On the Village Green, Fiddler's has been where Great Glen Way walkers stop since the route opened in 2002. It is a restaurant and café bar with Scottish ales and a whisky list long enough that one visitor called it "a whisky lover's dream," and there is a patio to sit out on when the weather allows. The Great Glen Way and the Loch Ness 360 pass through here, and the Affric Kintail Way begins in the village.
The other pub worth your evening is the Loch Ness Inn, in a building the inn dates to 1838. Inside there is a wood-burning stove, a Brewery Bar and original work by the Scottish artist Dot Walker on the walls. The kitchen changes its menu with the seasons and sources carefully: fish mainly from Peterhead, whole prawns from Applecross Bay, meat from local hill farms and estates. Under executive chef Niall Dunbar you might find haggis fritters with parsnip purée and apple sauce, Isle of Shetland mussels in a harissa-and-coconut broth, chicken croquette with sauce gribiche, or hot-smoked salmon with beetroot, egg and apple salad. Well-behaved dogs are welcome in the bar and courtyard, though not the restaurant, and there is a beer garden.
For daytime eating, Ness Deli is also on the Green, and Quila Cridhe Tearooms, tied to Drumbuie Farm, does home baking and home cooking. The Drum Bistro at the Drumnadrochit Hotel leans on local produce and generous portions. For a fridge to fill at your rental, there is a Scotmid at Carriers Croft in Lewiston.
The setting does most of the work. Drumnadrochit sits on the western shore of Loch Ness at the foot of Glen Urquhart, where the Enrick and Coiltie rivers meet in the low, flood-prone woodland of Urquhart Bay. A walk of about three miles there and back takes you into ancient wet woodland of alder and wild flowers, with dippers on the water and dragonflies over it. For height, the Craigmonie and Divach Falls circuit climbs to a prehistoric hill fort looking down over the village and the loch, then drops to the thirty-metre Divach Falls. Those falls drew the earliest tourists, who came by boat to Temple Pier; John Phillip's painting of the waterfall hangs in Buckingham Palace.
Kilmore Parish Church was designed by William Robertson of Elgin in 1836, a harled building with a Gothic bellcote, crowstepped gables and Y-traceried windows. Inside there are galleries on three sides, painted cast-iron cluster columns, a scissor-braced roof and a bell dated 1780.
Urquhart Castle stands on the shore just outside the village, its five-storey Grant Tower still upright above a visitor centre. Government troops blew the castle up in 1692 as they left, and a storm brought down part of the tower in 1715. Eight and a half miles west, off the A831, the Corrimony chambered cairn keeps much of its passage roof after four thousand years and is ringed by eleven standing stones.
The monster, of course, is the reason most people have heard of the place. In April 1933 the manageress of the Drumnadrochit Hotel, Aldie Mackay, reported a whale-like object in the loch; a story in the Inverness Courier that May helped propel the modern monster phenomenon. The hotel building is now the Loch Ness Centre.
Blairbeg Park is the shinty field, home to Glen Urquhart Shinty Club and the ground where the Highland Gathering tradition dates to 1945. Two former telephone boxes, at Milton and West Lewiston, have been kept by the community and filled with books to swap.