Glenfinnan and a little Caledonian Canal revisit

The little hire car was busy again, we felt that we had to visit the Glenfinnan area and see the memorial to the Jacobite rebellion. We also wanted to get up closer to the amazing railway viaduct that we had crawled over in the train a couple of times.

The monument to Bonnie Prince Charlie and his supporters sits at the top of the loch looking a little like the leaning tower of Pisa - yes, it now has a list.... For information on the monument, have a look at National Trust website :

It sits at the head of Loch Shiel, where Bonnie Prince Charlie landed. He couldn't have picked a better setting really:

We tried to imagine how that area would have looked with a horde of warlike highlanders camped out. Riskier than attending an SNP meeting for the average English guy we guess.

The viaduct is still impressive from the land rather than the train although the scenery kind of overpowers it:

Apparently it was one of the earliest large scale concrete structures.

We also revisited the Caledonian Canal which we had cruised with Andrew and Linda two years ago. This time we walked the area around Neptune's Staircase - the flight of locks at Banavie which was totally empty. No boat traffic at all in what should be peak season. We also walked around Fort Augustus and the flight there was busy - probably because the organisation of the lock keepers there seemed as bad as when we went through. Here is a gaggle of hire cruisers heading up (if that is the correct collective noun - perhaps a scrape or a scuff or a confusion is better?):

Perhaps our future possible job list has expanded now. As well as managing the shambolic Dunstaffnage Marina we could try to sort out the way they operate the flight of locks here. Interesting how things don't seem to have changed in the two years since we were on the waterway.

Blog reads - an update

Well, having mentioned that the potential Mossad reader seems to have vanished or spoofed their home country, the Russian secret service is very very busy. We don't believe that  1,800 posts were read from that country in the last 7 days. nor do we think that a denial of service attack on a silly little blog is likely. So, someone from Russia is having some fun - perhaps someone banned from the Olympics with unexpected time on their hands and still hyped up on drugs?

A hint for you - even if you manage to find our password for editing the blog, it will not work for any of our bank accounts so you are wasting your time. Go and annoy some Nigerian scammers instead.