Loch Ness day, and it started better than any of us expected.
We had booked a Highland cow experience at Drumbuie Farm, just above Drumnadrochit. The farm has the Quila Cridhe Tearoom attached. It is a small working family farm run out of the family home, sheep and cattle, and the dad of the family grew up on a farm over at Fort Augustus, so this is not a petting zoo with a farm theme. Brunch first, in a wee tearoom with a window looking straight down over green fields to Loch Ness, everything baked from scratch. Mirin got a cupcake with a coo face on it and has not stopped talking about it since.
Then the girls got a private feeding and petting session with the coos. Bread crusts, enormous tongues, and two children entirely undone by it. Mirin fed one by hand and got a lick from chin to elbow for her trouble. Katherine sat on the dyke and made a friend for life. There is a photo of the four of us with a coo resting its head on the wall between us like it had been invited.
Our guide was Brazilian, which we did not see coming in the Highlands. He had worked here the previous season, and when he was choosing where in the northern hemisphere to spend this summer he picked the exact same place again, because he loved the farm and the area that much. Which tells you more about Drumbuie than any review could.
Down to the loch shore afterwards for a proper look at it. Mirin found a rock out in the shallows and claimed it. No monster, but the light on that water does strange things and I understand how the stories started.
Then Urquhart Castle. I have been before, but this time we did the visitor centre first, which I had skipped last time and would not skip again. There is a film on the castle's history in a small theatre, and at the end the curtains pull back to reveal a huge window with the castle and the whole loch laid out behind it. A properly slick reveal, and it means you walk down to the ruin already knowing what you are looking at.
What you are looking at is a thousand years of people fighting over one rock. Alexander II fortified the site properly after crushing a revolt in Moray around 1230. Edward I's men held it in 1296. Robert the Bruce took it back in 1307 and it became a royal castle. The MacDonald Lords of the Isles spent the next two centuries trying to hold it. The Grants were given it in 1509 by James IV on condition they repair it, and they built the five storey Grant Tower that still stands over the water.
The best story is the Great Raid of 1545. A MacDonald force stormed the place and then spent a month systematically stripping the castle and Glen Urquhart of everything worth taking, hauling it away down the Great Glen and burning what they could not carry. The inventory of the plunder survives and it is extraordinary. 2,355 cattle. 3,377 sheep. 2,204 goats. 371 horses. 122 pigs. 64 geese. Twelve feather beds with the blankets and sheets. Five pots, six pans, two brewing vats, six roasting spits. Doors, tables, chairs, benches, three great boats. They even took the locks. It was payback, apparently, for the Laird of Grant having fought them at the Battle of the Swampy Meadow. Then in 1692 a government garrison blew the place up on their way out so no Jacobite force could use it, and a storm in 1715 finished part of the job.
A couple of practical notes worth knowing. First, if you are coming in summer, be ready for crowds. Urquhart had over 466,000 visitors last year and is the third busiest Historic Environment Scotland site after Edinburgh and Stirling castles. Pre book your slot and your parking, because they mean it. Second, the Grant Tower stair and basement are currently closed for essential maintenance, so the climb to the top for that panorama is off the table at the moment. Worth knowing if you have been before and were counting on it.
We split up to explore different parts of the ruin, which is when I heard Katherine calling out. Took a while to work out where the voice was coming from, and eventually found her inside the prison cell, grinning at me through the iron bars. The only route to her was back up and around and down a spiral staircase, dark and narrow and dusty in the way all of them are. Worth it for the photo.
The A87 Highlands drive onto Skye tomorrow.
