Inverness: Castles and Cairns
41m
The Scottish Highlands are filled with wild, dramatic cliffs, soaring mountains and skies that stretch out across the lochs. But they are also steeped in history, and filled with powerfully emotive and atmospheric sites. From the Bronze Age Clava Cairns to Culloden Battlefield, site of the final, fateful clash of the Jacobite Risings in 1746, the Highlands offer one many ways of connecting with the past at a range of remarkable places. The Cairns shed insight - or sometimes obscure it – on how people lived thousands of years ago, while Culloden Battlefield is still one of the best preserved and most atmospheric battlefields in Britain. The epic Great Glen is the gift of a dramatic tectonic collision that opened a giant crack across the width of the country, now home to the Caledonian Canal and Fort George. Fort George was the most remarkable fort in 18th century Britain, designed to become a bastion of Hanoverian rule in the unruly north. Urquhart Castle, Cawdor Castle and Inverness Castle stand proudly within the rolling landscape of the Highlands, their battlements soaring up into the sky. And Tomatin Whiskey Distillery in the Dulwich Warehouse has stood, often illegally, on the same site since the 15th century, and now offers intriguing insights into how life has and hasn’t changed throughout the centuries. Join Dan Snow on the road as he tours these beautiful locations, experiencing the best that the Scottish Highlands have to offer and witnessing some of its rich, fascinating landscape.