Urquhart Castle: the ruin on Loch Ness, and what it costs to go in

A castle that was fought over for four hundred years, in the one position on Loch Ness worth fighting for.

The headland at Urquhart controls the middle of the Great Glen — the fault line that cuts Scotland in half and, before roads, the highway through it. Whoever held this rock watched everything that moved along the loch. That is why there has been a fortification here since early medieval times, and why the castle changed hands so often through the wars of independence and the centuries of Highland feuding that followed.

It ended as a ruin deliberately: the garrison blew up the gatehouse when they left in 1692 so that nobody else could use it. What survives is a long, low set of walls following the shape of the promontory, with the Grant Tower still standing five storeys at the northern end.

The visitor centre is built into the hillside above so it does not interrupt the view, and the short film it runs ends with the screen lifting to reveal the actual castle. That is a good piece of theatre and worth the ten minutes.

What people photograph, though, is the walk down: the path descends from the centre with the whole castle and twenty miles of loch laid out below. That view is why the queue exists.

Most of Urquhart is at ankle height — foundations, a gatehouse, the shape of a great hall. One building still stands: the Grant Tower at the northern end, five storeys of it, with a stair to a viewing platform at the top.

Go up. From the road the castle looks small because the loch behind it is enormous; from the tower you get the reverse, and you can see how the walls fill the whole promontory and how far the water runs in both directions. It is also the only spot where you can properly see the ditch cut across the neck of the headland, which is the oldest defensive work on the site.

The other thing worth finding is the trebuchet on the lawn — a full-size replica siege engine, which gives the scale of what this place had to withstand more effectively than any information board.

Below the tower, the jetty is where cruise boats land on combined tickets. If your tour stop is short and you want both the castle and the water, a cruise that finishes here is the efficient way to do it.