Thursday June 14th

After breakfast, we settled the bill which I added a little to, as the owner of the B+B just so happened to make jewellery out of dichroic glass and had some items for sale.  I couldn't resist a bargain of an £8 glass pendant! :)

Today we headed on to Drumnadrochit which is very close to Loch Ness, actually, almost right on the shore.  We started our journey looking for Clava Cairns which we found with relative ease, although I get the feeling we may have approached it from the side that Historic Scotland don't really think about, and therefore only sign post it from the direction they think most people would go...!  Clava Cairns make up an ancient cemetery also known as Balnauran of Clava, which is dominated by a line of three Cairns enclosed by stone circles, probably created around 4,000 years ago, and they seem to be aligned to the midwinter sun.

We managed to explore and get all our photos in before a random German coach load of people filled up the area!  So onward we went to Culloden Battlefield, known for one of the shortest battles in history lasting under 1 hour in total, between Government troops and Jacobites.  The Visitors Centre was really well done, and we walked outside to the field with audio guides which had a GPS system in them, so it would 'ping!' when you reached the next spot.  This was quite good, although Mathew's didn't work at first as he was pressing the extra information buttons, and was walking past a couple of original points at the same time....but it got going again for him eventually!

After this, we had some lunch in the Visitor Centre cafe before deciding to miss out Cawdor Castle and head on to Inverness.  First of all we looked for the Knocknagael Boar Stone which turned out to have been removed and is now sitting in City Council building so we never got to see it.  This was all written on a plaque on a stone wall where it used to be.  Anyway, we went on to Inverness because my only combat trousers had split, so we discovered – thanks to 118118 – that there was a Marks + Spencers in Inverness, and fortunately for me, they had my size in, and in 2 different colours so I bought one of each!  That sorted, we continued on to our next B+B, Clunebeg Lodge which so far was the most...well, not difficult to find, but we had to drive along and up some pretty remote looking roads to get there, and fortunately they had put reassuring signs here and there so we knew we were heading in the right direction!  We had stopped off on the shore of the Loch Ness on the way, and spotted a few potential places to eat here this evening.