Seren: Julia Lynam's Blog: The Road to Loch Ness

One of my plans while here at Findhorn for nine weeks was to travel around and see a bit of Scotland. Ha-ha! I’ve become so absorbed with life in this Community that I’ve not been able to wrest myself away. Not until, that is, my seventh week, when I rented a car for a day (what a saga that was!) and took Pieter and Raquel for a trip to Loch Ness.

Pieter and Raquel

Pieter is from Belgium and Raquel from Catalonia and they are both participating in the LCG (Living in Community as a Guest) program, which is the main gateway to becoming a live-in member of the Findhorn Community. It's the program I dropped out of - remember?

Seriously, it was hard to move my focus from the daily round here out onto the open road. The A96 to be precise. However, once I was behind a wheel again the old habits clicked right back in and I became normal again.

Our carefully planned day took us first to Clava Cairns, three Bronze Age stone burial mounds lying just east of Inverness and dating from three to four thousand years ago. They are astounding, so astounding that they are actually a "type" site. That means that cairns like these are called "Clava" cairns even if they're not at Clava.

One of the two passage graves at Clava. Burials were found in the center,
which is now open, but was roofed over with stone in the past.
I don't know the man, he's simply there as a scale object about six foot tall.

Raquel in passage grave.

Each cairn was surrounded by a stone circle some time after
it was first built, but still a very long time ago.

A road slices through one of the stone circles.

The lowest course lining the cavity at the center of each cairn
is made up of large stones like these.

A few stones show "cup marks" like these.

General view of the site.

Bronze Age cattle?

Battlefield Thoughts

Our second port of call was the battlefield at Culloden, very near Clava Cairns. I have to make a small digression here to recall that some years ago I took my oldest grandson, Damon, out for a day to visit Crown Point, a pre-US Revolutionary War fort in New York State. As we crossed the stunning bridge across Lake Champlain at Chimney Point, crossing from Vermont into New York, we saw a curious sight. A handful of people dressed very strangely ran down from the foot to the lake on the New York side, jumped into a rowboat and rowed quickly off.

When we arrived at the fort we found a battle re-enactment going on. Soldiers were camped out all over the place. They didn't look very American to me so I asked what battle they were re-enacting and was told "Culloden". The people running down to the rowboat had been Bonnie Prince Charlie and his friends escaping from the battlefield.

I was horrified at the whole idea. I didn't know much about Culloden but I did know it had been a bloody massacre of the Scots. I found it really distasteful that 3,000 miles away and 350 years later people were enjoying its re-enactment.

So when I realized that Culloden battlefield lay on our route to Loch Ness, I decided to stop there. to connect with the sadness of the place. I should have known better. It's a huge open field, yes, I should be thankful for that, but it's also a tourist attraction with coffee bar and gift shop, which all felt a bit odd to me. Maybe it's better to preserve it this way than to forget it altogether - or is it?

Site of the Battle of Culloden, April 16, 1746

Onward to Loch Ness

Glaciation is an extraordinary process which began to be elucidated in a scientific way for the benefit of our current culture in the mid 1700s. Both Loch Ness in northern Scotland and Lake Champlain in the northern USA/southern Canada are glacial lakes. I live beside one of them and here I was visiting the other, so I ran a comparison:

Loch Ness is 23 miles (37km) long; Lake Champlain is 125 miles (201 km) long.
Surface area of Loch Ness is 22 square miles (56 square km); surface area of Lake Champlain is 490 square miles ( 1,269 square km).
Maximum depth of Loch Ness is 788 ft (240m); maximum depth of Lake Champlain is 400 ft (120m).

Its great depth means that Loch Ness is the largest body of freshwater in the UK. Lake Champlain is, I believe, the eleventh largest lake in the USA.

We took the road along the south-eastern side of the Loch, the B852. Several people had recommended it, omitting to point out that it's single lane, with passing places, as so many minor roads are this far from civilization. That was no problem, however, and it was an extremely good route for us because, unlike the main road on the other side of the Loch, it allows easy access at several points to the waters of the Loch itself. We stopped several times along the way.

Loch Ness from the west about 1pm, Tuesday, March 10, 2015.

Raquel demonstrating easy access to the Loch

Welcome to Loch Ness

Our destination was the small, and I mean small, settlement of Foyers, about half way along the Loch. We ate lunch, then ventured down to the 165ft (50m) Falls of Foyers .

Squirrels seem to be quite important
to the people of Foyers.

.

Perhaps because they're so cute.

We took a scenic route back, past Loch Mhor and Loch Ruthven, relishing the sensation of being beyond the firm embrace of the Findhorn Community for a day, but being sure to reach Cluny in time for dinner!