Inverness Museum and Art Gallery; Down Ness

Inverness Museum and Art Gallery
Inverness Museum and Art Gallery

I filled this afternoon in Inverness, Scotland by visiting the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery and then walking downstream beside the River Ness, and then over to see a bit of the Caledonian Canal at its mouth.

It might surprise you to learn that, for the most part, I found the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery to be the most enjoyable of those activities. Then again, if you’re a random person who found this post by goodness knows what means and you don’t know that I tend to visit galleries and museums primarily because I think it’s expected of me when I travel, not because I love them, then that might not surprise you at all. The Internet can be so unexpected at times.

This is my last day in Inverness, so I’ll also include an Inverness summary at the end of this entry.

Inverness Museum and Art Gallery

The Inverness Museum and Art Gallery occupies two levels of a not particularly large building in central Inverness. The lower level contains part of the museum. It presents the geological and human history and prehistory of Inverness, along with a display of some local fauna.

On the geological side, there are several labelled rocks and text panels discussing the geology.

A Pict stone at the Inverness Museum
A Pict stone at the Inverness Museum

On the human side, this section of the Inverness Museum presents the history and prehistory of the area up to several centuries ago. For example, it notes that there’s evidence of humans being in the area more than 7,200 years ago. That evidence, human artifacts, were buried in sediment when a giant tsunami caused by a massive underwater landslide off the coast of Norway obliterated the area.

No one knows what happened to the people who had been there before the tsunami hit, but I don’t imagine they faired particularly well if they were in the area at the time.

The exhibit also talks about the Picts, an ancient society that descended from Iron Age people. They had their own culture and language. No one knows what they called themselves in their language. “Picts” was the name the Romans gave them.

For some purpose or another (art? religion? communication? something else?), the Picts etched symbols on stones. The Inverness Museum displays some of those recovered stones, at least one roughly the size of a single-width gravestone.

According to the guide on the Highlands tour I took yesterday, a Pict stone figures prominently in the Outlander television series. He said that when a character in the series (or maybe more than one character; I don’t know) puts her hand on the stone she time travels. He also said that the stone used in the series is a 3D printed copy made from a 3D image of an actual Pict stone that’s located, and publicly accessible, in the Scottish Highlands.

(Note: If you are forced to write a review of the series, don’t quote me. I didn’t pay much attention when he talked about Outlanders. So I might have gotten that wrong. I get a lot of things wrong even when I do pay attention. Consequently, I offer no guarantees.)

Much (all?) of the Outlanders series was filmed in Scotland. Several companies run several tours of Outlander filming locations. I specifically avoided any tour that had “Outlanders” in its advertised title or description, even if they visited other sights as well. I haven’t seen the series so I figured I wouldn’t get full value out of any such tour.

Felicity the puma at the Inverness Museum
Felicity the Puma at the Inverness Museum

Geez. How did I get onto The Outlanders? Don’t you just hate it when I go off on a long, irrelevant tangent like that? Sorry about that.

Meanwhile, back at the Inverness Museum

Getting back to the lower level of the Inverness Museum. It also contains information about the Romans and Vikings who invaded and then settled in the area.

Another room on this level contains taxidermy of local fauna, including a puma. What, you ask? You didn’t think there were pumas in Scotland. That just shows how little you know. There was a puma here, known as Felicity the Puma, that was probably someone’s escaped pet. It was captured and stuffed. The signage didn’t say if they waited until its death by natural causes before they stuffed it or if it met an untimely death.

Art gallery at the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery
Art gallery at the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery

The above makes it sound like the lower level is huge. It’s not. They don’t go into a lot of detail, nor have a lot of artifacts. In addition to it being a relatively small building for a museum, the lower level also contains a small café and a tiny gift shop.

The upper level of the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery contains the art gallery. It’s one small room. I read that it mounts travelling exhibitions. When I was there, the paintings on the walls were, I believe, all 20th pieces by a variety of artists.

This floor also contained a small theatre, with a single, not particularly long bench. I was the only person there. The theatre showed a series of short films of a nature such that the theatre could also rightfully be considered to be part of the art gallery. I watched only one.

The Inverness Museum portion of the institution continues on the second level as well (first floor by local floor numbering). It presents much more recent Inverness history.

Knickknacks at the Inverness Museum
Knickknacks at the Inverness Museum

Artifacts include bagpipes, weapons, clothes and an even more eclectic collection of knickknacks. For example, there’s a red deer’s hoof mounted in silver and fashioned into an inkwell. (Inkwells predate me other than as novelty items. For the benefit of young folk, they were containers that held ink. Inkwell users dipped their nib pens into the ink or siphoned up some ink from them into their fountain pens and then wrote on paper or parchment with the ink. Also for the benefit of young folk, pens were devices that people could use to manually write or draw on paper rather than entering it into a computer and then printing it out. Paper was … oh, never mind.

