Five locks climb in a staircase through the middle of Fort Augustus, and when a boat is working through them, traffic waits at the swing bridge while the water lifts or lowers a hull one chamber at a time. The lock flight is the free centrepiece of the village, and it sits at the point where the Caledonian Canal meets the south-west end of Loch Ness. The pubs, the cafés, the gift shops, the campervans and the walkers with the Great Glen Way still on their boots cluster around it.
Stand on the towpath and you can settle the day without deciding anything. The Lock Inn is right there beside the flight, canal-side, with tables set out to watch the boats and an open fire for when the weather turns, which it does. The kitchen leans Scottish and practical: butcher's haggis with a honey-mustard sauce, black pudding with red-onion chutney and a tattie scone, battered Buckie haddock, a slow-cooked Scottish-beef steak pie. There is macaroni cheese and a sweet-potato, chickpea and spinach curry for anyone who wants off the meat, and burgers built from Highland beef, Cajun chicken or haddock. A chalkboard carries the day's specials. Dogs are allowed in the bar if they behave. Of all the drinking places in Fort Augustus, this is the one that most literally is a canal-side pub, and for a Great Glen Way walker arriving footsore it is a natural first stop.
The Bothy sits a little further along by the swing bridge, a family bar with a conservatory restaurant and its own canal-facing tables. The cooking here is traditional Scottish — cock-a-leekie soup, venison, haggis on toast with a Drambuie sauce, a smoked-salmon and prawn salad, steak pie, fish and chips, apple crumble to finish. It draws warm notices from the people who eat there. The malt-whisky selection is long.
For something with rooms above it, Richmond House stands at 5 Main Street, family-run and eight bedrooms deep, its bar pitched as a place to fall into conversation with locals over Scottish pub food and a whisky. The menu is a roll-call of the region's plainer pleasures: Cullen skink, hot-smoked salmon, Scottish-haddock fish and chips, a fish pie, Highland stew, haggis with neeps and tatties, and a Lochs and Glens sharing board of smoked seafood, meats and cheese. The Black Rock Ceilidh Band turns up to play, though you should ask about dates rather than trust a passing mention.
The Legion — properly the Royal British Legion Scotland branch club on Canalside — has the reputation of being the least touristy option, and it welcomes the general public as well as members. It can lay on bar meals, live music and an outdoor drinking area, and drinkers who find it tend to praise the unfussy atmosphere and the whisky. If you want the village rather than the coach party, this is where to look.
Beyond those four there are bars attached to hotels and hostels, each with its own character. The Waypoint Bar at The Lovat is the most deliberately odd — a quirky interior, drinks made with herbs from the kitchen garden, home-brewed ginger beer, fermented teas and a shelf of rare gins and whiskies, with a guided whisky tasting built around local distilleries if you want to make an afternoon of it. The Inch Hotel, about a mile and a half out along the loch, keeps a whisky bar that ranges across Highland, Island, Lowland and Speyside bottlings in a lounge with an open log fire and water views; the building went up in 1878 as Inchnacardoch Lodge, a hunting lodge for Lord Lovat, and only became a hotel in 1953. Morag's Lodge up at Bunoich Brae is a hostel bar with an open fire, home-cooked food, live music and, usefully, bike hire and a drying room for anyone travelling under their own steam. The Caledonian Hotel, run by the MacLellan family since 1978, has a small bar it calls the Corbie. Papa G's sits out at the Loch Ness Highland Resort on the village edge, a family restaurant and full bar with a playpark attached.
Eating well is not difficult. The serious dining is Station Road at The Lovat, a modern British restaurant in the Michelin Guide, led by the chef and co-owner Sean Kelly, whose kitchen works hard at Highland produce, foraging and its own garden. Dishes have included Shetland brown crab with partan bree and garden apple, a stoneground bere-barley bannock, wild halibut with Shetland mussels, dry-aged Highland lamb with stovies, and a clootie dumpling served with Blue Murder cheese and pine-cone syrup. Kelly became head chef in 2011, married into the family that had bought the hotel in 2005, and now co-owns it.
