Beauly, Urquhart, Cawdor Castle and Culloden in a Day

We drive alongside the Cromarty Firth from Invergordon

The route runs alongside the Cromarty Firth from Invergordon, or over the Kessock Bridge from Inverness with views of the Beauly and Moray Firths, to Beauly Priory.

Beauly Priory

Beauly Priory is one of three priories founded in Scotland around 1230 for monks of the Valliscaulian order. The Valliscaulians came from Val-des-Choux, the Valley of the Cabbages, near Dijon in France, and held to strict ideals of poverty, chastity and obedience. Beauly means beautiful place, which is presumably how it struck the monks who came to worship here. Only the abbey church still stands, with some fine funerary monuments inside it.

Urquhart Castle

More than 1,000 years of history centred on the Great Glen. Urquhart Castle stands on the shore of Loch Ness and has seen some of the most dramatic chapters in Scotland's story. It was once one of the largest castles in the country, and its 500 years as a medieval fortress were violent ones. Control passed back and forth between the Scots and the English during the Wars of Independence, and the Lords of the Isles raided the castle and the glen regularly until the 1500s. The last government troops garrisoned here during the Jacobite Risings blew the place up when they left. The ruins remain, and with them a view of medieval life and of the people who held it.

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Inverness

- The Hill of the Faeries (Tomnahurich Hill) - The Caledonian Canal - The River Ness - Inverness Cathedral - The Old High Church and its graveyard - The oldest buildings in Inverness

Cawdor Castle

Cawdor Castle has an iron yett gate, a moat and drawbridge, turrets, turnpike stairs and a vaulted 16th-century kitchen, with the history to match. The medieval tower house was built for the 3rd Thane of Cawdor and has housed over 23 generations of the Cawdor family. Twelve principal rooms are open, holding collections of rare tapestries, fine art, furniture, ceramics and sculpture that span 3,500 years. The gardens are worth the time too.

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Clava Cairns

One of the most evocative prehistoric sites in Scotland: the remains of an ancient cemetery on a terrace above the River Nairn. The Clava Cairns are about 4,000 years old and were built to house the dead. The cemetery stayed a sacred place for millennia, and it tells us a good deal about what Bronze Age society believed. What stands today was once part of a larger complex. The site holds a range of prehistoric burial monuments and the remains of a medieval chapel.