MacDonald by Inverness sculptor Andrew Davidson, erected in her memory in 1896. It is at the castle that the Great Glen Way Walk ends, having started in the Old Fort at Fort William; you can, of course, start here and walk to Fort William instead!
We walk down past Castle Tavern to take the wee steps down onto Ness Walk alongside the River Ness. We walk past Nessbank Church as we progress, passing a number of city hotels, to the Inverness War Memorial in Edith Cavell Gardens, where we pause to remember, before proceeding onto Lady’s Walk. As the path opens out onto a grass area on Island Bank Road, we spot a substantial fountain, looking out of place in a secluded spot among the trees, the Forbes Fountain. Dr George Fiddes Forbes of Millburn gifted the fountain to Inverness and its people in 1880, replacing a lesser drinking fountain in front of the Town House. When road widening took place in 1958, it was removed to this spot, now a shadow of its former self, as in the process its large stone canopy was irreparably damaged. No plaque speaks of its significance to the city and some hope one day it will be restored to its rightful place.
We walk a little further along the road to the Ness Islands to take a woodland walk in the middle of the River Ness itself. The islands are connected to each bank by a series of bridges, first completed in 1828, but these were washed away by the flood of 1849 so were replaced by a footbridge and 2 suspension bridges in 1853-4. We wander through the shade of the trees and sit on benches, enjoying views out over the river for a time, before returning to the road heading south out of the city on the old General Wade’s Military Road towards Dores village. This area of Inverness has experienced great expansion since it became a city in 2000 and we see several housing developments, a Tesco and petrol station as we pass. The new city centre bypass also runs over the Caledonian Canal and River Ness to join the existing road network here at Dores Roundabout.
As we say goodbye to Inverness, we leave the Dores Road to walk alongside the River Ness, through Darroch Woods passing Loch Dochfour, at whose northern point the river splits for the Caledonian Canal to continue to Dochgarroch. On a side note, in 1929 there was a hydro-electric scheme constructed on the riverside to make electricity for Inverness, near Whin Park, where the playpark is now situated. It was made redundant when the city was joined to the National Grid some years later.
We continue our walk in Darroch Woods to reach Aldourie Castle, located near a small crofting village of the same name in the Strath Dores area. Aldourie, whose name in Gaelic means ‘dark water’, is the only habitable castle on the shores of Loch Ness today. There has been a laird’s house on this spot since 1616, coming into Fraser hands in 1754. A Tytler married into the Fraser family taking on the name, becoming Fraser-Tytler. The building was extended in 1839, then transformed in the 1860s by William Fraser-Tytler into the baronial style castle we see today, with the addition of 2 turrets and raising the building by 2 storeys; no wonder he did so as he had 11 children!
The British army unit the Lovat Scouts was reputedly founded by Simon Fraser, 14th Lord Lovat, and Edward Fraser-Tytler in this building. It was formed in January 1900, consisting of Highland ghillies, stalkers and hillmen, who were good with rifles and telescopes. The first contingent of Lovat Scouts, composed of one company mounted on Highland ponies and one company on foot, assembled and trained at Beaufort Castle in early 1900 (there is a photo in Fort George Museum to prove it). They served in the Second Boer War and then also served in different ‘forms’ right through the World Wars. They were the first known military unit to wear the ghillie suit and went on to be the first British Army Sniper Unit in 1916. Today they are a Company in the Orkney and Shetland Battery of 1 Highlanders Battalion Army Cadet Force.
Aldourie Castle was purchased by Anders Holch Povlsen in 2015 and has undergone a total restoration including a change in the render and colour of the building. It was once creamy white and is now a burnt sienna, which will apparently weather quickly to suit the stonework on the building. It is set in over 202 hectares of garden and parkland which remains much as it was in the mid-19th century. As a result, they are included in the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland. The castle is for private use hire and a number of the cottages in the grounds are available as holiday accommodation.
We wander past the castle, through Torr Woods at Torr Point, onto Dores Beach where the stunning panorama of Loch Ness looking south is awaiting us. The fields behind this area belong to Clune Farm, and it was where the RockNess Music Festival used to take place. In recent years Groove Loch Ness has taken place here; a ‘one night, one stage’ electronic music festival. We make our way along the pebble beach, stopping midway for a dip in Scotland’s second-largest loch and have a scout about for ‘Nessie’, before heading to Dores Inn for refreshments.
Refreshed, we continue along the shore of Loch Ness on General Wade’s Military Road, passing Erchite Wood and the village of Inverfarigaig, sitting on the River Farigaig. Above the villages sit the remains of the Iron Age fort of Dun Deardail, Gaelic for ‘Deirdre's Fort’, built around 700 BC. It is associated with the legend of Deirdre of the Sorrows, a tragic heroine in Irish legend. Deirdre and Naoise fled to Scotland after they fell in love, as the King of Ulster wanted her for himself as she was incredibly beautiful. They are believed to have lived near this fort for some of the time, living a happy life while they were in Scotland. It didn’t last, as the King tracked them down, and they were escorted back to Ulster; of course, it didn’t end well.
A little further down the road, we come to Boleskine which holds a darker part of Loch Ness’ history. There is a beautiful Burial Ground situated on the lochside which once had a medieval church. The parish was formed in the 13th century and ministers travelled by horseback to and from the area to preach at the church, whose ruins became a burial enclosure for the Frasers of Balnain, Culduthel and Boleskine Parish. It contains some old gravestones of note as well as another small, roofed building called a mort-house, a mortuary built for a coffined body to sit under guard until it was no longer of use to the bodysnatchers and could be buried in peace!