Down on the water, the Boathouse occupies the abbey's former boathouse, up on stilts over the loch, and claims to be the only restaurant on Loch Ness's southern shore. Its range is Scottish crossed with Turkish and Mediterranean — fish and chips, soups, sandwiches, burgers and Mediterranean plates. For quicker food the canal supplies an unusually good run of options: the Moorings does pizza, kebabs, burgers and a seafood pizza; Canalside Fish and Chips fries to order and will batter you a haggis or black pudding; DelightfulNess, a small canalside bakery, has turned out homemade soup, a salmon bagel, filled pies and a white-chocolate-and-raspberry traybake. Monster Fish and Chips does takeaway from near the car park. The Caledonian Canal Centre — the heritage-and-café hub that occupies the old MacVeans building, once a supermarket, gift shop and eighty-cover restaurant before it fell into liquidation and stood empty — serves homemade Scottish food and Black Isle Dairy ice cream, with canal interpretation and a gift shop under the same roof. Ripples Tearoom, Cobbs Café, the Highland Hideout, Beaufort House Pizza and Miele's Gelateria fill in the gaps.
For a working village the shops punch above their number. Iceberg Glass, founded in 1982 by Douglas Wilson and Julie Snowdon, is a studio you can watch as much as a shop you can buy from — the team shape borosilicate glass into jewellery, thistles, birthstones, stylised Nessies, whisky pipettes and drinks stirrers while you look on. The Clansman Centre puts a reconstructed seventeenth-century turf house inside a former Victorian schoolhouse, stocks mostly Scottish-made goods, and runs live interpretation of clan life alongside a short film. The everyday needs are met by the SPAR at the Great Glen Trading Centre, which folds a grocery, petrol, post office and pharmacy into one practical stop and has built a serious range of whisky, gin and beer over the years. That Cute Little Highland Shop, Angela's, the Mill Shop, Glen Albyn Gifts and the Loch Ness Nessie Shop supply the gift trade the loch inevitably generates.
The walking is the reason to stay more than a night. The easy version never leaves the village: the lock flight, the swing bridge, the canal banks and the shore where the River Oich and River Tarff run into Loch Ness. From there the ambition scales up as far as you like. Allt na Criche is a short, steep forest hour with a waterfall and a view of the loch opening through birch and pine, about a mile and a half with a stiff little climb. The Jenkins Park circuit is longer at just under five miles, running on forest paths and a stretch of General Caulfeild's old military road, climbing to views over the village and the Great Glen; it starts beyond the play and skate park. The River Oich trail is flatter and family-friendly, close to four miles, muddy in places, with red squirrels, cormorants and goosanders about and an otter if you are lucky. Serious walkers pick up the Great Glen Way, which runs some seventy-nine miles between Fort William and Inverness across four to seven days; the stretch north to Invermoriston passes Acquisition Number 1, the Forestry Commission's first Scottish planting, still holding its big Douglas firs and Sitka spruce. The Corrieyairack Pass climbs south towards Laggan on what is reckoned the finest surviving stretch of General Wade's military roads, but it is an exposed mountain crossing and an expedition, not an afternoon.
The history is written into the buildings, and it does not sort itself neatly. Kilwhimen Barracks came first, in 1718, and the fort proper followed between 1729 and 1742, named for William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland; Jacobites took and damaged it in the rising of 1745, and government forces patched it up after Culloden. Boswell and Johnson reached the fort in August 1773 and found, in Boswell's phrase, "all the conveniencies of civilized life in the midst of rude mountains." James Watt surveyed the glen for a canal that same year, Parliament authorised it in 1803, and Thomas Telford and William Jessop drove the Caledonian Canal through — a job first costed at seven years and £474,000 that opened in 1822 after twelve years and closer to £910,000. Queen Victoria came through by boat in 1873. Later still, Benedictine monks converted the old fort into a Gothic abbey and school, employing architects across decades until the whole thing became a Category A monastic ensemble wrapped around the surviving military stone. The school closed in 1993; the complex is now flats, and the loch-side boathouse became the restaurant. A railway once reached the village too: it opened in 1903, lost its passengers in 1933 and closed for good in 1947. A concrete bridge built for the intended extension carried trains only from 1903 to 1906, and ruined stone piers in the River Oich mark where the line meant for Inverness was abandoned.
None of this asks anything of you. The locks keep filling and emptying, and the boats keep waiting their turn. On a fine evening, buy chips from the canal bank, find a bench, and watch the boats drop through the flight while the midges decide whether you are worth the trouble.