In 1822 the vast bulk of King George IV was levered into a kilt for a state visit to Edinburgh, the loyal clansmen lined up in newly invented tartans, and the modern industry of Highland tourism was born. The Great Glen and Strathspey were perfectly positioned to capitalise. The two valleys converge on Inverness, the most northerly city in the British Isles. One is a fault-line slash from the west coast; the other is the salmon-river corridor of the Spey down from the Cairngorms. Together they channel road, rail and canal traffic into the Highland capital, and they hold most of what the rest of the world thinks of when it thinks of Scotland.
The Great Glen is the surface expression of a 430-million-year-old strike-slip fault, scoured into a deep diagonal trench by ice. Three long lochs sit in the floor: Loch Lochy, Loch Oich, Loch Ness. In the early 19th century Thomas Telford joined them with the Caledonian Canal, opening a sea-to-sea inland passage. Fort William sits at the south end below Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Britain. Fort Augustus marks the head of Loch Ness, where five linked locks step boats down to the long water. Drumnadrochit, halfway up the loch, has the photogenic ruin of Urquhart Castle and an industry built around a creature most people are not really expecting to see. Inverness sits at the northern end. The A82 follows the glen for its full length.
Strathspey is the broad valley of the River Spey, climbing east from the heads of the Highland Main Line into classic whisky country. Most visitors approach over the bleak Drumochter Pass on the A9, dropping into the Spey valley near Dalwhinnie. Aviemore is the central town, a ski and outdoor-sports base built up under the eastern wall of the Cairngorms. From here the railway and A9 carry north to Inverness while the A95 swings east through Speyside distillery country toward Aberdeenshire. Much of the upper valley lies inside Cairngorms National Park, the largest in the UK, with peaks rising to Ben Macdui at 1,309 metres. Steam trains still run from Aviemore on the Strathspey Railway in summer.
This part of the Highlands was anglicised earlier than the country to the west. Lowland farming methods and land tenure had taken hold here well before the 1745 rebellion, and English had largely replaced Gaelic among the educated. Depopulation began before the more famous Clearances and was driven as much by the pull of Glasgow and the Americas as by the push of landowners. There was no equivalent of the dramatic Sutherland or Skye evictions, which is why this stretch of country is not remembered as Clearance landscape. The change, when it came in the 19th century, was railways and tourists rather than smoke and burning roofs. The Highland Sleeper from London Euston still splits at Edinburgh, with one portion to Inverness and another to Fort William.
Urquhart Castle, on a headland on Loch Ness, is the photogenic centrepiece. Culloden battlefield, just east of Inverness, marks where the 1745 Jacobite rising ended on 16 April 1746 in less than an hour of close-quarter slaughter. Fort George at Ardersier was built afterward to crush any remaining clan power, and is still an active military barracks today. The Glenfinnan Viaduct, west of Fort William on the Road to the Isles, has been used in films and television enough that small crowds gather to watch the Jacobite steam train cross it each summer. In Loch Ness, year-round boats putter out looking for a monster that has so far declined to appear. In the Moray Firth, real dolphins and whales do appear, and tour boats sail from Inverness to find them.
Inverness has an airport with flights from Amsterdam, London, Bristol and the northern isles. Trains arrive from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, London. From the city, roads radiate in all directions: south down the Great Glen to Fort William and onward to Glencoe, southeast up the Spey to Aviemore, northwest to Skye via Kyle of Lochalsh, north into Ross and Sutherland on the North Coast 500 itinerary. The Caledonian Canal still links the two coasts for small craft. The Spey valley still produces classic single-malt whiskies. The latitude is the same as Newfoundland and Tomsk in Siberia, which the locals like to mention when the weather turns. Bring waterproofs in any month.
The Great Glen and Strathspey region centres on Inverness at 57.48 N, 4.22 W. The Great Glen runs diagonally southwest to northeast from Fort William (56.82 N, 5.10 W) to Inverness, following the fault line and the Caledonian Canal. Strathspey runs northeast to southwest from near Aviemore (57.19 N, 3.83 W) into the Drumochter Pass. Inverness Airport (EGPE) at Dalcross is the main commercial field. From altitude the two valleys form a Y converging on the Moray Firth, with the Cairngorms massif rising to the southeast and the Monadhliath to the south. Weather over the Cairngorms can be severe; mountain wave activity is common in strong winds across the ridges.