We took another ferry off Mull, but this time from Tobermory to Kilchoan. The ferry was much smaller, and only had two cars on it during our ride, so there wasn’t much camouflage for the behemoth’s alarm going off every time we rolled over a wave. Which we did quite a bit!Nevertheless, we made it to Kilchoan and drove off without incident.
The Ardnamurchan area seems to be mainly farmland, coos and sheep. It’s very green and the landscape is even more majestic. Even better, while we’re in the area, we’re staying at an actual CASTLE!
Mingary Castle has a massive stone curtain wall from the 13th century which surrounds a later building (Georgian maybe?) that was restored 10-15 years ago. Now it’s a ‘restaurant with rooms’, with a great view over the water.
The food is great – it certainly deserves it’s awards. We had dinner there one night (we went for the restrained 5 course option rather than the deluxe 8 courses…!) and waddled our way back to our rooms stuffed with delightful morsels like quail egg with asparagus and wild garlic emulsion, braised short rib (that I’d been smelling cooking all afternoon – omg!) chocolate cremeux… yum! The breakfasts were also amazing – choice of small plates (porridge, yoghurt, bakery items etc) and big plates (Full Scottish, eggs Benedict with venison salami, or pancakes, or the one I went for – local smoked trout and scrambled eggs on toast. So good!)
To balance the food, we did some walking and exploring, checking out the Westernmost point of mainland Britain at Ardnamurchan Point, trudging through some boggy fields to find an ancient cairn, exploring Sanna Beach and popping into the local distillery.
The area is quite sparsely populated and we were surprised that there weren’t many places to get food. There was a (brand new) cafe at the community centre but otherwise the general store was closed every time we drove past, and the pub wasn’t open for lunches. So if we weren’t eating at the castle, we were pretty hungry! Luckily the new cafe had one gluten free option of a brownie that I had for lunch one day, and I bought some fresh raspberries from a roadside stall the other day.
We waved a fond farewell to our castle after two days and headed through the beautiful scenery up to Glenfinnan to see the Viaduct. The roads were single lane with passing places for most of the trip (my ‘favourite’ bit was the single lane clinging to the side of the cliff, with frequent signs warning of falling rocks. But beautiful scenery!)
Once at Glenfinnan, after being gently reintroduced to other people through the transition to two lane roads, we found all the tourists from this part of the world at the viaduct too. We waited at the viewing point half an hour after the supposed 1.20 steam train but figured we must have missed it and headed down to the carpark again, only to see it steaming past almost an hour after it was due. It was a pretty amazing sight!
We drove over to Fort William, our home for the next couple of days, and stopped in at the supermarket and the Ben Nevis distillery before checking into our holiday home. While the castle was amazing, it was also great to be in a self catering place with a washing machine.
Although we considered driving across to Eileen Donal Castle, we ended up just heading north to Fort Augustus to get a glimpse of Loch Ness and see the other end of the canal and the locks.
Fort Augustus was teeming with other tourists, as it was a beautiful day. Lots of people were enjoying the weather on the sides of the canal and we were just in time to see a sailing boat heading down the locks. Amazing!
Loch Ness was gorgeous of course, like the rest of the lochs we’ve seen. No sign of the monster unfortunately.
We drove back to Fort William in time to hop onto a cruise around the area, looking at derelict boats, the start of the canal, the woodchip/lumber port, the salmon fishery and the highlight, Seal Rock. While there were no seals on the rock itself, there were many baby seals playing in the water around it and we all crowded over to that side of the boat to see them.
Once we landed at the town jetty again, we took a quick walk down the main pedestrian mall, picking up some chips from a convenient fish n chip shop to keep us warm.
The last bit of Scotland was driving the Behemoth back to Glasgow. Such great scenery – I literally said ‘Look, another beautiful mountain!” every time we turned a corner. We waved goodbye to the Behemoth and celebrated the end of our combined jaunt with a fish n chip lunch at the station, before I headed south and K met up with her family again.
Two Weeks Away 