Great Glen Way: Oich Bridge to Fort Augustus

Oich Bridge

Oich Bridge carries the A82 over the River Oich next to the Caledonian Canal. The modern road bridges pale into insignificance when compared to the adjacent suspension bridge, built by James Dredge in 1854. It is a truly magnificent structure, and is well worth a quick visit if passing by. Dredge managed to make a superlative example of a bridge that perfectly fits its location.

Fort Augustus and the old fort

The town of Fort Augustus nestles at the southern end of Loch Ness, about halfway between Fort William and Inverness. It was a small settlement called Kiliwhimin before General Wade built a fort at this strategic point immediately after the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion. A small village grew up around the fort and this flourished even after the fort was abandoned.

The fort was sold on to Benedectine Monks who founded Fort Augustus Abbey in 1876, which they later converted into a school. Sadly this closed in the 1990s, and the site is now privately owned.

Fort Augustus village is dominated by a flight of lochs that takes the Caledonian Canal down into Loch Ness. There are several shops, and accommodation is provided by many B&B's and hotels, all of which are ideal for walkers on the Great Glen Way. Nothing is finer than sitting outside a pub beside the locks, supping a pint whilst scrawling on postcards and watching boats slowly rising and falling.

Loch Ness

Loch Ness possibly has to be the most famous location in the entirety of Scotland, eclipsing even Edinburgh Castle in the public's imagination. Just the statistics are mind-blowing: it stretches for nearly 23 miles from Fort Augustus in the southwest to Inverness in the northeast; it is over 1.5 miles wide and is an incredible 230 metres deep. It contains more freshwater than all of the lakes in England and Wales combined.

Yet these figures are not why people visit. It takes a certain something for a place to develop a mythology, and Loch Ness has mythology in spades. It is far from the remotest place in Scotland and the scenery, although grand, is far from the best the country has to offer. So why is it so popular?

The answer is a little sighting made in 1933.

The A82 main road follows the northern shoreline of the loch, whilst the southern shore is much less accessible and quieter for much of its length.

The Caledonian Canal

The Caledonian Canal should have been one of Scotland's great engineering triumphs. Before its opening, any ship wanting to go between Scotland's two great cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh has to undertake a long journey via the south coast of Britain or a shorter but more perilous voyage around the north coast of Scotland. Many ships were being lost on this voyage, and the line of three large lochs that marks the Great Glen seems like an obvious route for a canal.

Unfortunately the lochs are freshwater and are situated at some height above sea level. This means that the work was much more expensive than would otherwise have been the case, and that the engineers tasked to survey the route did not have an easy task. For one thing it was not going to be a normal canal as it would be able to take seagoing ships. James Watt performed the first survey, and this was followed up by Telford and Josias Jessops.

As is often the case with civil engineering, both time and fiscal estimates were wildly optimistic. The canal took nineteen years to build, finally opening in 1822, and at double the cost. Unfortunately it was outdated almost as soon as it had opened; new sailing and (later) steam ships were too big to fit into the locks. Thus the investors in the canal made a massive loss.

However, their loss is our gain, and the canal still offers boats and small ships a short-cut across Scotland.

The Great Glen

The Great Glen is a feature unmistakable on any map of Britain. It follows the Great Glen Fault that incises a harsh diagonal line across the Highlands, from Fort William in the southwest to Inverness in the northeast. Various glaciations periods have eroded the fault and formed three large freshwater lochs - Loch Loch, Loch Oich and the famous Loch Ness.

Much of the Great Glen is surrounded by high ground, meaning that the glen forms one of the best low-level routes in the region; it is used by the busy A82 road between the west and east coasts and also the Caledonian Canal. Part of it was also used by the Invergarry and Fort Augustus railway line, which closed to goods just after the Second World War.