Ross McDowell / Tartan Compass
The Great Glen is a landscape people move through, on foot, by bike, under paddle and aboard boats travelling between Scotland's east and west coasts.
Long-distance walkers, cyclists, paddlers and boats all use the Great Glen today, sometimes travelling through essentially the same landscape in completely different ways. Yachts and cruisers still pass through the Caledonian Canal, while people moving under their own power follow the lochs, canal and surrounding land. The reason the route feels so direct is much older. The Great Glen follows an enormous geological fault zone, later deepened and reshaped by ice. Loch Lochy, Loch Oich and Loch Ness occupy that remarkable line through the Highlands. Thomas Telford's canal then connected the natural waterways with constructed channels and locks, opening in 1822. This is why Loch Ness belongs inside the Highlight without becoming the whole of it. The larger story is a natural corridor that people have repeatedly found ways to move through.
Watch the different forms of movement. Boats, cyclists, walkers and paddlers can all be reading the same landscape in completely different ways. Then look beyond the engineering. Mountains and shorelines keep pulling the eye along the glen's north-east to south-west line. The canal works because it follows a route the geology had already created.
On a map, the Great Glen looks almost impossibly direct: one great line running from Fort William towards Inverness. Then you get into the landscape and it starts to make sense. What fascinates me is that people have kept finding new ways to use that same natural corridor. The geology came first; everything else has had to work with it.
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