Highland weekend
Categories: places
Tags: photos, Scotland, Highlands, Jacobite steam train, Scottish Crannog Centre, Loch Tay
Date: 02 August 2010 20:38:59
Last weekend was HD's birthday, and to celebrate, this weekend we had a weekend in the beautiful Highlands of Scotland. The main bit of his present was a trip on the Jacobite steam train (colloquially known as "the Harry Potter train") from Fort William to Mallaig and back. I'm really not a train nerd at all, but even I was excited by this! Before the train left we had the chance to look at the engine and get up into the driver's bit (which of course has a proper word but I don't know what it is!) - I was amused to see the teapot warming nicely above the coal fire. Sadly the weather was a bit, well, Scottish, and particularly on the way up there it felt like the train had a cloud about 10 feet above it almost all the way - it wasn't until we were not far from Mallaig that someone else in the carriage pointed out a slither of blue sky in the distance. So it meant that my photos weren't always that great, but we still saw some beautiful scenery. The train stopped for 25 minutes at Glenfinnan mid-way through the outbound journey which gave enough time to look around the railway museum there (it was only a couple of rooms, they managed to pack in quite a lot there though). Glenfinnan is also the place with the massive viaduct which people familiar with the Harry Potter films will recognise - because of the weather I only really saw it on the way back though!
Once in Mallaig we had about an hour and a half so we had time to have lunch and wander round the harbour a bit before getting on the train to come back. Luckily the weather had cleared up quite a bit, so we saw quite a bit more on the way back - including the viaduct. HD took a little video of that bit of the journey and put it on YouTube:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLiBINGtCfM[/youtube]
It was raining again though by the time we got back into Fort William; unfortunately that was the day of the Lochaber Highland Games in Fort William, which I understand were a bit of a washout sadly. It was a fabulous day out though, and I recommend it very highly as a present :)
In the evening it took us several attempts to find somewhere to eat out. Fort William is nice enough but doesn't have any particularly nice restaurants (well it probably has plenty of seafood restaurants which are fine, but as veggies we were a bit more restricted). We headed off to the Ben Nevis Inn (at the foot of Ben Nevis) but unfortunately they were full and had people waiting, so we then went to the Glen Nevis restaurant but they were full and had people waiting too. We were just resigning ourselves to having a bag of chips for the second night in a row when HD had the bright idea of heading north to Spean Bridge, a village about 8 miles away. This is where I'm pretty sure the breakdown lorry that took us the last 150 or so miles home from our honeymoon after Car2's dramatic demise in the back end of nowhere in the dark came from, so it was nice to find somewhere to give us a happier memory of the place! We ended up in a B&B which had quite a posh restaurant, we had to wait for a bit and it was a little pricey, but the food was well worth the wait and HD's merlot (I couldn't indulge as I was driving) smelt stunning! (I did have a little sip, it tasted great too).
Yesterday rather than going straight back to Glasgow we went on to Loch Tay in Highland Perthshire, to the Scottish Crannog Centre which HD had seen on Time Team. We had a very interesting tour of the reconstructed crannog, and also of course a beautiful drive to get there. I'd recommend it as a really interesting visit, including a demonstration of crafts such as woodcutting. All in all a fab weekend - it's such a shame we couldn't spend longer, it really is such a beautiful part of the world.
Some more photos from the train journey and the Crannog Centre are on this flickr set here.