As with the other small and quirky museums I’ve visited on this trip and particularly on my previous trip, to Norway, I enjoyed the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery. It’s small and quirky enough that it won’t bore you unless you’re terminally easily bored. And it has interesting exhibits.

River Ness Downstream

This morning, the River Ness upstream from my hotel dazzled me. After leaving the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, I thought it only fair that I give downstream the opportunity to do the same. That was a mistake. It epically failed to meet the challenge.

The starting point in central Inverness is as handsome as the central Inverness portion of my morning River Ness walk. But it quickly went downhill from there, figuratively and literally.

A view from Carnarc Point
A view from Carnarc Point

I only inferred the literal meaning of the word. I was walking downstream and rivers have a hard time flowing uphill. But Inverness is close enough to sea level that I didn’t notice walking downhill in the least at any time.

The rhetorical meaning of downhill comes from direct observation. It wasn’t long before the buildings on either side of the river were at best mundane and in some cases ugly.

And it didn’t take much longer before the riverside path on my side of the river came to a dead end.

I crossed over a bridge at that point and a sidewalk continued downstream on that side. The scenery was no better there.

Soon, the street and accompanying sidewalk pulled away from the river and moved inland to make way for warehouses, factories and industrial marshalling lots.

Another view from Carnarc Point
Another view from Carnarc Point

An opaque, monotone, tall wall blocked the view of the industrial area for a portion of the way. I don’t know what was going on behind that wall. Something nefarious, no doubt.

Nevertheless, I persisted. And I was rewarded for my persistence.

Where the River Ness spills out into the Moray Firth, a point of land, Carnarc Point, juts into the water at what I think is the aquatic dividing line between the Moray Firth and the Beauly Firth.

Carnarc Point is forested, has a path down it, and provides splendid views of the firths.

Caledonian Canal

The marina (in the distant background) beyond the most of the Caledonian Canal
The marina (in the distant background) beyond the most of the Caledonian Canal

Because River Ness is not navigable between the firths and Loch Ness, someone or another built a canal, the Caledonian Canal, to bridge the gap.

The Caledonian Canal continues on the far side of the Loch Ness to provide navigable waters to the next loch over. That happens at Fort Augustus, where I was yesterday on a Highlands and Loch Ness tour.

Being a glutton for punishment, after leaving Carnarc Point, I decided to walk to the mouth of the canal. The walk from Carnarc Point, about 25 minutes, was soul-sucking. A portion of it went through a big box store area of Inverness.

At the point where the Caledonian Canal meets the Beauly Firth, there’s a scenic marina in the firth. Just in from the firth, there are some locks to lift and lower boats between the canal, which is a fair chunk above sea level and the firth.

The Caledonian Canal
The Caledonian Canal

I walked up the path beside the locks. The canal up there is pretty.

The path that Google Maps told me I should take into central Inverness to get to the street that would take me to my hotel isn’t much past the uppermost of that set of locks. I continued a bit farther, but then turned around because Google Maps told me the next path down the steep hill off to the side of the canal wasn’t for a considerable distance. I was already up to almost 23,000 steps at that point in the day and I’m not the walker I used to be.

I went back to my hotel and ended my day’s activities.

Inverness Summary

My disappointments this afternoon notwithstanding, I like Inverness. A lot.

I probably saw all of the recommended spots in town, and a few that weren’t on the guidebooks’ recommended lists (they don’t have a lot here). But it’s just such a pretty town to spend time in that another day or two here would have been great. And there are one or two other day trip tours out of Inverness that looked interesting, but I didn’t have time for them. So, maybe two or three more days.

But don’t bother walking downstream on the River Ness. I probably should have spent more time walking upstream. It was gorgeous. Maybe I should have bought a sandwich to carry with me so I could have had lunch on a bench somewhere beside the river.

One word of advice, if you want to eat dinner at one of the highly recommended restaurants in town, book well in advance. The afternoon I got in I tried making a reservation for that night at the restaurant rated number one on TripAdvisor. They were full. I asked about the next evening and the evening after that and they were already all booked up those nights as well.

At midday, I tried making same-day reservations for dinner at a few other highly-rated restaurants on a couple of the days I was here and had no luck with them either. The restaurants I ended up at were okay, but nothing special.

On the thumbs-up scale, I’d give Inverness one and a half thumbs up. The lost half thumb was my fault, not Inverness’s. I should have tried to investigate online the walk downriver before I went on it. Without that walk, it’d be a definite two-thumbs-up sort of town.

Aside

Fly Tipping

On my walk toward the firths, I passed the sign pictured here.

I cannot begin to tell you how much I appreciated them banning fly tipping. I never know how much to tip flies. I experience existential angst worrying that I will overtip or undertip the fly.


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