Mature Flâneur

Scotland’s Great Grind and Slide

Driving the Great Glen

The Great Glen, from the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lochy. All photos by Tim Ward.

You can’t drive in a straight line through the Scottish Highlands. The road either twists along a rugged coastline, or winds up and down through mountain passes. Except for one place where Highway A82 is straight shot for 100km/62 miles. The road runs alongside a series of lochs that cuts a diagonal line from coast to coast between Fort William and Inverness. If you look at a topographical map, it’s as if God took a giant knife, and slashed a giant gash across the land, slicing Scotland right in half. This gash is Scotland’s Great Glen (a glen is a valley in Gaelic).

The Great Glen as seen from space (my photo of an informational placard on the shores of Loch Lochy

The actual cause of this strange, straight line, though not divine, is a story of great earthly powers: of shifting tectonic plates and the collision of prehistoric continents. I learned about this story while Teresa (my beloved spouse) and I were driving up the Great Glen from Fort William toward Inverness.

“Oh look, Tim, an information placard! You better pull over,” Teresa said.

I felt a gush of love well up in me. Teresa knows me so, so, well, and she wants me to enjoy the things I enjoy…