The Hairy Coos of Inverness

The View From My Beer

Lunch today was fish n chips followed by a pint of McEwans in a decidedly Scottish pub, Glenalbyn.

Inverness

Stop number eight on my 14-day cruise around Britain was the port of Invergordon. Invergordon acts as a gateway to the Scottish Highlands. The nearby city of Inverness has a population of 65,000 and is the UK’s northernmost city. The city is considered the ‘capital’ of the highlands. This area has been the scene of many battles between Scottish clans as well as between the Scotts and the English (including the Picts and Jacobites). Invergordan and Inverness also act as a gateway to tourists hoping for a glance at ‘Nessie’.

My Walk

Today was likey to be a oince in a lifetime chance to see Loch Ness. Being 65km from Invergordon, I needed to take a bus tour. My tour had three stops, plus a quick photo stop at Loch Ness.

Beauly

Our first stop was the village of Beauly. The town was charming with flower baskets hanging down the street divide. Beauly Priory is one of three priories founded in Scotland in about 1230 for monks of the Valliscaulian order. As we were driving through the area, our tour guide would often get excited and point out we were pasing some ‘hairy coos’. It took me a whaile but I eventually figured out he was referring to a local breed of cows that had a cute hairy exterior.

Loch Ness

Loch Ness did not quite live up to my expectations. But then I thought about it. Most of the hype is about a monster that doesn’t exist. There were quite a few things in the area that built on the theme of the Loch Ness Monster, including a small theme park – NessieLand. Our tour guide expressed it in clear term. Back in 1933, the Courier carried an article about a reported sighting. This attracted a lot of tourists who then reported sightings of their own, that then attracted even more tourists. I get the feeling the locals are not too caught up in the myth, but they recognize that they need to maintain the hype in order to keep the much-needed tourist revenue coming in.

In the absence of that there was not a lot to attract heavy volumes of tourists. The loch is big, but especially attractive. Urquart Castles provides perhaps the only scenic view of the lake, which is why it is the oconic shot featured on most images of the loch.

Inverness

We stopped at Inverness for lunch. It was a good-sized city and provided me with the chance to finally take a walk and catch some sites.

Cawdor Castle

Our final stop for the day was Cawdor Castle. As fate would have it, this is also the site of a Scottish tale, that of William Shakespeare’s play McBeth. It turns out that the castle was built 300 years after McBeth ascended to the Scottish throne. It would appear Shakespeare was like other writers of that era who took a few facts (McBeth was real, and Cawdor Castle was real) and spun them into a story. That story then gets taken as being non-fiction rather than the fiction it really was.

Cawdor Castle Gardens

Invergordon

On our return to Invergordon, our tour guide made us aware of two interesting things about the small port town. First, it is the home of Tom Stollman, who has won three World’s Strongest Man titles in 2021, 2022, and 2024. The other was the very visible presence of oil rigs in and around the port. It turns out Invergordon has quite a thriving business maintaining North Sea oil rigs.

Photo Gallery