A place of further interest lies above the Burial Ground: Boleskine House. Strange happenings in the area go back long before the house was built. One Minister, a Thomas Houston (1648–1705), was said to have once had to hastily lay animated corpses back in their graves after a local wizard had raised them from the dead in the graveyard. Boleskine House was built in the 1760s by Colonel Archibald Fraser (son of the ‘Old Fox’) as a hunting lodge to annoy the Frasers of Foyers. The lodge was built on the site of an earlier kirk which was said to have burst into flames during a church service killing everyone inside!
The Manor of Boleskine and Abertarff, as it was then known, was expanded by the Fraser family, and also included a tunnel linking the house to the Burial Ground. It remained their property until 1899 when the family sold it to the poet, mountaineer and ‘spiritual thinker’ Aleister Crowley. Crowley thought it an ideal spiritual retreat to practice the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage; a ritual to summon your Guardian Angel, which required the summoning of demons! He became known for his black magic practices, referring to himself as Lord Boleskine. Crowley stated that his experiments had gotten out of hand after his lodge-keeper suffered a number of personal tragedies!
Crowley left the property in 1913, which was followed by a couple of owners who didn’t fare well; one committed suicide, the others were newlyweds. The wife was blind, and the husband walked out a month later leaving her to fend for herself. Move on a few years and Jimmy Page, a Led Zeppelin guitarist who collected Crowley memorabilia, bought the property. By this time the house was in a state of disrepair, so Page restored the property but didn’t spend a huge amount of time there. He asked a friend to be its caretaker, Malcolm Dent, who experienced strange happenings and ‘the most terrifying night of his life’ whilst living there. In 1992 Page sold it to the MacGillivray’s, who ran it as a hotel until 2002 when it was then sold to a Dutch family. In 2015 the house caught fire while the family were out shopping; the interior was totally destroyed rendering it uninhabitable. It was put on the market once more in 2019 and bought by the Boleskine House Foundation; they have started to restore the property to its original state with a view to opening the house and gardens to the public.
We reach Lower Foyers, after leaving the road to follow a trail, where the remains of the British Aluminium Company (BAC) industrial units still stand. Foyers is part of the national hydro-electric scheme, but it didn't start out that way. A hydro-electric scheme was built by BAC in 1896 to harness power for their aluminium smelter. The plant operated until 1967 after which the Scottish Hydro Board, now Scottish Hydro Electric (SHE), purchased the station and refinery to use as pump storage after redevelopment. A power station was added in 1975. Today the station operates as follows; water is pumped up from Loch Ness to Loch Mhor, a natural loch at the top of the Glen using surplus electricity from the National Grid. This water is then released to turn turbines and generate electricity. As we walk past the area, we see the aluminium refinery, which still lies empty, whilst the power station lies further along the shore towards Boleskine. The BAC developed a thriving industry here and the Foyers Pier was used by them, as well as the steamboats which called in en route from Inverness to Fort Augustus.
We walk through the area to join the Falls of Foyers Walk, which leads us up the side of the River Foyers to the lower, then upper falls. These 2 sets of waterfalls drop into a gorge, with a total drop of circa 42 metres, and are known as the Smoking Falls, ‘Eas na Smuide’ in Gaelic, as a result. They became popular as a visitor attraction in the late 18th to early 19th century following promotion by poets, writers and artists. The falls were regarded as an important destination on the ‘Scottish Romantic Tour’, a movement embracing past history and nature, putting an emphasis on intense emotion drawn from this as an authentic source of aesthetic experience. The mid-19th century development of railway and steamboats enabled greater numbers of people to travel.
In the late 19th century, the falls became an early example of a conservation versus industrial development debate. The BAC, by installing their power station, wanted to take water from the source feeding the falls to which objections were raised, but BAC won. The falls remain impressive but have a diminished flow today compared with the Victorian experience. They are particularly spectacular after rainfall. We wander up the tree-lined path reaching the lower falls first with a drop of 30 metres, where the falls get their ‘smoky’ name from because of the spray which rises from the pool. Robert Burns described them on his visit in 1727, as cascading into a ‘horrid cauldron’ and ‘dim-seen through rising mists’. Further up we see the upper falls, a 14-metre drop in another beautiful setting, before we walk the rest of the sloped path up to the Foyers village itself.
Foyers, which means ‘shelving slope’, grew up around a mansion house built here by the Frasers of Foyers, who acquired the land by marriage in 1420. They were of Norman stock and came to the south of Scotland during the reign of William the Lion, prior to the acquisition of the Lovat Estate in the 14th century and the Foyers Estate as above. The house was built below the falls after 1541 and was home to the Frasers of Foyers for the next 3 centuries. It was James Fraser, 9th Fraser of Foyers, who fought as a Jacobite then eluded capture post-Culloden by hiding for 7 years in his favourite cave near the falls. To keep his location a secret the locals referred to him as ‘Bonaird Odhair’ (Dun-coloured bonnet or Dun Bonnet). During hiding, people would bring him supplies and, on one such run, a young boy was bringing him beer when soldiers questioned him. Refusing to give up the Dun Bonnet’s location the soldiers cut off the boy's hand.
With poor management in the late 18th century, the Frasers of Foyers Estate fortunes declined, and the estate was eventually sold by trustees to pay debts in 1843. The mansion house was demolished with the arrival of the BAC, removing the last link to the Fraser of Foyers in the area.
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