Don’t Go Breaking Urquhart

Day: 191

Towns / Cities Visited: 124

Countries Visited: 23

Steps Taken Today: 6,551

Steps Taken Around the World: 3,170,396

It was another early start, but it was for a good cause, I swear. You see, after a half hour drive we were arriving at the first of the day’s adventures; a boat cruise on the world famous Loch Ness. The morning air was brisk, with the dappled sunlight providing very little respite, and as we settled in on the top deck of the vessel, we were infinitely grateful that we had decided on donning thermals under our clothes and bringing along our gloves. The cold proved too much for most of the other visitors, who scurried into the warmth of the cabin below, and we were left with a relatively unencumbered view as our journey commenced.

Our cruise did not begin in the Loch itself, but rather at a port in Dochgarroch to the north. The voyage began as we set off down along the famed Caledonian Canal. This important waterway was built in the 19th century to the design of engineer Thomas Telford, in order to allow large ships to make their way from Corpach on the west coast, inland to Inverness and onwards to Moray Firth which allows passage to the North Sea. Although it is nearly 100 kilometres long, only about a third of it is actually man made, as the remainder simply uses a series of pre existing lochs which dot the Great Glen, a huge geological fault which provides one of the only large expanses of arable land in the…