Neptune’s Staircase and Glenfinnan, Near Fort William
The engines fired up at six and Lord of the Glens slipped away from the Craignure quay to steam north up Loch Linnhe. It was a moist, misty start to the day, but soft greys gave way to still water and green hills as the clouds lifted at Fort William, end of the sea loch. Three yachts passed us heading for the sea, as we nosed into the first sea-lock of the Caledonian Canal at Corpach. Captain Bob slipped us in between the open lock gates as tightly as a foot into a sock: barely 2’ clearance either side, with nothing between our polished hull and the sandstone lock walls but a few precious fenders. The gates closed behind us, water started to swirl as the lock filled and we rose the first 4’ inside this tidal lock. Now our early start makes sense: another hour and the tide would have fallen too far to get into the lock. This is the start of Thomas Telford’s engineering masterpiece, the Caledonian Canal, which can take yachts, motorboats and fishing trawlers a 60 mile shortcut across Scotland from the Atlantic at Fort William, to the North Sea at Inverness.
Here at Banavie is the most dramatic section of all, the 8 locks of Neptune’s Staircase, which will lift a boat nearly 100’ above sea level. Before we could enter the Staircase, we encountered two bridges, one for the railway to Mallaig, the next the road to Fort William. As we paused to consider this obstacle, to our delight the Jacobite Express (alias the Hogwarts Express) steamed into Banavie station and huffed and puffed its way across our bows heading for the coast. Once past, the locksman got an entire section of the railway to swing aside to the bank, followed by a similar sleight of hand with the road, which miraculously split and swung aside before our eyes. This allowed us to cross a gaping hole in both railway and road to enter Neptune’s Staircase. During the 90 minutes of our transit up the 8 locks, our National Geographic expert Iris gave us a lecture on the Jacobite rebellion. She spelt out the complex royal genealogy which led an expatriate Catholic pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, to take the Highland clans to war, and the disastrous outcome which pitted Scot against Scot and ultimately led to the systematic destruction of their traditional clan system. The reverberations continue to this day, with the call for Scottish independence once more a potent political rallying cry.
Her talk set the scene for our afternoon excursion to Glenfinnan, 12 miles west of the canal, at the head of Loch Shiel. Here the Prince first raised his standard in August 1745, and marched inland at the head of the first Highland army, gathering the clans ready for battle. We waited to see the return of the Hogwarts Express as it crossed the Glenfinnan viaduct, toured the small museum, walked down to Loch Shiel to climb the monument to the Highlander, and followed Ian on a nature walk through the woods. This ended at a superb surviving patch of Caledonian Pine forest, the native woodland which once clad most of the landscape 8,000 years ago when the first human hunters arrived in Scotland.
