Fort William Day 2

I had a relatively easy day this day becaue of the excessive exertion I made in the pub the night before. My first port of call was Inverlochy castle, a ruin just outside Fort William. There's little to be said about this place other than, apart from having fallen completely to pieces, it's a changed remarkably little in a very long time - it was built, then nobody did anything with it for hundreds of years. I did get some pretty pictures of it though.
Next I headed off to another distillery - the Ben Nevis distillery. It was... how do I put this? Oh yeah. It was a crappy distillery with a crappy tour. Sure it was only four pounds, but I would have been happy to at least pay an extra pound or two to get a twelve year old single malt at the end rather than their cheap, nasty blended rubbish. As for the tour itself, it started with a video. Now, a lot of distilleries do this, but typically they're not as bad as this one. Now I can handle cheesy and badly edited, but this was too much. It was completely narrated by the hairy giant Hector who supposedly dug out all the lochs and mountains of scotland, and explained the mythical origins of whisky. After those 3 hours of torture (or so it felt) we were given the tour proper. It was guided by a girl who talked like she was reading off a script. Like she was reading off a script she'd read 100 times and was getting sick of reading it. And the grounds... well I'm sure they would have looked like the sterile Midleton's distillery in the 70s, but now... well they look like a factory that was brand new in the 70s and was never looked after since. So I'll just leave it at that. Instead I'll talk about the gondola ride I took afterwards. It was nice. I wish I could remember the name of the mountain now... but it's a nearby and during the winter months used for snowsports. But being such a spectacular location they keep the gondola running all year round for people to go up and get a look at the view.
So enjoy the pretty pictures!